There’s a saying: “Practice makes perfect”. It’s wrong… kind of. Today I’m going to talk about why it’s important to realize that you suck before you can get better, and why some people practice but never get better while others constantly get better.

Lesson 1 - You Suck



I’ve been a gamer my whole life. While growing up there wasn’t a single day that I didn’t play games alone or with friends. At the time I was into fighting games and I had 3 very good friends that all played with me almost every day. From the 4 of us, I was the best player and I won almost all the time. It was only when I was 16 though that I realized where I truly stand.

I found a fighting game forum that had a bunch of people who live near me. I decided to go to one of their usual meetings and kick their ass. I remember that moment like it was yesterday: I entered a room full of mostly teenagers like me sitting on 2 couches and playing on 2 different TV sets. I said hi to everyone and sat on one of the couches. I watched them play for a while and when it was my turn to play I felt very confident that I would win. I grabbed the controller and… got my ass handed to me before I could even land a single hit. Shock.

Apparently I was so bad at the game that I couldn’t even see the skill gap between me and the others while watching them play. At first I thought it was just a fluke, but time after time when it was my turn to play I lost horribly. I was devastated. How is it possible that I’m the best player among my friends but the worst player here?

Noam, One of the people there, saw that I was upset and started speaking with me. He politely asked me about my experience with video games and told me that he would try to help me out. We met privately later that week and from that moment I really started to get better. Later on I found out that this guy was the reigning European champion in Tekken 4 (the game that we were playing at the time).

What can we learn from this experience? Well first of all, never judge your skill before you play with people who you know are very good. More importantly though, you have to realize that you suck before you can get better. If you think you are the best at something, you won’t be able to criticize yourself and truly understand what you did wrong and learn from your mistakes.

Lesson 2 – Practice Efficiently

Noam was about the same age as me and we practiced around the same amount of time in fighting games. How is it then that I was the worst player ever, while he was a champion? There are 2 main reasons which I’m going to break down here:

Skill – Probably the most obvious reason, but surprisingly not the most important one. Different players have different natural skill ceiling that they can achieve, that’s just how the world is. No matter how hard I tried, I never became as good as Noam. It was impossible for me since his natural skill ceiling was higher than mine in that particular game. Natural skill ceiling is very important IF you achieve it. Most people don’t.

Efficient Practice – This is how you can actually climb to the top of your natural skill ceiling. Almost everyone plays a lot, it’s fun! But anyone who dreams about playing competitively wants to get better so they’re not just playing for fun, they’re actually practicing. This is what I was doing all these years, I practiced. Did I get any better? Maybe a little, but I was still very far away from reaching my ceiling because I didn’t know how to practice.

This is how my practice looked like: play a match --> lose --> I’m so unlucky --> play another match…

This is how efficient practice should look like: play a game --> lose --> why did I lose? --> play another match while trying to improve the aspect that made me lose...

If you have keen eyes, you probably noticed one of the main components in getting better – losing. Can you get better if you win? Sure you can, but only up to a certain point. You need to play with people better than yourself in order to improve, otherwise you won’t know what you’re doing wrong. Always remember: losing is the fastest way to improve, it’s good to lose!

Efficient practice was the main reason that Noam was so much better than me. Every match he played helped him in some way to improve, while every match I played pretty much wasted my time (except the fun part of course).

These are sentences that you want to avoid telling yourself when you lose:

“I lost because I was unlucky.”

“My teammates suck! I could have totally won this on my own.”

“This game is dumb.”

“This guy used character X, that’s so lame. I could have won if X wasn’t so OP.”

“He used game mechanic X to win. That’s like cheating!”

These are the sentences that you want to tell yourself when you lose:

“Why did I lose?”

“What can I do next time to improve?”

“How can I beat character X?”

“Maybe I should try to use mechanic X myself next time. It seems to be working well.”

Sometimes you do lose because of bad luck or bad teammates, it happens to everyone. However, you need to be extremely honest with yourself to be sure that that’s the reason. Not only that, but even if you lost because of luck/teammates, there is probably something that you could have done better in order to win. Or, worst case scenario, if you were really destined to lose, you could have used that time to improve even while losing.

There is way more to this than what I wrote here. If you want to read more about the subject, I suggest reading “Playing to Win” by David Sirlin. His book has really opened my eyes and helped me improve my set of mind while playing. “Playing to Win” is free online (although I highly suggest buying it just to support him if you can) and you can read it all here: http://www.sirlin.net/ptw/

Note: I have no connection to David Sirlin what-so-ever and I’m pretty sure that he doesn’t even know I exist. It’s a good book, read it!

For some of you this article was probably useless, but if I helped even 1 person with this then I feel like it’s worth it. As usual, if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to write them here or send them to: creationesports@gmail.com.

I’m looking forward to discuss this with you guys so bring it on!

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