Luck, The Missing Ingredient (Part 2)

This post is the second of a two part series on the “missing ingredients” needed for successful Daygame. Read as much theory and learn as many techniques as you like and grow your SMV and you’ll still need these things to succeed. You’ll find the first post on the quality of “sisu” here.

Luck is the big pink elephant in the room whenever we talk about Daygame. Heck, it’s the same for life. People commonly ask “would you rather be lucky or good?” The problem is that even if luck is only a small part of the equation, it still accounts for a vast majority of the results.

I remember Krauser saying something like only 15% of the process is within your control. In reality I think it’s much less than that.

Think about how lucky or unlucky you can get. What if she takes a left turn rather than a right? What if you’re in a bad mood that day? What if you ate something that doesn’t agree with you that morning? What if you get ill? What if one of her exes pops up? There is an endless list of coincidences that bring the two of you together or keep you apart.

It’s this element of luck which makes people question whether Game is a probability or numbers based game. The truth is that it’s both.

Does that mean don’t try then? No, of course not. It’s a well worn cliche but it’s true that you miss 100% of chances you don’t take.

And skill does play a part, however small that is. You can make small incremental improvements which can add up over time. That will mean that rather than doing thousands of sets which end in a handful of lays you can do thousands and end up with a few dozen.

As a side note: this is why having sisu is so important. Read my post on realistic expectations in Daygame and you can see that you have to withstand a terrific failure rate and have all your ducks in a row to get what people (I believe) mistakenly called an intermediate’s level of success.

What are we to do with the luck element then?

To begin with we can all thank our stars that we’re already lucky. It’s great that we’re even in a position to practice Daygame and don’t have any strike out features that make us invisible to women.

Plus there’s a survivorship bias when it comes to looking at beginners’ luck. It’s not that newbies are plain lucky, it’s that the ones that survive to tell the tale had luck on their side all along. There might be something ineffable about you that predicts future success.

It reminds me of something a hiring manager once said to my class at university: “the first thing I do when I see a stack of CVs is to pick up half and drop them in the bin because I don’t like to hire unlucky people.”

Essentially, in being here today, we’re already lucky people.

Now to make luck work for us:

I learned a long time ago that the best guys in any endeavour aren’t lucky, they just put themselves in a position to get lucky more often. And when they do get lucky, they earn outsized returns. How can we benefit from luck more often then?

We know that each set has an asymmetric return. The worst that can happen is you get blown out. The upside is massive though.

Why not just approach like a maniac then? I don’t think this is the answer unless you have a fanatical workrate. It’s just not in many guys. However I still wouldn’t recommend it so you don’t burn out your local Daygame area and become a nuisance to your fellow Daygamers and wings.

Instead I recommend putting yourself in the way of opportunity as much as possible. Walk the Daygame route whenever you can. Wear a piece of clothing or an accessory which encourages you to approach no matter where you are. I’m guilty of this: not approaching in a regular (non-session) setting just because I don’t have the right clothes on. I justify walking the Daygame route because I need to get my steps in each day.

To cut a long story short: design your environment so that you have the best chance of benefiting from good luck. “Diligence is the mother of good luck.”

Yours unfaithfully,

Thomas Crown

To improve your Daygame skills then you can hire me for infield coaching and Skype consultations. You can also buy my book. Follow me on Twitter @thomascrownpua while you’re at it too.