In the early days of the pickup community, writing field reports was very common. The Game even features several field reports written by key members of the community.
The practice is much less common now. Partially because the switch to messaging apps and social media platforms has made forums (and the long-form style of writing associated with them) gradually disappear. It’s much more convenient to just text in group chats than to post on forums. People are mostly learning about pickup through YouTube and podcasts rather than through long-form blog posts or books as they once did.
This shift in the community means that people are spending a lot less time reading and writing than they used to. It’s great that there are abundant resources now for just about every topic you could imagine, but it also means that people can endlessly consume without taking the correct actions to get better.
Getting good at pickup is an extremely useful process to go through. Mostly because it molds you into the kind of person who can achieve their goals. This is a natural side-effect of learning pickup because of these three things:
- You learn that you have to lose in order to win. You cannot date or sleep with every single girl you approach but, if you work on your skills enough, you can start dating the types of girls you want. Rejection is a necessary part of the process, even when you’re very skilled.
- Improving in pickup requires you to iterate and fix what’s not working. In other words, you need to reflect on what you’re doing well and what you’re doing wrong so you can
- Once you’ve had some level of success with pickup, it teaches you that even things that seem impossible (like being able to date hot girls as an average guy) are possible with the right knowledge and right actions.
You can transfer those three lessons to any area of life and apply them to be successful in that area.
Back to field reports: they tie into the second item in the list above. Field reports help you iterate and improve at a much faster rate than you normally would.
The act of writing them is important because it helps you reflect on what happened during your sarge. Pickup can be an emotional process sometimes, especially when you get rejected, ignored or don’t have things go the way you want them to go. Writing field reports help you step back and look at things rationally and objectively. The simple act of translating your memory into words helps remove your emotions from the situation.
It’s very common that while you’re writing the report, you’ll start to realize things that you could have done better or notice things about the interaction that weren’t immediately obvious.
Even if you don’t share the reports somewhere, the act of writing them can be extremely helpful. At the bare minimum, I highly recommend keeping an approach log in your phone when you’re still new to game. I promise it will help you a LOT. I still have the composition books where I logged all my approaches back in 2007 – 2008. Each approach had a short summary of what happened during the approach, along with a bullet-point list of mistakes I made or things I thought went well.
The second reason field reports are helpful is because when you share them, you can get access to a huge pool of knowledge from people who are more experienced than you. This is incredibly valuable as a beginner. It means you can exponentially speed up your progress because you can know EXACTLY what went wrong and how to fix it.
It’s normal to feel shy or embarrassed about being a noob, but you have to remember that we all sucked at some point. Anyone who has learned pickup was also terrible with girls at one point and had to go through the same process of sucking.
So, get out there and start logging your approaches! If you want feedback, you can post them on the Pickup Asia forums.
