The Skill Issue Issue
Practice haters ngmi.
Slight spoiler warning: this one goes kind of off the rails but I’m pretty proud of where it ends up and I hope you, dear reader, get at least a little something out of all this whether from where it starts or where it ends.
Today’s springboard:
The most unpleasant truth is that getting really good at something requires both some amount of innate baseline talent and an unusual passion for the thing that makes the overwhelmingly boring process of improvement at the thing unintuitively fun and rewarding
If you’re missing one or both it’s going to be work, and you’re probably going to fall behind those who do have both, but that doesn’t always have to matter unless the thing you wanna do is literally a competition
Like I’m sure most, ahem, video game enthusiasts, I spent most of my entire youth assuming (especially against any evidence) that I was the best at everything I played. As one gets older, doubt starts to creep in until “I’m obviously the best” transitions to “wtf how is it that I’m not maybe possibly obviously the best?” One starts occasionally googling “how do I suck less” and then it becomes more and more frequent until one realizes maybe the upper echelons of ranked matchmaking are going to be, rightfully, out of reach…
Okay in truth I was never that consciously convinced of my own infallibility, it was more of a passive presumption that, just as a natural mode, I was more skilled than I probably ever was. Everyone tends to be biased in their own favor, yeah? As long as one doesn’t sincerely commit to the illusion, there is a lot of good information out there that one can use to analyze and think about what separates skilled players from the masses themselves.
The first time I was exposed to something adjacent to the OP idea was in a video1 about League of Legends pros that explained that what typically separates highest level pros from lower-tier players isn’t a particular, direct skill at playing the game per se, but that pro players were frequently players who were unusually gifted at keeping track of the highest number of things mentally. This is especially true for MOBAs like League of Legends and Dota—where you have to keep track of creep and general map positioning, jungle spawn timers, player positioning for both teams, what items and skills every other player is using, cooldowns on everything and so on—but something similar is probably true for everything ever; there will almost always be some form of innate talent that will play a nontrivial role in high level play, but this talent may also be in an unintuitive element that plays the true role in high level performance2.
But still, something like “ability to keep track of a lot of things” is something that’s probably highly innate, and strongly suggests that there’s an immutable, innate talent component of professional play. There might be ways you can develop this, or other central performance components for any game, as a skill3 but your inborn potential is always going to be limiting to a degree.
I can’t recall where I first encountered the “passion” component but I think it was in relation to fighting games. The idea here being that a top player will have spent hundreds or maybe thousands of hours in a game’s practice mode perfecting combos and pouring over frame data, optimizing offensive and defensive strategies, testing what works in a punish counter situation, practicing hit confirms and reactions, etc etc.
If you have ever tried to do this yourself, you might know that this is skull-crushingly dull and frankly pretty unbearable to do for even just a few minutes, especially compared to the tense, exciting action of simply playing the game normally. Someone wanting to play at a high level needs to have an innate desire pushing them to survive the mundanity of practice; either an overriding need to be the best or an extreme, deep, borderline unnatural love for the game that makes even the boring process of perfection somehow fun4. Jumping ahead just a bit but there’s a well-known Steve Jobs bit that touches on this.
Provisionally, I think there’s probably a social element as well: I’ve observed that a lot of high level players either find their competitive drive by having friends that play (or a community to show off to) or have enough of a competitive drive that compels them to make the friends they need to have high level practice partners.
Lastly there’s a degree to which having a natural affinity or talent for a thing can have feedback effects that makes it more attractive to want to do the thing. I used to be a fairly talented string bassist when I was younger and, while I did some of the archetypical talented-kid coasting along, all it took was a little recognition from the right teachers5 and some remarkably outsized success relative to the effort I started putting in to make it a serious enough consideration for a set of life choices that could have set me on an entire alternate history career path.
Even though I’ve framed the “skill issue issue” through video games, I’m very confident this is basically true for everything ever, which begs two broad kinds of questions that I’ll bring up and then sort of ignore here:
How can we draw these parallels to other skill sets in a way that’s informative or interesting?
Why do I suck at the things I don’t want to suck at and/or how do I find the things I love and/or are talented enough to become the best at?
Skill pursuits like music and sports have clear parallels to what I’m describing, where the thing has a limited level of skill that can be achieved by just doing the thing and demands a level of tolerance for the boring-but-focused drills and practice required behind the scenes to make the live performances thrilling and enjoyable.
There is something of an elephant-in-the-room here and it’s that is that both of these elements are fully, individually-unique traits6. The talent component tends to be socially eschewed for cultural reasons we’ll get to in a sec, but it’s important to note that the passion component is also severely understated, though maybe less for how much it’s very socially en vogue to eschew all innate talent components versus a slightly more complex set of unintuitive reasons.
Growth mindset-type schmalz has been culturally popular for long enough that “everyone can do anything” is an inescapable part of the social fabric. Among the consequences of this are both a manic downplaying of how individual variance affects competition and a stubborn insistence that any level of performance can be attained by any starting skill set. This isn’t even a left vs right thing, you’ll find this attitude on both sides of the political spectrum. Corporate America is so bizarrely bought into growth mindset that they get really really weird about it and go as far as to comically misrepresent fixed mindset.
But whereas on one hand, this competitive philosophy requires outright antagonism to the idea of innate talent, it also needs to obfuscate the prices one has to pay in boredom and suffering to force oneself to develop a skill set that they just don’t really care about. It’s easier to frame certain things as some sort of moral failing when you refuse to acknowledge that even the process of improving a skill set requires something akin to a natural talent.
There are some great, recent explorations of why for much of this here and here.
Asking “what am I passionate about” is not a fully straightforward question. Sometimes it’s just vibes, sometimes it’s obfuscated by what you want to be passionate about but are not truly. To cut to the chase here, I don’t really have strong advice for doing this either, I can only gesture at the lines of thinking in my own life.
I can think of lots of personal examples of things I’d love to be passionate about. For one: writing! But I’m not, really, and I can recognize this by how much it doesn’t subsume my attention. I think I have maybe a better-than-average innate skill for writing7, and, as above, there’s some ways where having a talent for a thing makes the thing more fun than it might be otherwise, but I’m not possessed with a desire-for-the-thing as I’ve heard described (in writing, by writers!) that makes me think it’s quite my thing.
I think the post-Matthewmatosis/Joseph Anderson-era of YouTube video essays are kind of cool, and sort of wish that was my thing. It, too, is obviously not, because my compromise is to write these half-baked Substack regular essays instead.
How about a more socially damning confession: I’m definitely not especially passionate about pharmacy or healthcare either8.
That last footnote kind of gives it away: the one thing I’m unambiguously passionate about is simply just playing video games. Not making them, not even really talking, thinking, or writing about them, not collecting them, not even playing them particularly well9. I don’t care about finding bugs or exploits, pushing games to their limits, achievement hunting, recording, streaming, or speedrunning, though those are all things I’ll occasionally enjoy as additional entertainment. I really enjoy playing with other people, but I don’t really have a strong need to or to turn gaming into a regular social activity10. I’m hungry for the interactive experience, and that’s the only part of it that’s maybe a mystery to me—whether interactivity as a mode of experience is specifically what is attractive to me versus that it’s…video games11.
The reason I went down a gradient of sort-of-embarrassing admissions was because we can say that this is probably why I’m not especially ambitious in any meaningful12 way, and thus my existence is admittedly kind of socially low-value13 and low-meaning. So let’s transition into a discussion of why I’m okay with all of this and why it seems to be touchy for so many other people, because I think people do a lot of weird guilt-based interfacing with society when they realize they’re not especially skilled in some pro-social way and/or don’t have socially useful passions.
I think society doesn’t teach people to be okay with being mundanely skilled in a healthy way. Well, maybe. Some of this seems sort of obvious once you’ve peeled back only a few layers on the social psychology of how people behave online, but also something like tall poppy syndrome seems to have been just a part of human DNA since the ancient world.
Some of this is undoubtedly defense mechanisms14 and the subconscious psychology of:
You hate and fear action, because it seems like the kind of thing that could go wrong and lower your status. But you would prefer (“desire” seems like a strong word for something this unnatural) to have certain things happen, for example for your friend’s wife to leave him, or for your ledger to be fairer. You solve this contradiction by fantasizing about some “omnipotent entity” somehow forcing you to sow dissent in your friend’s marriage. Only then can you act without the stigma of actually acting.
—but, in a broader sense; I think the skill issue here is more of a “meaning” issue. That feeling as though one doesn’t have a well-defined talent or skill set is a crisis of meaningness.
I could probably spin off an entire other post on my thoughts on the need for meaning but for now I’ll say that I think not having clear talents and passions are among some of the reasons that some people have a deep-seated unhappiness with themselves on some fundamental level, and some of this manifests as a strong need for “meaning”15.
I guess one of my long-term projects is reconciling nihilism16 with “lol who cares enjoy the trip while it lasts”. Parts of my conclusions in All the nerds are undead and All the subcultures are undead touch on the idea of divorcing your entertainment preferences from a need to have to justify themselves, and there’s a similar throughline for Anger at how other people waste their time as misplaced angst at not having personal claims on other peoples' time that touches on human civilization’s memetic need to require its members (to have to justify their entertainment preferences but also) to have to have some kind of pro-social purpose—flavored with your preferred political philosophy to taste here. You have to use your talents for society, for morality, because you owe it to everyone, or whatever. I disagree with the notion of obligation here, on some kind of difficult-to-describe primal level17, but I feel I ought to at least find a way to say “I don’t care that civilization needs you to be motivated to continue civilization” in a way that’s consistent on principle.
I think it goes something like this: when you say “but if everyone did what they want, society would collapse” I suspect you’re wrong because I think there’s a sufficient number of people for whom “what they want” is doing the things that keep society from collapsing. To bring it full circle, there are going to be enough people whose genuine passion is for all that pro-social stuff—and if that’s you by all means go to town, perhaps literally…and be its mayor.
So maybe a better framing of this viewpoint is: there’s enough people. If your passions are as such, I don’t believe the machine needs to eat your soul specifically, nor probably quite a few other people’s souls generally. I think civilization is blessed enough in its present incarnation that you should be free to exercise a high degree of “nah”.
Where it falls apart past this is that I don’t have a really good answer to, “well okay you can line item veto the social contract but then you deserve less of the fruits of society.” My best short-time-horizon reply is: “the compromise is that I got a job and I’m going to do whatever the fuck I want with my money (that by the way I’m paying exorbitant taxes on), bitches.” My long-time-horizon answer is everything I wrote about in Age of Eye.
It’s weird that I keep ending on this note of “look just try to be happy with who you are even if you don’t really know who or how that is”, but I think that’s quintessentially me and maybe that’s just another passion I have.
I haven’t looked but I imagine it’s going to be next to impossible to find the specific video given that I don’t remember it’s title and author and this was probably circa 2011. Post-publish edit: Nevermind! Was looking through my old YouTube favorites and found it:
Granted there will also probably be the rare rockstar players who are good at all of that and have insane micro.
In fact, you can probably bump this up another meta level to point out that an ability to master learned skills is another kind of innate talent.
Now that I think about it in editing, it also could have been for professional Starcraft, where the same sort of practice-is-obscenely-boring-so-you-gotta-just-love-the-game element definitely applies.
Not my high school orchestra teacher, who was a generic smug asshole, and also a violinist.
I had two influential private teachers: one at the latter two of the three summers I attended the International Music Camp, that made me realize maybe this is something I could stand to take more seriously, and another after returning from that session at IMC—a friend of the family and member of the local F-M Symphony—who did a great job of teaching me to push my potential. My high point was hitting first chair at the All-State orchestra the first year I auditioned.
IMC was always a blast with lots of great memories; came back from my first one with a crippling Magic: The Gathering addiction. One of my unrequited fantasies is going back as one of the weird few adult musicians who would show up every time. I’d love to buy a bass someday for posterity but I absolutely don’t have room for it at home.
Going to try to avoid using “inborn” going on from here because I think something like preferences for what one is passionate about can probably be influenced by circumstances of one’s environment versus wholly genetic.
Seed of doubt: my father was/is a professional writer and thus I’ve always presumed to have an inherited-family-business-style proclivity for it, but I can’t actually be sure that’s true.
I have a vivid memory of the precise point I picked out pharmacy as a career. I was playing Star Ocean: The Second Story during what must have been late middle school (Wikipedia says the US release was summer ‘99 so that seems to line up right) and I was in a car ride somewhere with my dad when he asked me if I’d thought about what I wanted to do as a career and I blurted out, only half-jokingly, “pharmacist!” Entirely because I thought Bowman Jean was a cool character.
As time went on, I just never thought of an actually-serious, real answer to that question and so that was kind of my default but also I was into science and chemistry and shit even though I wasn’t really that interested in healthcare and wow the money’s pretty not bad and hey NDSU has a pretty solid pharmacy program so why the hell not. I packed in two science classes a semester in high school and set myself on the path of funding my eternal video game habit with drugs.
Though these are all things that ebb and flow over time. I’ve dabbled in a design here and there (spent a little time with RPGMaker)—though I’ve always had a strong understanding that I’d rather be playing games than making them which is why I never seriously considered it as a career option. Obviously talking about games makes a good diversion when you can’t always be playing them, and clearly I’m writing about them now. My Steam library is the closest I get to collecting. There have been times where I’ve tried to take competitive games seriously, though nowadays I recognize that they fit better as self-directed challenges to improve the skills tied to a game for the simple joy of making the improvements.
Though again, it’s still something I have done and have found some amount of fulfillment in. One of the three weddings I’ve ever attended was one of my buddies from my longest-term gaming groups.
But I’m leaning towards it just being video games; if it was the former I’d probably be more enthusiastic about, say, travel, and overcoming challenges and problem solving are two of the things about video games that I really enjoy that might not fully square with just having “interactive experiences”.
Foreshadowing.
Being a pharmacist sort of incidentally muddies this calculus and gives me an admittedly substantial pro-social out but let’s ignore that for now.
I blame what follows partly on the fact that I was rereading the ACX book review of Sadly, Porn.
I could be the odd one out here, but I don’t feel like I have a strong personal need for or drive towards “meaning” generally, as I’ll more or less be exploring for the rest of this post anyways. I mean, I’d be surprised if I’m the only person that feels this way but maybe I’m in enough of a minority that nobody really writes substantially about it.
Not that I’m nihilist, I’m very much not! But it’s hard to escape that what I’m endorsing is, in some sense, nihilism.
Look I promise this isn’t strictly laziness or any kind of natural aversion to authority but it’s probably at least a little of both.