When you're a beginner, you need to make a lot of approaches, to learn the skill (this is basic learning theory that you would find in any psychology text book).

Eventually as you become more proficient at the skill, the number of approaches doesn't matter that much, since you've already acquired the skill set. A beginner has to stay disciplined and set aside approach time, otherwise he's not growing.

On a side note, what i have written here is stating the obvious. It seems that people on here are convinced that the basic process of learning new skills does not apply in pick-up. This is where our fundamental differences lie.