These were my two main 2018 goals:
- One lay in 50 approaches
- Two lays a month
Ambitious goals, as I’m sure you will agree, for someone in their second full year of pickup. But at the start of the year, they seemed reasonable to me. My long term average was somewhere around one lay in 80 approaches, and I’d racked up 18 lays in 2017. I figured that if I ironed out a lot of the creases I’d have an excellent chance of hitting that one in 50 goal, and given that my number of approaches stayed constant, the second goal would be reached by definition.
Given I’m writing this post, you should be able to tell that something has been going awry. It’s because these two goals are actually contradictory. Let’s start with the first goal.
I think that the dirty secret to improving your approach to lay ratio is to reduce the number of sets that you do, as much as actually running better sets or better dates. To be more specific, reduce the number of no-hoper sets you do, and in doing so, you separate the wheat from the chaff.
Let’s consider a contrived example:
- 10 sets:
- Two girls are interested and available
- Two are interested but unavailable
- Two are uninterested but available
- Four are uninterested and unavailable
In terms of hook points: two girls give both a social and sexual hook, two give a sexual hook but no social, two give a social but no sexual, and four give neither. The art to improving efficiency lies in not approaching the last two groups; the ones who don’t fancy you. You don’t know whether a girl is unavailable until you approach so I think the second group is unavoidable.
The next issue is that, all other things being equal, the frequency of the first two, desirable, groups stay the same. Vis-a-vis, the number of sets you do decreases and you’re forced into the zen Daygame style. This brings us to goal two.
You need to be in the zen state to achieve goal one, but need to do more sets to achieve goal two. We can dismiss one proposal nearly immediately: to not enter the zen state and instead do lots of sets, keeping the workrate the same as 2017. That would involve approaching sets that I was heavily suspicious of being no-hopers, though. Remember, the frequency of groups one and two are the same. I’m not going to do that.
The second alternative is to stay in the zen state, but spend more time on the street. Let’s do some quick maffs:
- Assume the 50 approaches per lay, which means 100 sets a month to get two lays, and 25 a week.
- Another assumption: you’re not perfect. You’re able to eliminate five out of 10 sets from the undesirable groups.
- One last assumption: given the same frequency of groups one and two, and the “10 sets in two hours” rule holds.
- To summarise: you need to do 25 sets a week, which means five sessions, and each session is two hours long.
- 10 hours a week of Daygame.
Is 10 hours a week doable? Yes and no; of course it depends on how much of your life exists outside of Game and how addicted you’ll allow yourself to be. You could do four hours a day on the weekend, and then a session in the week. Then again, will your ability suffer over those four hour sessions? It means sacrificing watching your favourite football team or going to a BBQ with your blue pill friends (if you have any left!). Alternatively, you could do one long weekend session then three midweek sessions. But what about dates, first and second? What about seeing a regular after work? What about work’s impact on your ability to Daygame effectively? Three after work sessions, one weekend session, one regular, one date, and one day of adrenal gland rest: that way lies Daygame addiction.
What I hope to have shown, in excruciating detail, is that goals one and two work against each other, which means I have to choose between the two. Like an investment fund, you can’t have both a risk and return objective (though many would like to claim they can!). So please join me in imagining that I’m drawing back my arm, hurling my Pokeball and yelling “goal one, I choose you!”
I think in choosing goal one there will be a greater benefit to my skill rather than through goal two. Goal two would involve upping my workrate from 2017, and that’s without all of the beginner’s euphoria which I enjoyed last year. I know I can work harder, but I want to work better. In 2017, I was still working out a lot of the basics and was excited just to go and do sets. The excitement fed into my results, but it can’t be replicated this year. I’d be throwing myself into sets with little enthusiasm and that would send me hurtling into catostrophic moodiness.
But I won’t abandon my absolute goal absolutely. For one, I got 18 lays last year and I want to reach that number again. That way I’ll be able to show that 2018’s results strictly dominate 2017’s.
Yours unfaithfully,
Thomas Crown
Thomas Crown PUA 