19 Dec 2020
Focus on Improving
One of the biggest misconceptions of improvement is that we always have to win to get better. That is simply just not true. Our focus should be the continued improvement of ourselves every day and every game we play, with winning being a secondary focus that will come naturally on its own.
The constant focus on improvement is much more important to ourselves than simply focusing on how to get that next win. The improvements, methods and work ethic that we learn while we train, will stay with us for a very long time, if not forever, while learning some cheese strategy will only get us so far. Think of it as giving yourself a fish, versus teaching yourself how to fish. I will now give a hypothetical example that we can see in almost all levels of league of legends and other esports to highlight the importance between the two.
Let’s say we have two unranked players, A and B. Player A focusing on practicing the latest OP champion and strategy. Player B spends the majority of their practice time on basics, such as trading, csing, warding, minimap awareness, macro decisions, micro management training and mental focus within a game. At the beginning, player A climbs faster and a lot higher than player B. The champions he’s playing paired with the latest meta strategy he runs give him easy victories over his opponents. Player B has a slow start, as he’s spending time on issues which take a substantial amount of time to fix, improve and even understand.
After 6 months of playing, player A finds himself still winning and climbing, but the games are much closer now. Players are starting to become much better as he climbs up the ladder, they adapt to meta strategies and champions faster than lower ranks and know how to counter them, and Riot also decides to nerf these cheesy strategies and champions. Player is starting to gradually climb at this moment. The process is not easy though, as he still has a lot to work on and he plays champions which may not be meta, but he really enjoys playing them. Nonetheless, he is starting to see a lot more wins due to his early game being very clean in the sense that he’s not giving up gold, and only going for high percentage plays, which are executed correctly thanks to their constantly improving understanding and mechanical skills of the game.
After one year of playing, player A finds himself starting to lose more games than he actually wins as his champion gets nerfed and the meta has shifted entirely. And when he picks up a new champion to learn or a new strategy to practice the enemies stomp him as his fundamentals really suck. His level of fundamentals are a lot lower than his actual rank and he’s going to demote sooner or later, or just be hardstuck in this rank. Player B, however, is starting to win more games convincingly as his fundamentals at this point have been refined for an entire year. Little to no time is wasted up- keeping his basics in play as it is muscle memory at this point. This frees up time for him to pick up new champions which suit his play-style and the meta equally.
The outcome is clear. Player B, has set himself up for success, while player A is now a whole year behind in terms of improvement and game understanding.
The goal of this podcast is to produce players like player B with long-lasting results.
