Learning

This post was originally written for another site that is now defunct, so I'm reposting here to reference. The examples are video game and Guild Wars 2 specific, but if you want other non-GW2 examples, please let me know!

Here begins my grand idea of trying to put into words a string of ideas, concepts, and mental training that can allow anyone to better themselves at whatever they do. For our purposes, it will mainly be for video games, but the concepts apply generally to anything in life. For these guides, I’ll be trying to say what I’m talking about, then tell a story, or give an example of what I mean, for better understanding. The stories and examples will come from everywhere, but mostly they will come from Tennis and Video Games, as those are the things I compete in the most.

Learning

What is learning?

My favorite definitions from the internet:

1. The acquisition of knowledge or skills through experience, practice, or study, or by being taught.

2. The cognitive process of acquiring skill or knowledge

What does this actually mean? For me, it’s about the process, not the end result. Learning is not being able to build a car; learning is the mental steps you take to internalize and integrate the steps of building a car into your thinking. The feeling of doing it.

Here’s an example:

Think of sitting down in a chair. Bending your knees, leaning back while your torso leans forward, staying balanced while you come to rest. You do all of those things, but it’s a feeling, not a conscious action. How did you first learn that?

How do you repeat those steps so that everything else in your life becomes as simple as sitting in a chair?

That’s the goal of this guide.

Mastery curve / You get worse before you get better.

I discovered an idea while learning to play tennis that affects everything that I try to learn, and it’s called the Mastery Curve. It looks like this:

From George Leonard's Mastery : the keys to success and long-term fulfillment

The basic idea is that whenever you learn something new, you immediately are worse off than you were before. The reason for this is that you have to completely change everything else around that new skill to adapt your entire “game”.

I have 2 examples.

First example:

When playing tennis, there are a number of different shots to master, but each of them requires a lot of complicated steps like: early preparation, good contact, long follow through, steady balance etc. When a new concept in a stroke is being learned, it throws the rest of the stroke off. If you were previously swinging the racket with your wrist instead of your shoulder, changing that habit will initially make you worse because the timing and strength of hitting the ball will be completely different. Over time though, you will have the potential to be a much better player for a short amount of time being worse.

Second example:

Binding all of your abilities to your keyboard instead of clicking each of them with your mouse is a pretty difficult change. Most people have spent months or years clicking their abilities with their mouse and they have become pretty good at it. If they decide to change to using their abilities with a keyboard, the first few days they try this new method they will be a much worse player than they were before. They won’t remember which keys to push, they’ll accidentally click them with their mouse like before etc. Over time, however, the habits will change and the person will be much better off because of using the keyboard for abilities. It’s a sacrifice of being worse in the short term to be much better in the long term.

tl;dr:

You have to get worse before you can get better. This applies to anything new that you learn.

Practice and focus

The problem with getting worse before you get better is that you get worse. No one likes getting worse.

The bad news: There’s no way around it, it’s going to happen.

The good news: The “worse” part can go away quickly if you practice at it.

Practice is what makes everyone better. It will raise anything you want to learn to a new level. I’m not talking about going out and trying something 5 or 10 times to see how it works. I’m talking about dozens and dozens of repetitions to make it something normal and everyday, like sitting in a chair.

The trick with practicing is to do it right. Don’t practice multiple things at once. If it’s the first time you’ve played a game like GW2, don’t go in and practice dodging, crowd control, kiting, etc. There’s no way you can do all of those at once. Pick one thing to work on, and perfect it.

Example:

So, we have a new character in GW2, we’ll call him “Gameronomist The Mighty”. He’s a ranger, and will be building the ranger to be great at kiting. Using the longbow and greatsword as much as possible while his pet does a lot of damage. His additional skills will be focused around this concept of slowing enemies and keeping them at range so he can just plug them over and over with arrows.

So that’s what he should do right? Go out there and get into fights and kite people like crazy and shoot them with arrows!

No.

The first thing Gameronimist the Mighty should do is really practice his core skills. Kiting is great, but it doesn’t mean anything if he can’t use his core skills. So there should be a lot of time spent on using the longbow and only the longbow. Go into fights and only use the longbow for fighting. No additional skills, no weapon swapping.

Sounds crazy, I know, but it pays off. It’s really hard to do, because Gameronomist the Mighty will end up dying a lot because of only focusing on a single set of skills. The gain is that those crazy situations where Gameronomist the Mighty would normally pull out the greatsword (e.g. a thief or warrior charges into your face), he realizes it’s much more efficient to use his arrow that pushes the enemy back, and then dodge backward. Boom, instant space to shoot more arrows and do more damage and kite. This would not have been learned if the greatsword was pulled out to use as a melee crutch. (Simplified example)

So what’s the next step? Ignore the longbow completely and use only the greatsword for fighting. Same type of thing happens: Gameronomist the Mighty becomes an expert at using the greatsword and in what situations it is the best to use.

I’m not just talking about going into pve and using the greatsword to kill 100 mobs (although that helps). I’m talking about spending 5 hours total in SPvP or WvW using ONLY one weapon at a time.

Now, when a real pvp fight happens, Gameronomist the Mighty is comfortable and confident in any situation, and can easily and handily go back and forth between the longbow and greatsword. So, there’s no thought given to what ability to use when, and Gamernomist the Mighty can focus on strategy and tactics, and how to win the fight, rather than what abilities to use.

Take this as a model for every skill that needs to be learned. Some will be learned faster, some will take longer, but practicing different strategies, tactics, and abilities requires this type of testing and practice, whether it’s in a game or RL.

Mistakes

Let me save you the suspense: You’re going to make mistakes. A LOT. Tons. Bazillions. And there are going to be some big, horrible mistakes that cost your team a whole game. It’s going to happen.

What not to do about it: Get scared of making mistakes. When you get scared of making mistakes, and tighten up, you instantly start playing differently than normal, in a way that you haven’t practiced. This option guarantees that you will lose, and make an even bigger mistake. That’s right, being scared of making a mistake causes an even bigger mistake to happen. And you don’t learn anything, because you haven’t done anything new. You haven’t pushed yourself to learn.

What do do about it: Accept it. At the beginning of the learning process just tell yourself you’re going to make a lot of mistakes, and then tell yourself not to worry about it. As you move up the mastery curve, you’ll make fewer mistakes until you are doing whatever you want as easily as sitting in a chair.

When you make a mistake with something, think about what you did wrong (or ask someone else), and then try it again. You’ll probably do it wrong again. But do it a few more times and then you’ll get it right, and eventually you’ll be an expert at it, and you can teach others how to do it.

Example:

In life there are such things as “good mistakes”. Sounds like a contradiction, but it’s true. It’s a concept that can apply to just about anything.

In life there are such things as “good mistakes”. Sounds like a contradiction, but it’s true. It’s a concept that can apply to just about anything.

Think about WPvP. You are curious as to what that huge keep is, and what’s inside it. You walk up to check it out, the guards rush out and kill you dead. Whoops. Next time you’ll remember to check the map to see who owns the keep before you walk up to it, right? It’s a good mistake as long as you learn from it.