During my last Istanbul trip of 2026. I’ve settled on a Turkish language learning approach for this fall and winter. My goal is to have basic conversational Turkish that I can weave into my sets when I return to Istanbul in spring or early summer. I’ve learned other languages (including French and German) up to a high1 level of both spoken and written fluency. I learned both languages by complete immersion: living in said countries for over a year and using the language at work. In both cases, I managed to evolve from not being able to speak to speaking fluently (albeit with grammatical mistakes) in about six months. This however meant I was interacting with the language (reading emails, speaking to colleagues, ordering food) for well over 8 hours per day. ...
I’m somewhat of a nerd when it comes to tracking numbers… On Wednesday October 7th I opened my 2000th set. In Istanbul, of all places. Although this moment was much less impactful than hitting One Thousand Sets in Prague, I nevertheless felt accomplished. In that blog post, I wrote that my goal was to hit 2000 sets by the end of 2025. That didn’t quite happen. Nomadic travel, winter hibernation, and my new sales job had a big impact on my work rate. Still, I feel I’m doing enough sets to make progress. ...
Today I defined my focus for this winter until begin February.I’ll spare you he details; it boils down to: Doubling down on my corporate sales job instead of daydreaming about returning to entrepreneurship. Looksmaxxing: cut down to ~10% BF and then decide if I want to hardmaxx (sliding gynioplasty). Enjoy high-quality leisure: learning Turkish and reflecting on my daygame journey. My Sales Job I switched into tech sales because I was fed up with my nerdy data engineering solo-business. Though introverted, I just didn’t enjoy being alone staring at a screen all day. More importantly, I feel my sales jobs actually improves my daygame: every week I make over 200 cold calls, practicing my speaking skills (pace, objection handling, tone of voice). ...
I’m writing in my favorite Caffè Nero in Nişantaşı, looking back on the last ten days of daygame Istanbul. These stats conclude my third daygame trip to this city: Opens: 80 Numbers: 22 Replies: 9 Dates: 01 Lays: 0 This was by far the worst conversion from numbers to dates since the beginning of my daygame career. About half of the numbers replied, which in itself is better than my average. However, all of these leads eventually fizzled out over text, with the exception of the 3 leads that left town. ...
This Saturday was my last evening in Istanbul. My flight would leave tomorrow at 14:40 and all my leads were dead. Given that I had already two near misses this trip, I was determined to fly home with a new notch. The night before, I agreed for my long term Turkish girl to meet me in Amsterdam end of September. Combined with a proper gym session that Saturday morning, I started my last daygame session with an outstanding vibe. As this was my last evening, my game automatically became more r-selected: I started filtering for rebellious girls and refused to take phone numbers unless I was certain that I could get them out on a date that night. ...