I checked my inbox one day and I received an invite to the Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty beta. Starcraft is a real time strategy video game, it is like chess on steroids. I love playing strategic video games especially against other people, I’m competitive. Don't try to eat more cheese than me, we will wreck the plumbing.
I began to watch the Global Starcraft League, a Starcraft 2 tournament in South Korea, the total prize pool was 170k USD, in 2010 that was the biggest I saw for a video game. I watched the winner of the tournament walk up to the center of the stage with all the confetti raining down, to the thunderous applause, he picked up the trophy and kissed it. The light bouncing off him in glorious ways. I thought, “That is going to be me one day”.
And so began the grind of playing Starcraft 2 and working my way up the ladder. There are leagues which break the players up based on skill; it starts from bronze and goes to silver, gold, platinum, diamond and masters. I was in the bronze league, the lowest of the low. I knew with enough practice I could make it to the top. I watched guides on youtube and read about strategies on public forums. I worked my way up to gold league and stayed there for a week. I was feeling on top of the world, about to achieve my dreams. Then I had a few days in a row where everything went wrong and I was demoted to silver league. I thought yeah, maybe I’m not good enough and uninstalled the game from my computer.
I was browsing youtube in a total slump and found a guy named Day[9] he played Starcraft in tournaments around the USA and he had a video on teaching a novice how to play Starcraft. He broke down step by step each of the mechanics of the game, what to practice, what are the optimal techniques, no strategy, just the raw foundational skills of the game. He recommended the book The Art of Learning. I immediately bought the book on amazon and decided to relearn everything I knew about the game from the ground up.
Day[9] broke down every nuance of the game into bite size chunks. And suggested repetitive practice in those small chunks. After reading the Art of Learning I began to understand the process of how to learn a skill. I began to understand the game at a fundamental level and worked my way up. I could come up with my own strategies, learn new strategies faster and trusted myself to compete. After a few months of practicing these skills for many hours each day, learning from my mistakes, developing my own style of play and analyzing my own replays I was promoted to the masters league, a month later I was within the top 2000 players in the world.
I began to enter online tournaments. I got demolished. The highest I ever placed was 11th. These were tournaments for $25 USD. I took a hard look at myself, I was playing the game 8 hours a day, I was studying and analyzing the game for another 4 hours. And I wasn’t producing results. I decided to go back to the drawing board. I gave the dream a shot. I was a failure. The truth is there is no such thing as failure, what my saga of starcraft taught me was how to learn. And having this tool in my belt was one I came to use many times, paying dividends in ways I never would expect.
Imagine that you knew that you could learn how to do anything anyone else in the world does. Everything you do in life is a skill, washing the dishes, writing, driving a car, singing, drawing, dancing, typing, talking to people. Anything where you do anything with your body parts. Sounds like a superpower right? Learning how to learn a new skill effectively has helped me in all areas of my life. You have to have the willingness to try and fail and be okay with embarrassment. You have to learn how to do it slowly before you can do it fast. With enough effort you can learn anything you want.
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A quick overview of the learning framework is a cycle of Study, Do, Analyze. Study, Do, Analyze.
Study
How do you even know what the proper form is? An expert helping you or research on the internet. There are many different ways to shoot a basketball. Some are better than others. But in general if you look at the top 200 basketball players in the world, all of their shooting forms look similar to some degree. Their shooting form is a result of many years of practice, knowledge passed down from experts before them. Thousands of hours of trial and error to come up with the most effective shooting form. There is no reason to go through this trial and error again if someone else has already done it. Why reinvent the wheel? I can save time by copying what is already known. Then I can build upon that if I understand why they are doing the things they are currently doing. This is the study phase.
Do
A concrete example of this learning framework is learning how to shoot a free throw in basketball. I thought to stand at the freethrow line and practice and practice. That can work, but there is an optimal way to learn. Start 1 foot away from the basket head on, make that shot 10 times. Then take 1 step back and make 10, then repeat until at the freethrow line. What this example shows is breaking down a bigger skill into something smaller and slowly increasing the difficulty. And then performing the action successfully multiple times in succession, this allows your muscles to learn the coordination required to perform the action. No jumping, fancy dribbles or passing, just shooting. What this does is remove the variables and isolates the skill. Skills are complex and learning a small chunk at a time then combining all the chunks together results in a highly effective way to learn. Figure out the variables and isolate them. After being isolated, make it as simple as possible and perform enough repetitions until consistent success is achieved. Then slowly increase the difficutly and repeat. Using this method will reduce the amount of time required to learn the skill, if you can find an expert in the given skill who uses these principles you will be golden. This is the Do faze.
Why start off easy? So you can learn good habits. When you are overreaching your ability by too much you compensate in other ways, this can lead to bad habits. If my arms are not strong enough to even throw a basketball from the freethrow line to the basket, then practicing from that distance would cause me to over exert myself and develop a bad shooting form.
Now I thought yeah this can only be applied to sports or video games. Something physical. Turns out using this method can be applied to anything in life that can be learned.
Analyze
Because the game of Starcraft is one versus one every loss was my fault. I had to be 100% accountable. I learned to only worry about the things I can control. I can’t blame the keyboard or mouse for my loss, I can’t blame the people who made the game. The game is the way it is, I am a player. I can learn from my losses or keep making the same mistakes over and over until I learn. This is the analyze faze.
When you are building a skill you have to be accountable. What can you control? If you are shooting free throws and you miss. Who is to blame? The wind, your shoes, the rim, or your shooting form. Focus on what you can control, realize that if you are making a mistake you need to consciously do it differently or else it will become a bad habit. Sometimes you can’t do it all by yourself. The outside perspective of a coach or record yourself using your phone will help you learn faster. The first thing is to realize you made a mistake. Then remember that mistakes are a gift, mistakes are part of the process, failure is good. This means you were trying something new and now you have an opportunity to learn. You can blame the wind or you can realize the ball is heavy enough that the wind doesn’t affect it and really it is that your wrist isn’t loaded back enough to give a high enough arc to effectively land in the basket. Mistakes and failure will happen that is guaranteed. How you deal with mistakes and failure will make or break you.
How to analyze
Realize you made a mistake.
Think back to what you were thinking and why
Think of a better solution to the problem
Run the scenario again and see if your solution works better
Flow
The ideal situation is to be in the flow state.
When the task is too easy it becomes boring.
When the task is too hard you easily give up.
You have to be self-aware enough to understand when the task is too easy or too hard.
Learning framework - step by step
Study - Break the skill down into sizable chunks
Do - Deliberate challenging practice while slowly increasing the challenge
Analyze - Self-awareness of attempts
Critical Analysis of what could be done better to achieve a better result?
What went right
What went wrong
What can I do better next time
Having fun
What does it mean when someone says just have fun with it. It means that all this analysis; all the drills and exercises you are thinking about. Throw it out the window. You put in the work in during practice and when the game happens. Forget it all, be present in the moment, trust in the practice you put in and enjoy what happens. You can analyze after it is over. The higher fundamental skills, baseline skills you have the more room you have to play. An issue which happens when learning is over-anaylzing, over-thinking. By switching to playful and fun you get out of your head and are in an optimal state for learning.
What skills are worth learning?
There are skills which apply to anything you choose to do with your life.
Talking, Reading, Writing, Emotional intelligence, Problem solving, Self awareness, Leadership.
No matter what field or activity you choose to do these skills apply.
Sports are a great way to practice the art of learning.
Once you become competent with the learning process you can apply the same process to anything. How to write code, how to deliver a speech, how to write.
Resources