Wow did not expect to see a Marvel Rivals reference in this post.
Common theme in any domain: Just doing the obvious things puts you in the 90th percentile. I used to be extremely bad at chess, with a terrible rating after around 50 hrs of playtime against friends, but just 5 hours of deliberate practice learning openings and strategies put me head and shoulders above all of them.
I have been playing Marvel Rivals since it came out, and I have friends who really spend time grinding competitive and want to rank up but they don’t do the obvious things, such as reviewing a video of their gameplay, or watching a video for tips of their hero (or not blaming your team for every loss…)
Why is this? Why do humans fail to do the obvious things, and instead take suboptimal routes? Why is it so easy to get to the top 90th percentile in any domain?
This is a really good lesswrong post relating to this topic
That's awesome, and yeah you constantly see people who refuse to take the accountability necessary to improve. I've been playing rivals a lot recently and managed to get to GM solo queueing so it seemed like a great fit. Thanks for the comment and the link!
“it can potentially push your promotion forward by years.” Then you are on probation and get laid off by DOGE…. Sorry: couldn’t resist. Lol. Excellent read.
Great article- that the general levels of "non-doing" seem so high makes me wonder how much of it might be from (hidden) low unassigned mental resources (even when it technically/externally seems like someone has enough free time and resources to do something that might seem obvious to others)?
Say, if you're in bad health or utterly preoccupied by mentally replaying some ongoing argument in your personal life, even when you in theory have enough time/ability to do something, there might still not be enough of a "mental gap" between intervals of reactivity to think about any fresh or unexpected moves in life.
Then this lower quality of thinking and spontaneous agency in life could put people in comparatively worse positions, where they're forced into more reactivity, without ever getting quite enough mental bandwidth or periods of comparative peace to allow the right higher-agency thoughts to routinely percolate into consciousness.
Maybe some people are slightly like the later Roman Empire- so overwhelmed with responding to so many problems and demands on so many diverse fronts that they get locked into crisis mode and thinking about maintaining current systems/approaches? Then maybe they don't see that they technically have enough resources to expand in some domain, if they truly made it a priority?
I wish I would have continued doing all of those endless hobbies and projects that I've started in my life. I have a spotless and perfect guitar sitting in my living room that I've actually sat down and trained with maybe 30 times total. But who cares? Boring. Time to move on to something else, like the txt files of poetry I'll never finish.
To what end? Finally after decades, stumbling upon a hidden passion? Or is the mere initial pursuit all that matters? It seems to me that the thesis of your essay isn't merely starting new things, but actually giving a shit and consistently trying.
Playing an instrument is a great example. For many instruments, if you can spend 30 minutes a day, 6 days a week, _actually_ practicing (not just noodling, but working on improving by doing exercises, practicing hard parts of pieces, etc.), you can get pretty decent in 1-2 years.
I say "many instruments" because some are much harder than others. Any fretless string instrument is about an order of magnitude more difficult than a comparable fretted one, at least to achieve minimal competency.
But if you've always wanted to learn guitar or drums or to sing, a consistent-but-no-too-intense _actual practice_ schedule will produce results relatively quickly!
The key thing is you can only truly be a real live player in one thing that people do for a career and one thing that people do for a hobby. It's a compute and energy efficiency thing. The people who are really good at something talk constantly about what you say no to and what you sacrifice to become excellent.
I talk about doing multiple things in general in my other post, https://open.substack.com/pub/arealsociety/p/you-are-what-you-do, and I plan on writing about doing multiple things well in the future. I think if you can be elite in one field it is significantly easier to be elite in multiple fields.
This post is so freaking inspiring. Would love more content like this. I always feel hesitant to jump into unfamiliar things due to a perceived high barrier to entry, and it makes me feel so much better knowing most people suck and don't put the effort in. Also thx for introducing me to marvel rivals! What character would you recommend to a newb player?
Thank you! I have several more articles planned around this topic.
For new players healing is generally easier and lets you get more familiar with the game. If you play a lots of shooters and have good aim dps will be comfortable, and tanks are great if you have a good tactical sense.
This really hits. Love the point about "doing the reading" too. The difference between someone who coasts and someone who levels up is often just a few deliberate hours of practice or curiosity.
i do like the inspirational & revealing tone of this article, but one simple reason i think more people don’t participate more deeply in parts of their areas of their is they don’t have time
average person accounting for work, commute, etc. has maybe 50-60 hours a week of free time - way less if you have kids. if you’re putting 5-20 hours a week into area of interest to “get good” like this piece says, that’s realistically 2-4 areas of “expertise”. i know for sure the number of interests i have is way higher than the time i have to get good at more than a few things
A good example is the Streamer Tyler1 that, with no experience, started learning chess at chess.com and after a year with everyday playing for some hours he has now a Elo that is comparable with a GM
This is really good. Thank you for writing. I'm putting myself out there a little more, but it's lonely at first. Watching your success keeps me going though. Thanks for the inspiration and good luck in your work.
The part discussing luck and putting yourself out there is so true, it’s easy to look back and see all of the lucky things that did go right, but no one sees the unlucky breaks that didn’t happen. People see “lucky” people and assume everything goes right. All this to say this was a good reminder to not get discouraged when you hear a no.
100%, people love to talk about how lucky someone else was after that person put in a lot of work. It absolves the commentator of responsibility for their own actions
It is great to see more people in this mindset talk about their own sentiment on the subject. This is like pareto, of course where It isn't a 1:1 translation for everything, but the effects do mirror a lot between politics, creative scenes or social groups
Wow did not expect to see a Marvel Rivals reference in this post.
Common theme in any domain: Just doing the obvious things puts you in the 90th percentile. I used to be extremely bad at chess, with a terrible rating after around 50 hrs of playtime against friends, but just 5 hours of deliberate practice learning openings and strategies put me head and shoulders above all of them.
I have been playing Marvel Rivals since it came out, and I have friends who really spend time grinding competitive and want to rank up but they don’t do the obvious things, such as reviewing a video of their gameplay, or watching a video for tips of their hero (or not blaming your team for every loss…)
Why is this? Why do humans fail to do the obvious things, and instead take suboptimal routes? Why is it so easy to get to the top 90th percentile in any domain?
This is a really good lesswrong post relating to this topic
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PBRWb2Em5SNeWYwwB/humans-are-not-automatically-strategic
That's awesome, and yeah you constantly see people who refuse to take the accountability necessary to improve. I've been playing rivals a lot recently and managed to get to GM solo queueing so it seemed like a great fit. Thanks for the comment and the link!
You echoed the exact sentiment of this blog post which is now load bearing for me: https://danluu.com/p95-skill/
Thanks for the link, that's a great post
Also good post yet again
“it can potentially push your promotion forward by years.” Then you are on probation and get laid off by DOGE…. Sorry: couldn’t resist. Lol. Excellent read.
Great article- that the general levels of "non-doing" seem so high makes me wonder how much of it might be from (hidden) low unassigned mental resources (even when it technically/externally seems like someone has enough free time and resources to do something that might seem obvious to others)?
Say, if you're in bad health or utterly preoccupied by mentally replaying some ongoing argument in your personal life, even when you in theory have enough time/ability to do something, there might still not be enough of a "mental gap" between intervals of reactivity to think about any fresh or unexpected moves in life.
Then this lower quality of thinking and spontaneous agency in life could put people in comparatively worse positions, where they're forced into more reactivity, without ever getting quite enough mental bandwidth or periods of comparative peace to allow the right higher-agency thoughts to routinely percolate into consciousness.
Maybe some people are slightly like the later Roman Empire- so overwhelmed with responding to so many problems and demands on so many diverse fronts that they get locked into crisis mode and thinking about maintaining current systems/approaches? Then maybe they don't see that they technically have enough resources to expand in some domain, if they truly made it a priority?
I think this is often the case, and why I think people should just do anything. Once they start it's easier to do more
I wish I would have continued doing all of those endless hobbies and projects that I've started in my life. I have a spotless and perfect guitar sitting in my living room that I've actually sat down and trained with maybe 30 times total. But who cares? Boring. Time to move on to something else, like the txt files of poetry I'll never finish.
I think that's common, and I don't think it's an issue as long as you keep doing something
To what end? Finally after decades, stumbling upon a hidden passion? Or is the mere initial pursuit all that matters? It seems to me that the thesis of your essay isn't merely starting new things, but actually giving a shit and consistently trying.
I think you can pursue different things over time, but when you are doing one specific thing you should strive for excellence in that
Playing an instrument is a great example. For many instruments, if you can spend 30 minutes a day, 6 days a week, _actually_ practicing (not just noodling, but working on improving by doing exercises, practicing hard parts of pieces, etc.), you can get pretty decent in 1-2 years.
I say "many instruments" because some are much harder than others. Any fretless string instrument is about an order of magnitude more difficult than a comparable fretted one, at least to achieve minimal competency.
But if you've always wanted to learn guitar or drums or to sing, a consistent-but-no-too-intense _actual practice_ schedule will produce results relatively quickly!
The key thing is you can only truly be a real live player in one thing that people do for a career and one thing that people do for a hobby. It's a compute and energy efficiency thing. The people who are really good at something talk constantly about what you say no to and what you sacrifice to become excellent.
I talk about doing multiple things in general in my other post, https://open.substack.com/pub/arealsociety/p/you-are-what-you-do, and I plan on writing about doing multiple things well in the future. I think if you can be elite in one field it is significantly easier to be elite in multiple fields.
This post is so freaking inspiring. Would love more content like this. I always feel hesitant to jump into unfamiliar things due to a perceived high barrier to entry, and it makes me feel so much better knowing most people suck and don't put the effort in. Also thx for introducing me to marvel rivals! What character would you recommend to a newb player?
Thank you! I have several more articles planned around this topic.
For new players healing is generally easier and lets you get more familiar with the game. If you play a lots of shooters and have good aim dps will be comfortable, and tanks are great if you have a good tactical sense.
This really hits. Love the point about "doing the reading" too. The difference between someone who coasts and someone who levels up is often just a few deliberate hours of practice or curiosity.
i do like the inspirational & revealing tone of this article, but one simple reason i think more people don’t participate more deeply in parts of their areas of their is they don’t have time
average person accounting for work, commute, etc. has maybe 50-60 hours a week of free time - way less if you have kids. if you’re putting 5-20 hours a week into area of interest to “get good” like this piece says, that’s realistically 2-4 areas of “expertise”. i know for sure the number of interests i have is way higher than the time i have to get good at more than a few things
That's fair, often I dive into things for a month or two then focus on something else.
A good example is the Streamer Tyler1 that, with no experience, started learning chess at chess.com and after a year with everyday playing for some hours he has now a Elo that is comparable with a GM
Yeah that is excellent
This is really good. Thank you for writing. I'm putting myself out there a little more, but it's lonely at first. Watching your success keeps me going though. Thanks for the inspiration and good luck in your work.
Thanks man! It's tough when you don't get many views but you never know what's going to pop off so you have to keep at it
Amazing post. I've noticed things like this in my professional career and you've distilled it into words eloquently.
Thank you!
The part discussing luck and putting yourself out there is so true, it’s easy to look back and see all of the lucky things that did go right, but no one sees the unlucky breaks that didn’t happen. People see “lucky” people and assume everything goes right. All this to say this was a good reminder to not get discouraged when you hear a no.
100%, people love to talk about how lucky someone else was after that person put in a lot of work. It absolves the commentator of responsibility for their own actions
What rank are you?
GM2
Big facts
It is great to see more people in this mindset talk about their own sentiment on the subject. This is like pareto, of course where It isn't a 1:1 translation for everything, but the effects do mirror a lot between politics, creative scenes or social groups
The Vienna History you refer to was covered in “Thunder at Twilight.” Frederic Morton.