My Last Year in Game, Part Two: My First Year / Obsessively and Complusively Daygaming

Previous Parts:

• Part One: The Beginning

This part is going to be all about newbie gains because Daygame is just like going to the gym: you have to try and squeeze out every last drop of juice from your first two years. (Okay, it’s not exactly like the gym in that if you train ineffectively for two years you’ll still have your newbie gains if you switch to effective training, but the analogy works well enough). With Daygame, your newbie gains comes from the enthusiasm and excitement which you’ll have for Daygame at the start of your journey.

I’m lucky in that I threw myself into the whole thing very quickly. I remember that Tom Torero had a video on “How Many Sets Should You Do in a Week?” and he said to do 50. These days I recommend 30 sets per week because I think the 50 figure for guys to aspire to but to land somewhere around 30 anyway, but I digress. Tom Torero had said it and what monkey sees, monkey does, and so I set that as my aim. It didn’t feel too difficult though, because, as the title of this part suggests, I was obsessed with Daygame and went out to approach compulsively. By the end of my first year, I’d done at least 1500 approaches. I say “at least” because in that first year I didn’t count it as an approach if it was an instant blowout, and so that number is probably more like 1700 or 1800.

Usually I would go out after work at least two times a week but usually three, plus sessions on both Saturday and Sunday afternoons. For my after work sessions I would either race home, get changed and be back on Oxford Street around 7pm or else take my Daygame clothes with me to work and go straight from there. I’d developed a bit of a reputation at work because when asked about what I did last night I’d honestly say “I had a date” and so it didn’t raise many eyebrows. Even though they didn’t know about Daygame with a capital “D”, it was fine; It was just “Tom being Tom.”

Throughout that time I had a great wing called Mazz who I met through Torero’s old “Find A Wing” page (which I’ve replicated here). I had met a couple of guys through that page but unfortunately they had dropped off. Mazz stayed in. We worked really well as wings because, amongst many reasons, a) we had very opposite tastes, b) got along very well and c) loved talking about Game. I have some lovely rose-tinted memories of walking through Seven Dials with him in the Spring sunshine on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, talking about Daygame and doing sets.

Another thing that worked in my favour was how I’d flipped my mindset to the regular guy. I think this is something that David Goggins talks about – though I confess I don’t follow him – in that you should swap around your mindset to make the hard thing feel good (no pun intended). It meant that on the weeks where I wasn’t Daygaming “enough,” I felt bad. I felt as if I was being lazy and should be putting more work in.

What I liked about that year, in part, was that it was private. It was all for me. And I was finding out a lot about myself and what I was capable of. I didn’t have a blog or any kind of public presence. The only guy I talked to about Daygame was Mazz or an old university friend of mine; I hadn’t come into contact with many other guys doing Daygame and usually stayed away from other beginner Daygamers on the streets. While of course I understand I’m in a different situation now, and I prefer it, there were definitely upsides to being a bit of a (somewhat) lone wolf.

And what would I do in my spare time? I’d started going to the gym at lunchtime during work hours and so that was already taken care of. Plus, I didn’t have many hobbies at the time either. I’d stopped playing video games at university too, if that could be counted as a hobby. There was only one thing I really wanted to do then: consume Daygame and Game content. I worked my way through Tom Torero’s entire YouTube channel plus his podcasts, memoirs and travel guides. I watched all of Krauser’s YouTube channel as well as reading all of his textbooks. I went through all of Rollo Tommasi’s best blog posts on his website and his first three books.

Then there were smaller, yet equally useful, reads such as 60 Years of Challenge and Practical Female Psychology for the Practical Man as well as classics of the Game genre like The Mystery Method. Things branched out further as I read some great books on masculinity such as Iron John: Men and Masculinity and King, Warrior, Musician, Lover. I have a long list of recommended reading here.

With all that said, I want to give one disclaimer/warning: at no point did I identify with being a machine or look down on others for not wanting to spend so much time on Daygame, both practising and learning about it. This is just what came naturally to me and it’s something that helps me to learn a lot in a short amount of time. Different people work in different ways and what I’ve described here is what’s best for me.

Plus, let’s look at some factors which aided me in my journey and so made the reward of learning much higher than for the average guy: I’m incredibly tall (6’ 8); always had good logistics; am a genetic outlier (ginger hair and blue eyes); flat brow and dominant eyes; well educated but not afraid to do things wrong in order to learn; had the right kind of psychology to succeed at Daygame and be driven to succeed at it. That list is nowhere near exhaustive but the point I want to get at is that I was in a perfect place to start gathering positive reference experiences which then acted as a virtuous spiral.

But as the old saying goes, “if you don’t ask, you don’t get.” If you don’t push yourself, in whatever position you are in, right now, then you’re not going to make any of the gains which you could if you did push yourself. And those first two years are the years to do so.

Yours unfaithfully,

Thomas Crown

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