Learn to Love the Games That You Were Built to Win

by Justin Skycak (@justinskycak) on

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We all have limits, but they’re often much higher than we think.

Most people’s ceilings are artificially lowered by inefficient practice: not mastering prerequisites, not working enough exercises, transcribing from a reference instead of pulling from memory, etc.

Push hard and train efficiently.

But at the same time, if you’re ambitious, then continually evaluate where your ceiling is highest, and learn to love the games that you were built to win.

Understand that games can change drastically as the level of competition rises. Your edge against 90th percentile competition might be table stakes against the 99th percentile, and the 99.9th percentile might have some kind of insurmountable edge over you.

At the same time, don’t be too quick to call an opponent’s edge insurmountable. Often, you can train up your abilities fast enough to stay competitive. Sometimes, what looks like inborn advantage in an opponent is actually the result of training.

But not always. Sometimes you hit a soft ceiling, a point of severely diminishing marginal productivity, and there’s nothing to do but pivot to a game where your ceiling is higher. Don’t make your ceiling lower than it has to be, but when you run up against one, don’t stay and spend the rest of your life hemorrhaging opportunity cost.

The good news is that there is a combinatorial explosion of games to play in life, and even if you pivot along some axis, you can and should continue leveraging much of the training and experiences you picked up along conserved axes. You can continue compounding an intersectional advantage.

As reader Abhishek Singh once paraphrased: “The meta-skill is knowing which game deserves your training at this stage of life, and stacking your past experiences so you’re not starting at zero but at an intersection where few others can compete.”


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