Preface

I've played under an hour of tennis in my entire life. Maybe I've hit a tennis ball with a racket 20 times. I don't watch tennis. I don't know anything about tennis.

And yet -- Timothy Gallwey's Inner Game of Tennis was brilliantly valuable to me.

I don't run. I don't like running. I like lifting weights. With my bad knees and mediocre lung capacity, there's very little that appeals to me less than the idea of long-distance running.

And yet -- reading Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running gave me an incredibly powerful metaphor for creativity, personal improvement, discipline, and just dealing with reality.

This book is about video games.

Well, sort of.

This book is about video games the way Gallwey's book is about tennis or Murakami's book is about running. Which is to say, despite the fact that we're going to be talking about video games constantly, the book isn't about video games.

***

I should clarify. The vast majority of video games, I think, have very little value in terms of art, in terms of lessons learned, or in terms of a worthwhile leisure activity. 

Just like the rest of society, games have trended in the "everyone gets a trophy" direction. The market has spoken -- they want games that are nearly impossible to fail at, that, if you sit at a console long enough, good things will happen to you.

I have no interest in that.

This book looks at a particular subset of games played only by people who want their leisure to put them on the edge of their mental abilities: roguelikes.

A roguelike is a type of role-playing game that, if you die once, you're dead. The game automatically saves the fact that you're dead, and there's no coming back. You can't save and reload. There's no checkpoints. That's it -- you died -- you lose.

These games don't typically play fast. It might take 20 to 70 hours to beat a roguelike. If you're 15 hours in and on the way to winning, but you slip up and play sloppy for five minutes, that's the end of it. You're dead. Good game. The game has automatically saved that you're dead. You lose. Better luck next time.

***

These very hard games, thus, become interesting laboratories if you reflect on them. To win at one of them, you need to play patiently solid for hours on end. If you find your patience going and sloppiness setting in, you need to set the game down for a while until you're rested.

In the harder roguelikes, not thinking through your advancement and development might make the game unwinnable. 

The games offer a large array of choices for difficult situations, letting you mentally wade through risks, variance, and so on.

There's a lot of quick applied math and decision theory.

You need to have awareness and perception of when things are going wrong.

Interestingly, all these skills -- planning, math, patient execution, emotional management, awareness, perception, self-control -- these are what's needed to do important high-concept work in the modern economy.

***

I'm a natural maximizer, so I want my leisure to do more than just relax me -- I want to get lessons and mental models out of it.

In this book, we take a look at some best practices from winning the hardest type of games -- and apply those lessons to real life situations, whether it be mentally relating to events around you, finding cohesion and gamebreakers in real life, or applying the basics of math honed in games to making high-dollar sales or doing well in finance and investing.

***

I think that's pretty cool -- but shall I address the elephant in the room? I don't dwell on this much in the book, but I'd like to say why I chose to write this now.

Like may kids born in the 1980's, I started playing the original Super Mario Bros on the Nintendo, and gradually graduated to Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, Playstation, Playstation 2. (Which was the last console I owned.)

I had a nice time playing. I think games made me smarter, sharper, and gave me better reflexes. I think they gave me better mental models of the world.

But they were never "cool." It wasn't something you wanted to bring up. I think, even five years ago, I wouldn't want to say at a party that I wrote a book about mental models and math from video games.

What changed?

Three things. I'll save the biggest one for last.

The least big thing is I started thinking about why Chess is prestigious. Why is Chess prestigious? I think Chess -- with no disrespect to people who love and immerse themselves in the game -- is less of a useful thing to train in for people. There's a huge amount of memorization and static learning you need to do to start to be competitive, and the real beauty of Chess doesn't show up until you've mastered opening play and endgame play, which is a lot of book-learning with minimal improvisation or flexibility.

Eventually, I came to an answer -- Chess is prestigious because smart and influential people played a lot of Chess at one point, and it got a reputation for that. I think that's going to happen to video games; I think it's happening now.

But that's the least important reason.

The second reason is, and perhaps this is cowardly, is I noticed people I respect and admire largely nonchalantly using metaphors for video games. My friend, the mathematician, investor, and entrepreneur Ivan Mazour wrote on his blog about an Actions Per Minute metaphor comparing life to high-level Starcraft play, and wrote nostalgically about his times playing X-Com: UFO Defense.

This was heartening. Gradually, games became conversation that was fun and light, like reflecting on a "cool" activity like listening to music or playing frisbee.

Maybe that's cowardly to some extent, but seeing people I respect and admire writing openly on the topic was heartening.

But you know what the biggest reason was?

I read this article by a woman who went out on a date with a former Magic: The Gathering champion, and because she thought this was uncool, she wrote nasty and publicly about him.

And I thought -- is this who I'm afraid of offending?

This woman is loser.

This guy seems like a good guy.

And then it all started to crystallize in my mind -- we live in a silly showy narcissistic culture, where people do things less for the joy and engagement of their activities, and more so that they can photograph and Instagram or Facebook that they've done the activities.

You see silly people photographing their cake and uploading it to social media, taking photos of themselves in front of landmarks, taking photos of themselves in an expensive car...

... it's like, that is the behavior that people should be embarrassed about.

A great solo game, like a roguelike, is not showy at all. It's a personal experience, immersing your mind in the mechanics and gameplay in an intellectual activity.

A team game, like a tactical shooter, lets you hone cooperation and coordination among other people.

And a competitive game lets you test your wits against another person in an environment where you characters can go battle royal with no hard feelings in real life.  

The more I thought about it, the more I realized just what a useful and praiseworthy activity that playing games can be, sharpening our minds, sharpening our work ethic, making us smarter and more effective.

And I don't mean the "everyone gets a trophy" games -- yawn. I mean, difficult games that force us to play smart, plan ahead, learn and do math, spot patterns, and really stay calm and mentally sharp in order to progress and win.

Does this transfer to real life? It has for me. Many of the most effective, smartest, wealthiest young people I know play games as one of their leisure activities. And the kind of people who judge and get arrogant about it seem like some of the dumbest and shallowest people around.

So maybe that's a petty reason to do it -- but I figure, if the opposition is so aggressively overbearingly stupid, this must be the right side to join.

Section I. A Brief Look Backwards

1. Morphine, or the Lack Thereof

“Are you sure you don’t want morphine?”

 I don’t want morphine.

“Most people take it?” 

“Yeah, they do.”

“Ehh, I’m pretty tough. I meditate, and I, uhh, try to use these things as a training opportunity.”

 (I feel silly right after saying that.)

She blinks and doesn’t seem to process that. 

“What’s your pain at on a scale of 1 to 10?”

“I don’t know… somewhere between 4 and 6?”

“Six! That’s pretty high! You sure you don’t want something?”

“You mean… morphine?”

“Yes.”

“No, really, I’m good. Thanks.”

“Okay! Well, if you need some…”

The nurse smiles cheerfully and exits to my right. 

--

inspect room

It is dark with dim lighting. As your eyes adjust, you note you're laying on a flat hard surface in a hospital recovery room post-surgery. The room is spacious and your bed is precisely in the middle of it; the headboard touches a wall but the rest of the walls are too far away to interact with. It gives a certain "floating" feeling.

There is a desk here to your left, built into the wall.

There are windows, but it is too dark to see outside.

An IV is in your right arm.

There is one exit here: east, to the main hospital corridor.

--

No book to read, no work to do, no laptop to use. Just... alone here in the darkness, the anesthesia wearing off. A training opportunity: indeed. The pain isn't so bad. My thoughts are clear and lucid.

I can't remember the last time I had nothing scheduled and nothing to do.

I have a long list of things I do each day. Seven days a week, I wake up with at least a couple hours of things to do: walking, fitness, meditation (two sessions), standard bed-making and tooth-brushing, writing, a whole host of other stuff.

Of course, there's whatever I'd planned to do the night before -- advancing projects and what not -- and "30+ Minutes of Misc Task Clearing"... my concession to the fact that I previously would let details pile up. So I spend 30 minutes a day doing whatever really ought to be done: cleaning, paperwork, details type stuff. I used to get way behind on the details, but now with my concessionary 15 hours per month, my taxes get done on time, my laundry is usually clean, my flights are booked more than three days before I'm scheduled to go on a trip. It wasn't always this way.

Of course, I can't book flights or do my taxes or do my laundry right now. I'm not sure I can even move: I try, and it's confirmed -- the pain in my abdomen shoots up to 9+ out of 10 at my attempt to shift around. The nurse, with her morphine, is long gone. I'll just... stay still.

--

Time passes, as it's prone to do.

The night waxes and then wanes; I drift in and out of sleep; eventually it is the next day and the surgeon has come to visit.

The basic details are clear enough: the appendix hadn't burst. The surgery went smooth. I'm lucky I came in when I did. Etc.

After surgeon-talk, the surgeon shifts to doctor-talk. "Now, don't you go doing anything for a few weeks."

He doesn't say it like that; he says it more precise and doctorly. You know the tone.

He admonishes: no work at all for one week; no fitness for three weeks.

Okay, doc, thanks.

--

I'm flying through my work. I haven't been this productive in ages!

Memento mori: remember you are mortal. I've got those "brush with death" superpowers right now. I'm focused; I'm killing it.

I haven't done fitness in almost a week now; I'm going crazy.

Pushups. I do pushups.

Who listens to doctor anyways? 

Wait, that kind of hurts.

--

It's the next day.

I've regressed.

I'm exhausted and in a lot of pain.

Damn it, why didn't I listen to the doctor?

--

Okay, I'm going to take a few days off. Explicitly. No "30+ Minutes of Misc Task Clearing"; no fitness; nothing. 

I do some quick research, and download Tales of Maj'eyal.

2. The Difficulty Level Is Too Low

Most games were never able to hold my attention for long. Before I more-or-less entirely quit video games a few years ago, I would have to search out for games that were either incredibly difficult and nuanced -- or I'd have to make a non-nuanced game more difficult.

Apparently, I'm not the only person that does this. Sometimes at Gamefaqs.com, there are listed "Challenge Guides" for how to play a game more difficult.

For instance, Final Fantasy VIII -- a pleasant game that I played as a pre-teen a couple decades ago -- is really rather easy once you get the hang of the slightly unusual character development mechanics.

The ease of the game made it nigh unplayable for me after beating it once, but I liked it. It was pleasant to play, sort of like running into an old friend and reminiscing. I'm not sure it was a very good game; I don't really know how much of my affection towards it is nostalgia (probably a lot), but I enjoyed the idea of playing it. But -- it was trivially easy.

Then, one day I saw a "No Level Up" challenge guide. Wow, how interesting. It was slightly complicated: you needed to run from the fights you could run from, and in the fights you couldn't run from, you needed to get a special very-complicated-and-not-normal-to-get magic that let you turn those enemies to stone. If you turn enemies to stone, you don't get experience points -- and don't level up. Meanwhile, there’s ways to dispatch enemies that help you develop your technology without getting experience, and you have to do a healthy amount of that, which is also tricky to execute.

That's the sort of thing that got me jazzed. It turns out, FFVIII is actually very easy past the initial stages if you're doing no-level-up; you wind up really overpowered, actually. No matter, the novelty of the challenge, planning it out, executing it is very interesting. Especially the early game which actually becomes somewhat dangerous.

To increase the danger level and improve playing ability, I'd often play games in "Hardcore Mode" that weren't meant to be played that way. Meaning, if I died, I'd erase the save file and call the character dead.

This made Morrowind, the epic fantasy game, this made it playable after the beauty and interestingness of the first play was over. 

Sometimes I'd combine challenges: make a character in Morrowind who wouldn't use weapons at all; only magic; and then make it one-death-game-over. This meant that instead of blindly rushing from area to area, you'd actually have to sit and plan like you're planning a military campaign.

"Okay, what happens if I get paralyzed? What happens if I get poisoned? If I run across a Flame Atronach, can I handle taking a first big nasty fireball without dying?"

Often in games, you're required to go get some item before you can get on with your quest. In "The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time," you'd have to go get a flame-proof suit before you could enter the volcano.

But if you were playing something like Morrowind on this made-up one-death-it's-over hardcore mode, you'd de facto have to go get anti-flame gear before you could go take on an area with fire enemies. The game wouldn't tell you to; rather, you'd need to do lots of planning and thinking ahead.

Sometimes it was tedious having to go search through shops with randomly generated inventory to stock up on +10% resistance to fire items, but mostly it felt like something a real adventurer would have to deal with. If you were going to explore the North Pole in real life, you don't get a Save/Reload button. You need to have your anti-cold gear so you don't die. And, if you have a single pragmatic bone in your body, you would be happy to do lots of research and testing and small trials to make sure you were ready to go, before you got into the most dangerous parts.

Combat, likewise, got very exciting if your character would be over if you lost the battle. Normally you'd reload your last save; you could often go into a fight where you had a 50/50 chance of winning, and if you lose, you just reload. Not so, here. Even a 1% chance of losing a fight from getting paralyzed right as your shield wears off, or something, would mean you wouldn't survive to beat the game.

You can't rely on luck in a game where a single death ends your game; if you're willing to accept a chance of dying over 0% per battle, you'd eventually get killed. Your guy would be over. 

3. Thai Kickboxing, Childproofing, and the Fighter/Wizard

Older games are to modern games what a Thai kickboxing ring is to a child's playpen.

Have you ever seen Thai kickboxing? I went to a match in Chiang Mai. It's vicious, vicious stuff.

They wear minimal gear. They generate immense power.

We were seated in some stands above and a set a little bit back from the ring. My Japanese friend and I were the only non-Thai in that area; these were the cheap seats; the few foreigners there sat on the ground near the ring.

But it worked out well: above the ring, it was possible to see everything play out. Up close, things would be more visceral and more of a blur; further back, the matches took on a Chesslike quality where you could see mistakes happen and get reacted to. Most matches ended after the first major mistake.

The fourth match was two young, energetic, and lightning-fast Thai guys. One maybe 19 years old, the other maybe 22.

The 19-year-old overcommitted on an attack and lost his balance slightly.

Stumbling slightly, the 19-year-old wound up leaning into his opponent's kick, taking a vicious foot to the head.

He hit the canvas immediately, knocked out cold.

The crowd went wild.

Me, too.

Everyone sobered up a little bit when the medics came and put the kid's neck in a splint before carrying him off on a stretcher.

--

If you'll forgive me for comparing the seriousness of Thai combat with the not-quite-as-serious video games, this might be an apt metaphor.

Back in the day, computers were largely for intellectual, analytical, deeply thinking people. This was a relatively small market.

In other words, the prototypical video game player in 1990 was much more armed and equipped to play games that were... punishing.

And they were -- punishing. Think about the original Super Mario Bros. You started with a few lives. You got a rapid rampup of difficulty between levels as mechanics are rapidly added. Dying was unpleasant. It was "Game Over" if you died a few times. You couldn't save and restore. The game didn't "cheer you on" very much, especially not when you died. (You did get points for stomping enemies and minor fireworks when grabbing the flag at the end of the level. But then, alas, the princess is in another castle.)

In the Thai boxing arena, these are already the top 1% of most competent fighters in the world going at each other. Those two young men are two of the toughest men on the planet. And when one overreaches ever so slightly, it's punishing. It's not celebratory-punishing. The spectators wound up almost ashamed to have watched it.

Likewise, games used to be played by the top 1% of most analytical people -- almost exclusively. And when you overreached in a game, you got punished.

--

"Punished" isn't too strong of a word, either. 

Let me tell you a story; you can chuckle if you want, but I don't think you will.

I played "Dungeons and Dragons" -- 2nd Edition and some 3rd Edition -- from around age 11 or 12 to around age 16. 

At age 15, I joined a game with some older teenagers that had been going on for a while. One guy, let's call him Jonny, had a level 18 fighter/wizard (if memory serves) who he'd really built up. 

Level 18 was pretty high in Second Edition Dungeons and Dragons.

He and another player there -- let's call him Tommy -- got into a tiff, and two characters that were once friends split off, and wound up fighting to the death.

This was all on pen-and-paper, occasionally using a checkerboard with little makeshift figures put on it, and rolling dice to determine the outcome.

Jonny lost and his character died. 

He cried.

Oh, I guess I didn't build that up well enough: to be clear, Jonny was not at all some hyper-intellectual kid. It was actually kind of an odd game. The guy running the game was nerdy, but Jonny and Tommy -- friends in real life -- were actually tough kids. Jonny drank and smoked pot and had sex. (I was a couple years younger, and wasn't doing any of those things.) He had bleach blond hair and earrings. He even got a girl pregnant while in high school. (They gave the baby up for adoption.)

He was a really tough kid, from a tough background. He was from the poor part of town and was doing a bad job of trying to get out of it. He could kick your ass.

But when his fighter/wizard died, he cried like a baby.

It was mentally devastating for him; I dare say it hurt him more than the time he talked trash at some older kids and got his ass beaten into the ground, or any of the times he failed one of his classes, or whatever else. Tough kid, but losing this made-up character was mentally punishing to him.

--

Games don't do that any more; in fact, they aim not to do it. They try to fence off the world so that you can play in it, but without hurting yourself.

This makes sense: basically all strata of society play video games now.

No, really, who doesn't play games? Everyone I know in first-world countries have at least played Mario Kart, and often a lot more than that.

As the market for video games has grown, it's gone from people who want to be pushed to their intellectual limits to people who want to relax after work. They want to see some scenery, get some vicarious hero factor going, and not at all suffer or practice to excel.

Scenery was irrelevant for me; a bonus if it's there, but not at all necessary. Vicarious hero factor? I guess, sure, I was into that. But I wanted to know that I needed to really suffer and practice to excel.

This is what led me first to older games, and then to roguelikes.

4. Eating Chicken

I just read that chicken -- poultry -- eating chicken, you know? -- I just read that it used to be a luxury good.

How about that? Who would have thought? Who would have known?

I guess it's obvious in retrospect. Before refrigeration, everything perishable could easily be a luxury good. It's not like you can herd chickens around, either. So if you're not near a chicken farm, how could you get chicken? Well, you couldn't. Not affordably, anyways.

It was less than 100 years ago -- not long before the advent of video games, actually -- that chicken became affordable and common in most of the Western world.

Insights went off in my head upon reading that, insights about culture.

Through most of American history, parents haven't understood their children very well. With a few small exceptions, every generation of Americans have been wealthier and more prosperous than their parents.

This really took off at the end of World War II, and the confusion has been immense in all subsequent generations.

But it's perhaps understandable when you think about the chicken. If someone grew up very poor, in cramped and dirty housing, maybe without electricity and indoor plumbing -- this was the norm really not that long ago -- then getting your own clean house with electricity and toilets and showers must have seemed miraculously better.

If there's regularly chicken on the table -- or better yet, "two chickens in every pot" -- then you'd be well-satisfied. "I came from dirt and lived in squalor. My children live in a clean home with plumbing and electricity. Sometimes I was hungry. My children are never hungry; we regularly have chicken on the table. My education was spotty; my children have the finest education. I've done well."

Easy to understand, when you look at it like that.

But the children growing up with electricity, plumbing, and chicken -- they think nothing of it. It's the norm.

In fact, it's the norm for you. It's probably hard to get your mind around. Allow me to give you an example that might resonate better, then.

Probably the majority of people reading this, if they drink alcohol (I don't, but used to) -- probably you see champagne as a luxury drink.

Imagine then, a self-made couple who works really hard and sacrifice a lot to start a business and build it up. Imagine them going from normal middle class -- you know, normal American life -- into being very wealthy.

Imagine that the first time the couple have champagne together is after the first month that the family business makes $10,000. Then they regularly have champagne with new milestones -- at $20,000 per month, at $50,000 per month, after the first million-dollar in revenues year, after the first million-dollars-in-profit year.

Champagne would be very special. Having champagne for the first time at age 25, 28, 30, 35, something like that, only in celebration after an immense amount of toil, champagne would be extremely psychologically satisfying, rooted and tied to hard work and accomplishment.

But, like almost all people who get wealthy, eventually they would acclimate and be able to have champagne all the time. Maybe they're in their 40's or 50's now, and they've got children who are teenagers on the verge of becoming adults.

And the kids see the grown-ups having champagne, now, every Christmas, most birthdays, regularly celebrating milestones and eventful good happenings.

Champagne would be not-so-special for the children. The taste of champagne isn't the taste of victory over adversity, of the fruit of toil, of the final reaping of the harvest long-sown through years of deprivation and sacrifice.

No, champagne would just be normal.

And perhaps every generation is like this. Automobiles, travel on airplanes with jet engines, computers, the Internet -- these were miracles when we first saw them. But for younger people, it's passe. No big deal. It's not even, "Who cares?" -- rather, it's not even thought about.

It's strange for me, I'm only roughly 30 years old, and seeing teenagers now think nothing of the internet is just really odd. Thinking nothing of smartphones with 3G internet that gets beamed down to them. Thinking nothing of WiFi just being everywhere. It's like -- whoa, don't you realize how big of a deal this is?

Like... electricity or plumbing or cars or air travel or chicken?

Oh. I'm starting to get it.

--

I remember reading JR Tolkien's "The Hobbit" in Barcelona -- and being underwhelmed.

"Yeah, yeah, dwarves, a troll, a hobbit, a wizard, a dragon, magic stuff. Whatever, I've read this before."

Then I realized that Tolkien invented all that stuff.

Whoa.

--

I had to write all this introduction because otherwise I'll seem crazy when I praise 1998's Baldur's Gate.

It was legendary for its time -- but like commonplace chicken, electricity, and the internet -- it might seem quaint that I'm so enamored with it.

--

But let's try. Imagine, for a moment, that you're a teenaged version of me. It's the late 1990's, the new millennia will come shortly (or maybe it's already came).

Dell computers are the state-of-the-art. The internet is dialup and you don't feel it's painfully slow because you don't know any better. Actually, it's hard to get around. Google either doesn't exist yet or isn't commonly known.

At a friend's recommendation -- the one who got you into fantasy novels and Dungeons and Dragons, actually -- you get Baldur's Gate. It's on six CD's.

That's a big game. It's like -- wow, there's going to be a lot to do in this game.

So you insert the CD into your Dell computer and it's got this epic score of music, really rich and symphonic, and the graphics are crystal-clear and have this surreal life-likeness to it.

It's like -- wow, I'm really in for something special here.

This is before online game reviews or spoiler-sites and you don't read magazines. So you have no idea what's going to happen in the game. Really -- none at all. (I can't remember the last time I didn't have a vague idea of what was going to happen in a game before I started playing. But it was around this era.)

You fire it up, and you're in a little scholarly community called Candlekeep. Your adopted father tells you that something bad is going on and tells you to get your things together and you'll leave on a journey. He gives you some money and tells you to buy equipment.

In Candlekeep, the non-player characters in the game, they talk to you like they've known you for years. Some of them offer to teach you little things, others ask you to do a little errand for them.

This is all very normal and passe now, but at the time, it felt incredibly immersive.

Then, as you're wandering around and exploring, someone attacks you and tries to hurt you! Whoa, you're thrust right into the fire.

When you go outside and tell the guards, everyone is very concerned and tells you to hurry up and meet your adopted father.

There's this sense of worry and confusion, of a certain gravity. These have held up reasonably well over time, but the novelty of this has worn off -- after the immense success of Baldur's Gate, this became a very common set of storyline and beginning in games like this. Starting off in a gated community, wandering around, interacting with people from your youth, but there's a tension in the air and things going a little wrong. This is normal and commonplace in games now, but it was the first time I ever saw anything like it.

--

Most of the "twists" in video games are somewhat cliche and predictable. Oh, the "good mayor" of the city is actually the evil mastermind! Whoa, who could have guessed! 

Baldur's Gate is interesting because it hits you with a "twist" right away. You seem like you're about to go on this great journey. Your adopted father helps you get ready for travels, you say goodbye to the people at Candlekeep, and he starts briefing you on the situation. When nightfall hits, you hurry out of the little scholarly community.

Then, as you're walking, the evil antagonist -- a gigantic man in spiked black armor -- intercepts you with two very large ogre henchmen. Your adopted father tells you to run and an epic battle ensues. Your father is able to kill the two ogres, but falls in the end to Sarevok.

You ran. In the morning, you wake up after that nightmare of a night.

And you're alone in the wilderness for the first time in your life.

That's it. That's how the game starts. You don't have superpowers; you don't have any powers at all. You're almost useless.

An old friend from Candlekeep runs after you; she asks to accompany you and offers to help. Then, as you walk through the world, you encounter other travelers. The first you come across are obviously sneaky and untrustworthy, mercenaries looking for money. But they invite you to travel with them.

It is safer to travel with them. But they're obviously bad guys. So right away, you're in a dilemma. A group of four is safer than a group of two, and these look like world-weary and savvy veterans. But they're bad people. Do you let them join you or not?

It's kind of scary. It gets the point across about starting from nothing and improvising.

The game has no overarching plot or narrative that you're aware of and moving towards at this point; it's not clear what should happen next. Your adopted father, Gorion, he told you to head north to the Friendly Arm Inn to find some old friends of his should anything happen. On the way, you periodically get attacked -- the roads aren't safe and bandits are around, and you yourself have bounty hunters after you.

The game starts you off weak and largely useless. The world is dangerous. If you wander around aimlessly, you will be killed. Absolutely. And that was one of the joys of the game. And when you played it "hardcore," it was even more satisfying.

5. Hardcore Mode

Baldur's Gate suffers from the same flaw that almost every mainstream game suffers from: in order to not frustrate the player too much, it makes dying not-so-painful.

The game automatically saves every time you change a level, and by pressing "Q" on your keyboard, you could quick-save and reload from that point at any time. There was no penalty to doing so.

A lot of the fights in Baldur's Gate wind up being intricate puzzles to solve. For instance, there's a number of fights where there is a hostile party of four mercenaries out to kill you, of whom one will be extremely dangerous, and three will be not such a big deal. Often, the really dangerous enemy would be a spellcaster or archer behind a few fighter-types.

Like any other game with liberal checkpoints and being able to reload with no penalty when you die, you wouldn't actually have to solve the puzzles these fights presented. You could just charge in and hope to get lucky. Maybe you win; if you lose, reload and try again, maybe slightly differently.

When you play in a "Hardcore Mode" -- where death is permanent and you don't reload -- it became a detailed challenge.

Some games come with a hardcore mode built in -- Diablo II's "Ironman" mode is probably the most famous; death is permanent there.

Baldur's Gate didn't have those settings available, but I improvised and set those as rules for myself. No reloading. Death is permanent. No resurrecting party members at the temple if they died; they just had to be disbanded from the party. Thus, every encounter was rather leveraged.

And suddenly, you do things quite differently. If you have a party with some mix of rogues or rangers in it, you probably wait until night before a big fight. You probably send someone who has sneak or invisibility out to scout important areas before blindly charging in. In very dangerous areas, maybe you don't move at all without summoned monsters in front of your party to absorb the first wave of damage.

At the start of Baldur's Gate, your main character is incredibly weak and useless. A single arrow from a bandit who just appears on the edge of your vision can kill your character. This doesn't matter if you quick-save after every battle, which is what most people do. It matters a lot if you take all results as permanent and are trying to win.

Sometimes, like the fight at the top of the Iron Throne Building, you have to go stock up on an immense amount of materials and supplies to beat it. The top of the Iron Throne is full of hostile rogues and spellcasters; quite nasty ones too. Really, the only way to be reasonably assured of beating it is coming in with a lot of explosives which can be purchased. Your casters can obviously blow stuff up on their own, but non-caster classes suffer up there -- in "Hardcore Mode," that's a pretty late fight in the game, and so you take the time to carefully prepare (dying means starting over from the beginning, if you keep playing that game) and so you get all your defenses in line, get some escapes ready, and have every person have some opening moves that will blow up basically the entire room full of powerful (but physically weak) assailants.

The nature of a Hardcore Mode-type no-reload all-results-permanent type game is radically different. The risk/reward calculus is different. In a normal game, you'll have at least a few hundred encounters. If you have a 1% chance of dying -- a 99% chance of winning! -- you won't make it through the game in one piece.

In my opinion, this single shift -- towards "Hardcore Mode" where everything counts, no re-do’s, death is permanent -- is what took my video-game playing habit from a mostly useless entertainment indulgence into something that actually starts to produce useful life lessons. 

Life, after all, life itself is run in "Hardcore Mode" -- there's no reload button if you screw up a job interview, or get mugged in a dangerous foreign country, or whatever other thing might happen in your adventures.

By playing in Hardcore Mode, games became about thinking, strategy, preparation, balancing the tradeoffs between safety and resource usage (should I use the potion now to guarantee I win this one? will I need it later?); it requires creativity and patience.

An additional underrated bonus is you'll usually do something stupid and get yourself killed when you're tired, so for savvy players, it de facto sets a "it's better to turn the game off now..." time. 

6. Not Twitchy

As I got older, I slowed down from playing video games; eventually, I mostly stopped.

But before ceasing, I became almost obsessed with finding certain types of very difficult games.

I wasn't looking for "twitchy" games where you needed to have fast reflexes. I was very, very good at the shooters Goldeneye 007 and Perfect Dark on the Nintendo 64 -- 15 years ago. How was I good? I knew all the maps, perfectly. I knew where all the guns, ammunition, and body armor would spawn. I knew which way to turn around a corner and what the room inside would look like. I knew roughly how many shots from each gun it would take to take someone down in multiplayer, and I knew roughly how accurate each gun was.

I think shooters are great, especially team-based shooters like Counterstrike or SOCOM. At a high level, they can teach kids communication and coordination skills and strategy. 

But they lose their luster as a player gets older and can't or won't devote significant time to them. The background knowledge to be assimilated is very game-specific and non-transferable. And then, it takes a lot of time to fine-tune your muscle memory so you can enter commands into your controller fast enough to be effective.

For the same reason, I preferred turn-based strategy games (like Civilization IV) to real-time strategy games (Starcraft). In a turn-based game, you could make up for a lack of knowledge about the game itself with some critical thinking and logic.

With a real-time game, you get punished repeatedly for your lack of knowledge. To be sure, in all games, knowing more about a game helps more than knowing it less, and sometimes an ability that looks useless turns out to actually be pretty good. But, definitely, a logical person willing to sit and think patiently does better at games they don't know and play irregularly if those games aren't real-time. 

That defined my search space for games pretty well: very difficult, and gave plenty of time to sit and think on courses of action.

There was one more thing I wanted: a relatively open world, where I had flexibility to build and advance how I wanted.

A lot of games have clearly defined "best ways to play them" -- for instance, many Japanese-style RPGs have obvious best ways to develop characters to make them strong. The game might be tough and offer difficult challenges, but it doesn't offer the opportunity for creativity and experimentation.

My search for this game -- immensely difficult, many and flexible options for how to advance and develop and play, an open world, and not-real-time -- this led me back further in time from 1998's Baldur's Gate to 1992's Darklands.

7. Medieval Germany

As you go back further in time, games get harder. Darklands is very difficult.

Among people who play rare, old, classical games, Darklands consistently rates as one of the best. 

It also has an incredibly novel premise: the game is set in the Middle Ages in the Holy Roman Empire. The basic premise is that every commonly believed superstition of the era is actually true. 

There are gargoyles, dragons, gnomes, witches. The Knights Templar are evil and satanic. Meanwhile, your party is Christian and can call on saints to perform miracles, according to what the saint is the patron of. Saints can save you from blizzards and floods, can turn back satanic enemies, can make the sky go bright in the middle of the night, can help you pass rivers, can protect you from arrows or fire, and so on.

But outside of these supernatural elements, the game also just did a fine job of recreating Medieval Germany. There's raubritters -- robber knights -- in strongholds that harass shipping and extract "tolls" for passing through their lands. Cities obviously don't like this, and once you either build local reputation or Germany-wide fame, they'll pay you to go take them out.

You can fight raubritters by besieging their castle, by trying to sneak in during the night and set it on fire, by asking to be invited inside cordially and then demanding a surrender, or you could ask to spend the night and then sneak out of your room to confront the 'britter without his guards around.

There's a host of mundane trade to do, and little errands to run. The game starts with an interesting very sandbox-y premise: your party bands together to go "look for fame and riches." That's it. No plot. Depending on how you play, it would be very easy to play the game for years without your characters even coming across the main plot at all, especially if you stick to major cities.

Meanwhile, you can study at local guilds, trade items, study at the university, make donations to the church (money or artifacts) to increase your standing with the church, rest in inns, or even just set up to live in a city for weeks at a time (or longer) working on your trade to make money.

The game is also brutally unforgiving. Parts of the map flood or get covered in blizzards -- if you have no remedies for this (no one with good wilderness survival skills and no knowledge of saints that can help with the situation), your party members will suffer permanent effects of frostbite, or die.

Like Baldur's Gate a half-decade later, Darklands is liberal about letting you save and reload. Like Baldur's Gate, if you flip into "Hardcore Mode" (where you accept every outcome and don't reload from saves at all), the game becomes infinitely more interesting and thought-provoking.

You can make your own party in Darklands through its elaborate character creation system, or you can play an (okay but not great) default party.

I took the default party out in one game and had played it pretty far along when I was caught in a series of disasters in a row. Eventually, the party wound up fighting a lot of bears, and 3/4ths of the party was killed, with only the toughest fighter surviving the battle with only a single point or health or two; the others were permanently killed.

The one fighter rested up and healed a bit, and then carefully limped back to the nearest city, and recruited a new party.

The tough fighter is pretty dumb: he doesn't have good knowledge of religion, alchemy, communication, survival, or craft skills. He's just a tough, dumb fighter.

So the new party wound up with a bunch of green 20-year-olds with this 45-year-old tough fighter. Adventuring consisted of the younger more diversely talented members going around building up their skills and negotiating and supporting the tough fighter, who took the primary role in all battles while the others built up (starting with bow and arrow at first, since to enter close combat would've been dangerous).

This is the kind of emergent result that only happens in a no-reload game. If you were reloading bad outcomes, no way you let 3/4ths of your established party die and limp your one survivor to the city.

But, the way Darklands works, it's more advantageous to continue than to reset, even though you're almost starting from scratch. The party, with its continuity from that one fighter, still has a good reputation in a number of cities, still has some fame, still has some decent money. So this one guy gets a new group together and they out, and they were actually a pretty successful group.

Darklands is almost a perfect game for its era; it's incredibly deep and they get most of the details right. The biggest problem is that, of the dozens of skills in the game, some are used immensely (Knowledge-Wilderness is critical) and others not at all (Riding horses is used only a couple times), and it's not clear at all from the start which are which.

Even with that, Darklands, with its punishing difficulty, was my last step on the way to the most punishing games of all -- roguelikes.

8. One False Move...

The pace of innovation in video games has slowed down. It's still breathtakingly fast, but there are now established genres, conventions, and franchises that dominate the landscape of games.

From around the year 2005 and earlier, for every five years you go back in time, you're dealing with a radically different type of game. In roughly five year increments, the whole nature of games would radically evolve.

If Baldur's Gate, from 1998, looks like a current-day Ferrari -- then Darklands from '92 looks like a Model-T.

1987's Nethack, then, might be a horse and buggy.

Or so it appears on the surface.

Under the surface, Darklands is a much deeper game with more interesting and varied mechanics than Baldur's Gate, and Nethack has the most interesting set of mechanics and interactions of them all.

But Nethack is really hard to get into.

It's the first roguelike we've talked about.

A roguelike is named after the first in its genre -- "Rogue" -- which came from the 1980's. 

Roguelikes typically have three things in common: first, there's permadeath -- if you die once, you're dead. This is enforced by the game auto-saving when you die. (You could get around it if you really wanted to, but it seems to defeat the point of playing this type of game.)

Second, there's "procedural generation" for large parts of the game -- that means, every time you play it, it's different. Shops have random selections of inventory, with random variables and modifiers. Monsters are randomly generated within certain bands of level and difficulty in certain level ranges, according to probability tables. Even level layouts are different each time you play. 

Finally, roguelikes are typically really, really hard.

To even get into roguelikes, you have to take on a steep learning curve. Typically, you character is represented by the '@' sign. Monsters will be represented by one letter: a 'k' is a Kobold, a 'd' is a dog, a 'V' is a Vampire, and so on. If you move your cursor over the enemy, it'll give you a longer description of what it is.

You enter all commands by typing and keypad; in older roguelikes, you don't use the mouse at all. (Newer ones often add a graphical interface on top for convenience and prettiness.)

Finally, the games have a rather finicky about inputting commands and usage. It's (unintuitively) the letter 'q' (quaff) to drink a potion, not 'd' which makes you go down.

The board itself is sparse: all text. The symbols that represent things on the map, enemies, shopkeepers, items, and so on — you have to learn what they mean by playing, and the learning curve is difficult. Again, a single false move and your character is dead forever.

Often in roguelikes, you need to also manage food (run out of food and die), and avoid a variety of monsters that can instant-kill you. There's enemies that can turn you to stone in a single move. If you see one, obviously, run.

Roguelikes became the pinnacle of what I was looking for out of video games: incredibly difficult, and calling for incredible flexibility and creativity. After you've played Baldur's Gate a few times, you know how to stop by and take out Mulahey en route to Nashkel, to get his excellent electrical hammer and collect the bounty on him. In a roguelike in the vein of Nethack, the levels are laid out differently every time, you wind up with different gear every time, and you wind up facing different threats every time. You need to be able to improvise, be flexible, and work with the situation you're facing.

==============
Section II. Lessons
==============

II 1. A Question of Leisure

I remember a series of nursery rhymes from when I was a young boy.

If my memory serves me, one of them went like this --

The bear went over the mountain 
The bear went over the mountain 
The bear went over the mountain 

To see what he could see
 To see what he could see 
To see what he could see 

But all that he could see 
Was

The other side of the mountain
 The other side of the mountain
 The other side of the mountain

Then there is, of course, the famous joke about the chicken --

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road? 
A: To get to the other side.

And then there's the famous book by John Kabat Zinn, "Wherever You Go, There You Are."

(It's too bad, the title ruins the ending and gives the whole thing away.)

It would be an eminently sensible thing to ask, "Wait, why, Mr. Marshall, do you look to find and play exceedingly difficult computer games? And why do you take computer games of lesser difficulty and impose arbitrary conventions and your own rules on them which are designed simply to make the game more difficult and less forgiving?"

Entirely fair questions.

I could list you a set of benefits of doing so; in fact, I'll share many of those benefits momentarily, and the mental models gained and lessons learned and such. 

But any such list would be necessarily incomplete. A better reply would be, simply:

"Why do anything?"

We could broadly separate out the reasons for doing things into (1) means and (2) ends.

Most people who work for money, do so not purely for love of money itself, but for what money can buy. (I get that we're not exactly in massively innovative philosophical territory here.)

We could nail down what people's final values are, their terminal values, the thing they just throw their hands up in the air and say "That matters because it just does" and don't explain any more.

I have a slightly more rigorous system of ethics and what I believe is right and wrong, but alas, I'm not superhuman. I can't write, do commercial work, do creative work, do nonprofit work, teach, speak, prepare, and otherwise get stuff done all the time. (I've sometimes tried; the result of nonstop work is burnout.)

So, I take leisure. Grudgingly. Frankly, I think leisure is greatly overrated. I like producing things and making the world a better place. But when I don't sleep, I get fatigued; if I don't eat for a few days in a row, my body and mind start to slow down; the effects of not drinking water kick in sooner, and so on.

...and if I don't take leisure and take a break at all, my mind doesn't compile and recharge, and eventually I'm grinding away through life, ineffectively, uninspired, and not very productive.

So, I take rests and breaks. I've come around entirely on the concept of naps and try to nap daily; the boost after even a short nap is roughly a 10x boost in creativity and perhaps a 2x boost in work speed as opposed to just powering through the mid-day lull.

Likewise, I read a lot, primarily history, and I study a lot of topics with a strong amateur's interest.

Oh and, sometimes, more rare these days, I play games.

I always figured that rest, breaks, and leisure are necessary to some extent, just like sleeping, eating, and drinking water are necessary.

I also figured it's better to spend that type of leisure doing things that'll build my strength, help me recover and recharge, and make me smarter and better going forwards.

Computer games still get a relatively bad rap with people over 40; these folk get worried if their kids are playing games too heavily, but I ask if they'd be equally worried at heavy television watching... if so, that's fine, too much media can easily be escapism. But games, games always seem to me to be much more interactive and immersive than most consumption activities. The television, you sit there and rot in front of it. You don't have to do really any work, mentally or physically. Your reflexes, judgment, decisionmaking are not activated at all. You're not really creating any experience there; you're on your butt, doing nothing, just being force-fed other people's conceptions of the world and what you should pay attention to.

Whereas, a good game seems to offer much more than that. A difficult enough game becomes a relatively low-stakes, low-pressure, no-identity-invested way to explore and test different ideas and strategies, to see how well you can keep composure on the fly when things are going wrong, to otherwise look to improve and perfect yourself -- and to recharge and take leisure in the process.

Why do I play games at times? Because I get more work done and build the world better than if I work nonstop when I take leisure, and playing difficult games is one of the better ways to take leisure while building my mind.

II 2. "This Isn't Quake" -- On Keeping One's Composure

If you haven't played a roguelike game before, an important point: time doesn't pass until you do something.

It's like a Chess board with no timer. You can sit and think very deeply about the problem at hand. 

When you take your turn -- attacking the nearest enemy, casting a spell, using an item, moving in a direction, using a special ability -- all the enemies on the level take their turn simultaneously.

You can be nearly dead, having only a single point of health left, and you can sit and really carefully think through the situation. You can ask yourself, "Ok, is the enemy almost dead? Should I blast it with a wand? What's the standing with my god -- would praying be a good idea? Can I use some ability to make it impossible to attack me? What are the odds the next attack hits or misses -- maybe I could cast invisibility, so that if the attack misses, I can then run away? But if the next attack hits, I die. Hmm. I have an unidentified potion -- I could either drink it or throw it at the enemy; what the odds that something good happens if I do either? My situation is pretty desperate here, what's the best way to give myself a chance to survive?"

Again, in a typical roguelike, a single death and you're dead. No saving, no reloading. 

One of the chief ways people die is via panic. Not "panic" cast on your character like blindness or silence or getting frozen. No, I mean, panic as a player.

The best advice I ever read about Nethack went something like this: "Remember that this game isn't Quake."

(Quake, of course, being the famous hyper-fast-paced shooter.)

You get no points for playing fast. Actually, you're likely to die if you play fast. Playing fast means making bad decisions.

But here's the thing: when things start going wrong, people naturally start to panic. While there's no real stakes in a video game, not like real life, it feels a bit like there's some stakes when you're 5 hours into playing a character that's started promising and it seems like you've got a chance to win the game. Then, all of a sudden, you run into a whole pack of nasty enemies, and you're low on health and almost surrounded.

What do you do?

Most people start mashing commands on the keyboard, doing things frantically, trying to run or rapidly attack the biggest nastiest enemy nearby, or all manner of stupidity.

By the time they come to their senses, they might be out of options. It might be "mate in 6" as they say in Chess; you've already lost the game and there's nothing you can do; it's all over but the pain.

But, like Chess, you don't get rewarded for playing faster. When a bad situation hits, randomly mashing the keyboard does you nothing except burns turns.

If you've got 40 life and a nasty creature is  hitting you for 10 damage per turn, you've got (at least) four actions before you're dead. If you rapidly mash attack!, attack!, attack! -- you've got one turn left. That might just be too late.

Roguelikes, again, punish you for blunders. In my opinion, thus, they can actually serve as reasonably good training for emotional management and keeping your composure.

It won't make any sense if you haven't played a game on hardcore mode or played a roguelike. I would expect someone who hasn't ever done it to not quite get what I'm saying. The feeling of a character about to die, who won't be able to get back up, the character gone forever; this is a significantly intense feeling. 

But at the same time, it is just a game, and doesn't really matter.

In some ways, thus, it's a perfect training ground for dealing with panic. There's seemingly real consequences and it's really frustrating. You've maybe invested hours getting where you're at. You might even "like" your character or feel excited about the prospect of winning with them.

And then, all hell breaks loose.

Your natural inclination, if you're like most people, is to speed up, play faster, start making a compounding series of mistakes and errors, and wind up with your guy dead.

Over many repetitions of this fundamental error, you learn to stop doing that. You learn to force yourself to slow down, breathe, think when things are tough. Maybe you even realize that if you get ambushed by some intense skeleton warrior that you don't need to do anything right now; you could go make a coffee, have a snack, do some pushups, wash your face, and then come back and think about it clearly.

Many dangerous situations in these games are survivable -- if you keep your composure. But if you let your panic take over and start spinning out of control, you dig yourself into a hole that eventually gets filled over with dirt on top of you.

Does this transfer to real life? I believe it has to some extent for me.

The lesson is this --

Panic: it's almost never the right answer.

II 3. Staying Out of Messes in the First Place

You know what's better than keeping your composure when you're in a hell of a mess?

Not getting into a hell of a mess in the first place.

We could speak about planning and preparation -- in fact, we will speak about planning and preparation. But not yet.

Before that, let's agree with something obvious, and analyze why people don't do the obvious thing.

The blindingly obvious statement is this: you want to stay out of situations where very bad things can happen to you. 

Well, that's obvious.

It's not particularly insightful.

Likely, the statement doesn't even register when you read it.

"You want to stay out of situations where very bad things can happen to you."

Duh.

I mean, who wants to be in situations where very bad things can happen?

Nobody. Nobody wants that.

Duh.

And yet...

Let's start with the video game metaphor first.

You're playing Tales of Maj'Eyal. If you die once, you're dead.

You're a berserker. There's different ways to build a berserker, but you've got for a fragile high-damage build: you've taken some basic defenses, but you've put almost all your points and specialties into speed and damage. 

You're in a dungeon and you descend a level. Right by the staircase -- unusually -- are a group of 12 tough enemies, including one boss.

Maybe that's still not a problem. You've got answers here: you turn on Blinding Speed, Precise Strikes, a Shield Rune, and then you unload with your highest damage attacks and use Warcry.

You kill four of the enemies.

Your shield gets broken by damage, the speed and accuracy boosts are starting to wear off. You use Regeneration; now you'll be healing.

Here's the thing: you're looking pretty good. Four enemies are down. A few of the rest are wounded. You'll be able to definitely kill a few more of them without any problems.

But you've used all your resources, powerups, defenses, and threats.

If you stay in that battle without running and don't do anything novel, maybe you'll survive it. But probably not. A single unlucky stun, blindness, confusion, or variety of other effects could take you out.

You've used your shielding and healing. You've used your best abilities to shell damage. You now (1) take more damage, (2) do much less damage, (3) are less accurate, (4) are slower, (5) can't heal when you take damage.

On the one hand, your character looks in good shape -- you just took out four of the enemies, another 3 or 4 are about to hit the deck and are wounded. You're in almost full health. It looks like you're in full control.

You're not. You're on the verge. You just don't see it.

When I write it out clearly, it's really obvious to see what you should do: run back upstairs, get away, and let all of your abilities cool down. In 50 turns or so, you can come back and shred the remainder of the enemies.

But it looks like you're fine. That's the thing. Your health bar is full, enemies have been dying, the others near you are wounded. But if you do the math and run it out, you're now at your worst part since the battle started, and it's less than half over. You're fine; you can just press "Up" right now and in one move you'll be in total safety.

The wounded enemies might heal up, but it doesn't matter. When you came in, you were facing 12. Unloading your attacks and defenses got you down to 8 enemies alive, with 4 of them wounded. When you go back and do another volley, they'll go down to 4 alive, all of them wounded. It'll be easy to wrap it up after healing up.

And to be clear, if you don't retreat, you've got a reasonably good chance of surviving. Maybe it's over 90%. But that means a 1 in 10 chance of dying, and one death is game over. Why accept a 1 in 10 shot of losing the game, right there, with nothing to be gained? It will literally take you 30 seconds of real world time, max, to retreat and re-prepare.

That's how people get wrecked in these games. There's other ways, yes. Sometimes you walk into a room and an opponent is generated with the exact perfect mix of threats to just wreck you. Sometimes you can even get one-shot killed when you first see an enemy, if you're really unlucky.

But these are rarities if you're preparing and building smart. No, most deaths happen because of hanging around. At the start of a battle, you have tons of options. After you've spent all those options, you might still have a full health bar, but you're actually in a very precarious position. Even at 100% health, you might be more than halfway to being dead.

Again,

"You want to stay out of situations where very bad things can happen to you."

Duh.

But most people don't.

Why?

I don't know. I can speculate, but I don't know.

To be clear, I'm not talking about games here.

Take real life.

"You want to stay out of situations where very bad things can happen to you."

I'm not talking about avoiding getting mugged or getting in a bar fight in real life. I'm talking much more mundane things, like blowing a huge opportunity, or failing to win a contract, or screwing up your studies.

What many people seem to do with their lives is exactly what the berserker who hangs around downstairs and gets killed do: they let themselves get into a situation where they don't have options, and thus they're vulnerable to chance and luck.

I remember one university class I took, I think the title was Management Information Systems. The subject matter was boring and I already knew most of it, but the professor was cool and had a great personality, so it just kind of felt like I was hanging out when I was in that class.

One little eccentricity about the class is that the "Final Project" wasn't necessarily due the final week of class -- instead, one of each of the students would present their "Final Project" each week to the class. The professor gave you like 15 minutes to teach the class something.

When he said that we'd get to fill in the date we were to present, I darted up to the lectern and claimed -- Week Two of class.

I did it. It went fine. And I never had to think about it again.

I'm not always able to follow this policy, but it's something I try really hard to do: if a project doesn't have an enduring impact, EG, if higher quality isn't worth much, I try to get it done as quickly as possible.

I think it's uncontroversial to say that just about every human has emergencies and things that go wrong in their life. Car accidents happens. Deaths-in-the-family happen. Serious illnesses happen. Sometimes even wars and riots start.

Now, it's entirely understandable if you can't get a Final Project in university done if you're deep in grief, or recovering in the hospital, or if your flight back to your university gets canceled because flights are grounded due to some crazy event.

On the one hand, it's totally reasonable.

On the other hand, I think it's useful to think that's my own damn fault when you leave yourself in situations where luck can affect you.

I'm not saying assign any blame to anyone else. Not at all. Be compassionate, of course. But you, yourself, the individual -- it's easy to get some mix of cocky and lazy. If you normally do your final paper for a class in the last 48 hours in a caffeine-fueled nonstop work frenzy... then why not just do that the weekend after it's assigned?

I know, I know. Easier said than done. But if you're leaving things to the last minute, sooner or later that broken ankle, that family emergency, that massive blizzard is going to catch up with you.

Many universities are understanding, but the professional world is far less so, especially if you're wanting to be a top performer. 

I went to London to go to a wedding. I stayed with Josef Wasinski. My good friend and oft-collaborator Kai Zau came; he was staying there.

The first night in town, we broke open the board game Puerto Rico. If you're never played, it's terrific fun: it's one of those games where you can enjoy it at all levels of the skill curve. It's got incredibly deep mechanics when you study them, but on the surface it's simple. You can play an enjoyable round the first time you play, and people of different skill levels can have a good game together.

Josef played, I played, two of Josef's roommates played -- Kai didn't play.

Kai was doing his consulting work.

He had something like five more days to get it done, but, no, he didn't play Puerto Rico with us. And to be clear, he quite likes the game and plays it quite well.

This memory stuck with me. It seemed alien to me. Why not play?

I asked Kai and he said, in his typical Kai-like way, "I wanted to get it done, and then I wouldn't have to worry about anything while I was in London."

See, by passing on the board game that he likes, Kai guarantees he can seize future opportunities and protects himself from downside. There's no way he'll let his long-term excellent client down. And actually, sure enough, three of those remaining five days became full-on days with long discussions and events and things, and Kai could partake fully without running himself into the ground.

This isn't how most people do things. Most people get their taxes in at the last minute, get their papers in at the last minute, choose immediate leisure and delay over completing work projects early... and they choose not to retreat their berserker back up the stairs.

Of course, attacking is more fun than retreating, and playing board games is often more fun than doing routine contracting work, but here's the thing: there's no deprivation there.

The biggest argument against this is deprivation. But it's false. Sooner or later, you'll need to heal your berserker. Clicking "Up" and then healing and going back "Down" just adds an up and a down; you've healed right away instead of waiting for the battle to end. Likewise, Kai got just as much leisure and socializing by getting his work done first.

No, really, I think letting yourself come into the grasp of luck is due to some mix of being cocky and lazy. "Oh, I can get away with it."

Many you can. Sometimes. Then you get killed when an emergency hits and you've got no time to fix it.

"You want to stay out of situations where very bad things can happen to you." 

I know that's obvious. But it takes some training to actually live it.

II 4. True Objectives

Being cocky and/or lazy can get you killed. That's true.

And yeah, it's dangerous to put yourself in the grasp of luck. When you burn your resources and flexibility, a bad event can sink you.

True enough. All true stuff. You should stop making those mistakes.

But let's dig a little deeper into decisionmaking. 

Decisionmaking is a funny thing.

Decisionmaking is like that acquaintance of your other friend that stops by during lunch, has a few things, and then "has to go" quickly and is gone. The check comes; who will pay it? "Oh, Jimmy didn't pay for his cornbread and hot chocolate... I guess we'll all have to throw in."

It's not so much that the $5.50 plus tax and tip to cover Jimmy's cornbread'n'chocolate is so offensive. It's not the end of the world, especially split a few ways by the remaining revelers.

The aggravating thing isn't that Jimmy does that, either. He's Jimmy; of course that's what he does. It's like being aggravated at the scorpion for being the scorpion.

And heck, you can't even really get aggravated at the kind-hearted person who invited Jimmy. They're a good person, probably. They offer to cover all of Jimmy's nonsense. ("He's my friend, after all." The remainder of the group nobly refuses this self-sacrifice.)

No, the person you get aggravated when Jimmy pulls his shenanigans is yourself, because how did this just happen?

You should have caught it. "Hey, Jimmy, throw some cash down."

But you didn't.

Decisionmaking is a lot like Jimmy. Fun and simple on the surface, seemingly easy to comprehend, but gone in a flash if you're not paying attention.

The topic of decisionmaking is elusively difficult to discuss. It's easy to come up with excellent actions and decisions when you're calm, composed, and far away from chaos. You get in the battle; poof, good judgment goes the way of Jimmy. And you're left holding the bill.

Much of everything generally teachable comes down to decisionmaking. You assess the landscape, think through options, make a decision, follow through on it.

This is trivially easy to discuss, but harder to follow through on.

Hardest of all is keeping one's true objective in mind.

Playing Tales of Maj'Eyal, I'd often feel a compulsion to kill every enemy and clear out every area. You got experience points for doing so, and you got items which might be useful or otherwise could be sold for money.

Many times I'd come across an enemy that was a bad matchup to fight -- one with nasty abilities that I had poor defenses against and not many options to use -- and yet I'd stupidly power on into the battle, ending with my guy getting killed.

It's hard to remember that there is very little utility in killing almost any enemy in TOME. There are a few that are required to be defeated by the storyline; sooner or later, you'll have to defeat them.

But with most, it's not so. You can go around them. You can retreat, get better gear to counter the threat, train and get stronger, and then come back later. 

Of course, we rarely do this. We get caught up in beating a particular enemy instead of winning the game.

--

TOME is enjoyable in that it's largely non-linear. Right away, you have access to about half the game world. You start at Level One in a starter dungeon, but you could get up and go to the very nasty Daikara Mountains immediately, if you were feeling suicidal.

Again, like most roguelikes, TOME has procedural generation. You get random elite enemies mixed in with the normal ones. Sometimes an area that's normally rather safe and harmless has something very nasty and dangerous in it. You could, of course, run and come back later. You should do that. You're under no compulsion to finish the area you're currently in, and there's usually no benefit to doing so.

But, how often do we forget to keep objectives in mind? Most of the time.

What's that expression? "When you're knee deep in alligators, it's easy to forget you wanted to clear the swamp" -- it's something like that.

The metaphor is apt for life, of course. How often do people get in stupid petty political battles at work that doesn't result in them building the company's success, doing work they're proud of, or advancing their career? Too often. How often does a couple in a relationship get into domestic strife for no good reason at all? Too often. How often do parents get battles of will with their children over trivialities, turning what could be a non-issue into a source of discord?

... too, too often.

We can easily lash out at things when we get upset, trying to take out our internal frustrations on the world.

This is rarely productive.

And of course, perfectionism is also failing to keep true objectives in mind.

So there you are, you're in the Kor'pul, and a tough unique vampire spawns who does heavy blight and darkness damage, has high speed, has spellcasting that renders mental effects that you have no way to clear off.

What should you do? Run, and forget about Kor'pul for about 10 levels. Clear out the forests, lakes, the random missions that spawn as you walk across the map. if you find blight resistance, darkness resistance, or wild infusions that heal mental effects, hold on to them. Then come back, well-equipped, and pound the vampire into the ground.

How often am I able to take my own advice here?

... not as often as I'd like. It's too easy to get fixated on clearing a dungeon or fighting with one enemy, and much harder to get one's mind fixed on the true objective -- winning.

II 5. No Heroism

"In war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory." -- Sun Tzu's Art of War

It is December. The year will end in three-and-half weeks.

I completed a yearlong consulting assignment working with the CEO of a small international technology company on the rise. We had a good year, the most notable effects being greatly increased revenues, greatly increased efficiency in the sales process by having tougher qualifying standards before pursuing a sale, and a massive reduction in the age of accounts receivable. 

He asked me about the parameters of working together again for another year, wanting to sign me to a one-year agreement.

This is flattering, and I very much like and admire him and his company, and we work well together. 

On the other hand, I intentionally try to limit my consulting hours to 20 per week at a maximum so that I can complete my nonprofit and creative work. As such, I'm regularly turning down assignments. I'm not in a hurry to sign new or repeat business, even from a fantastic client who is also a great guy.

The great irony of me intentionally limiting my hours and clients is that I don't make much less money, if at all. By being very selective and not particularly caring if I get any particular piece of work (I turn good assignments multiple times per year) -- ironically, due to that, I command much higher rates than I would if I wanted every assignment, where I'd have to bid more conservatively or be willing to take terms that have a lot more hassle in them. (I never take paid-on-completion and never guarantee a minimum set of hours or face-time; just focus on results. Both are life-changingly nice terms.)

Over the last year, I've done some good work, met a lot of people, and my general prestige and credibility has risen quite a lot. The client I worked with, he made a lot of money as a direct result of working with me, directly attributable. The time-savings (I net-eliminated more wasteful time than it took to work with me) and the improved cashflow and less defaults on receivables (was: somewhat high; now: low) -- this is just icing on the cake.

So, I could have asked for more money for this year. I did, in fact, ask for more money. But not a lot more.

No, the biggest thing I negotiated for was changing the format of our regular calls. We try to speak roughly weekly, for roughly an hour, so we wind up with something like 40-70 calls over the year.

On far too many of these calls, we would immediately open the call with what's on fire and that’s currently a serious problem.

For instance, very often, we'd have a situation like this:

*Broken prospect: This prospective client really wanted to buy three weeks ago, we got a proposal in slightly late, something went wrong and fubar on the followup, it got postponed once until yesterday, and then the meeting to discuss the proposal yesterday got pushed back "another two months, because things are so crazy right now."

However, we'd often simultaneously have a very good client who bought who is ending the first installment -- with no plan to take advantage of that for referrals, testimonials, case studies, and expanding our role in their organization.

Meanwhile, we'd also often have a brand new prospect who is very excited -- who is getting postponed while we fight fires.

While I wouldn't normally write quite like this -- this CEO and I have a very trusting and frank relationship -- this was actually a section in the proposal I wrote for 2015:

"Suggested Prioritization Shift During Calls

As per the last call, Marshall recommends that the majority of calls intentionally focus on mildly upstream opportunities that have the greatest chance to be won without heroic effort, followed by discussions on how to systematize/processize whatever actions we manually discovered as valuable.

Marshall would recommend that, on an hour call, we have a “hard stop” 30-40 minutes in at most, where we begin shifting to systems-building, procedures-writing, etc, to build up the Operations Manual of the company. (This will likely be painful at first, and require some adjustment.)

Marshall suggests intentionally consciously de-prioritizing low-percentage “stuff on fire” whenever there are high-percentage undamaged upstream opportunities, until those opportunities are complete and the lessons of them are externalized into business materials (for a staff member later to take over, or even for [CEO] to use just refreshing himself and continuing his own development)."

Please hone in on this line:

"...Marshall recommends that the majority of calls intentionally focus on mildly upstream opportunities that have the greatest chance to be won without heroic effort..."

Without heroic effort.

This is actually a surprisingly difficult thing to understand.

Due to human nature, we tend to spend more time on the wars and conflicts that are epic in scope and disastrous for one side. We spend much less time focusing on where ugly things could have happened, but were prevented.

Unsurprisingly, I think Roguelikes are a good teacher of this.

In Tales of Maj'Eyal, there's a variety of types of damage: fire, cold, acid, electricity, physical, arcane, temporal, psionic, blight, nature, etc.

In many regions, the most dangerous enemies all use one type of damage. In the standard map of the Daikara Mountains, for instance, there's frost giants that do heavy cold damage, and then a few enemies also have lightning attacks.

Physical damage you take almost everywhere and guard against it through armor, dodging, and hit points. But the remaining elements can be either trivial to handle or extremely dangerous depending on how well you prepared upstream.

By the time you're ready to go crash the Daikara Mountains, you've probably come across literally hundreds of items. If you keep some rings, an amulet, a helmet, and perhaps another piece of armor with cold resistance, you might be able to achieve 40% cold resist. 

If you've built your character with some generic resistances or found a weapon that's anti-cold, you might get to 70% resistance to cold.

When you do, you basically just waltz through Daikara. Actually, your biggest risk when you have great upstream defenses is that you get yourself killed by being lazy.

If you need to play it heroically and you're dropping down under 50% of your health more than once or twice in clearing a whole area, you're playing "heroically" -- and doing something drastically wrong. 

Sooner or later, you might find yourself forced to tackle a zone you're poorly equipped for. But the vast majority of the time, you want to accumulate the gear, resistances, and abilities to make walking through the area a breeze. If you're barely surviving "heroic" battles, you're not playing heroically -- you're playing stupidly. 

Sun Tzu can wrap this up: "What the ancients called a clever fighter is one who not only wins, but excels in winning with ease."

Section III.

III 1 Fixed Rules

I was having tea with a professor-friend of mine and on my way to play a round of Puerto Rico with some smart people an hour later.  It's a lovely board game; I invited him to play.

He gave this sort of professorial chuckle -- (yes, professors do this type of thing in their private lives, too) -- and declined.

I thought he would like Puerto Rico. It's a great game. And we had a really good crowd to play it.

But no, he made a joking remark along the lines of: "I try not to socialize in places where there's closed rules, even though it appeals more to nerds... board games and video games, they're ways to avoid unscripted parts of life. Regular people just go out dancing, nerds go to do very precise things like line dancing. I'd rather go to an art exhibit than play a board game."

Do note that I'm paraphrasing; it wasn’t said that harshly. The issue was this: a lot of the work of his life has been very un-spontaneous and scripted. He saw many friends and colleagues of his shy away and pull back from unscripted spontaneous interactions, and get gradually more uncomfortable with them, retreating to fixed and clear rules for how to interact in order to feel safer.

There is, in fairness, something of a point to that. He thinks the fixed ruleset of games is a disadvantage.

I would disagree. I would say,

Au contraire, mon ami. The limited ruleset is the point. 

Reality is unfathomably large. And paradoxically, as society resolves uncertainties and great mysteries, it becomes more impossible for an individual to truly understand the corpus of known knowledge. 

I study just about everything, and -- pardon me for the cliche -- the more I learn, the more I realize how little I know. 

Games offer something special, thus: they let you turn a magnifying glass on some small aspects of reality and explore those.

Gambling in Limit Hold'em with real money, the amounts that can be bet are precisely fixed by the rules; you know precisely how many cards will be dealt and when, you know precisely what hands beat the others. The game is almost purely about math, statistics, judgment, calmness and emotional management, and a little bit (but not so much) perception of other people's patterns and behaviors with some inductive reasoning.

In No'Limit Hold'em with real money, all of the above is true, except that now, anyone can bet or raise any amount of money at any time. Playing limit against players worse than you, it can basically be beaten purely mathematically. Understanding human psychology would help, but it's bonus, icing on the cake, and really just not necessary at all.

You change one rule -- from a fixed amount to bet to no fixed amount, and suddenly the money in front of you becomes a way to alter people's affinity and commitment to continuing to play. You might raise a large amount before any cards hit the board to try to get people out, or you might raise smaller to try to get lots of people in, depending on the situation.

The parameters of negotiation, cooperation, leadership out in the world are infinite and varied. If you sit down at the poker table to play Limit, you can start learning about math, decisionmaking, personal emotional management and self-control, perception, and reasoning. 

These skills all transfer to real life.

If you want greater complexity, you can add it in by the modification of a single rule regarding the betting. Suddenly, you're learning about human rationality, commitment and overcommitment, people acting strong or weak, understanding a range of outcomes that could happen, variance, table image, etc. The game gets much deeper.

If you go a step further and shift to a game like playing High/Low where the best and worst hands split the money, the mathematical complexity and decision trees get more difficult to do in real time. The starting hand values are incredibly different, and you need much more entrainment and exposure to how often there even will be a low hand in that round. It's obviously deducible from the rules, but counterintuitive the first time you do it.

Well, society has gradually come around on poker as being a valuable activity for mental training; this is not so controversial a viewpoint in 2014. "High prestige" games like Chess and Go are well-respected.

And of course, a great example of fixed rules to help understand reality is lionized for self-management, teamwork, training, keeping one's cool under pressure, etc: sports.

Games are next.

Puerto Rico or Magic: The Gathering or poker or Tales of Maj'Eyal or playing Morrowind on a self-enforced "Hardcore Mode" lets you explore the nature of reality, and then generalize that to spontaneous interactions.

It's not easy or automatic to do so, and perhaps most people won't bother trying to "level up" at being a better human through interactions with fixed rulesets. For my part, though, it's been one of the more shockingly valuable areas for mental development.

III 2. The Road to Balmora

The first great opportunity to get yourself killed in Morrowind is on the road from Seyda Neen to Balmora.

Like all games in the Elder Scrolls series, you start the game as a prisoner. In Morrowind, you're getting off a prison transport ship at the town of Seyda Neen. The guard commandant tells you to head to Balmora because there's important work for you, and he gives you a package of papers to give to your contact there.

The game is then largely unbounded. Sometimes games like Morrowind are called "sandbox" games because you can entirely ignore the plot and just go play around doing anything. The world doesn't have a set of linear levels: you can go where you want, do what you want, and play like you're in a sandbox.

Seyda Need has some safe basic versions of the things to do that you'll later do out in the world. A tax collector disappeared -- would you go look for him? There's a warehouse that's locked that's owned by the shipping company; if you can pick locks, you can make some early money if the guards don't see you committing that crime. There's a couple other little missions around town, and then most people will head for Balmora, the first real city you come across in the game.

You can take fast transport to Balmora for a few gold coins, or you can walk along a beautiful winding coastal road.

Most new players will take fast transport, but after you've played the game a few times, you'll probably walk. There's a few things to do along the road.

I had built one of those self-imposed challenge characters: the character would only use magic, not weapons. Weapons are generally stronger and more versatile than magic until very late in the game; the beginning is very difficult if you don't use weapons. And I decided on the, "one death and it's over" self-imposed-Hardcore-Mode thing.

So my weaponless mage jaunts around the little fishing village where the game starts, runs the little errands, buys equipment, explores, does more stuff, and is then walking to Balmora.

On the road, there's a guy just standing there. I talk to him. He demands to be paid 40 gold coins... or else.

I click the "No" option reflexively; in games like this, when someone threatens you or demands something, you generally just click "No" and fight them.

He takes out an ax.

He attacks.

It hits.

The blow is hard enough and my character is weak enough that he's knocked down to the ground by the first hit.

He hits once or twice more, and the character dies. True to form, I delete that save file, the first hour or two of setup gone.

Hardcore Mode.

In a normal playthrough, you'd have probably saved the game not long beforehand. If the bandit had dropped you, you'd just reload and play again. It wouldn't be a particularly big deal.

Now, if we dig a little deeper into what's going on, we'll note something so obvious that it might seem silly to write:

Being a "good person" or "bad person" had nothing to do with it.

The bandit, he has two options in dialog. They basically resolve to 

Option A: -40 gold. 
Option B: Fight starts.

If you click Option B, and you're not strong enough, you die.

That's it. Period. Nothing else to the story.

In a game, you've got a limited and bounded ruleset. In real life, if someone gives you an ultimatum, you have practically an infinite number of replies, and the endgame probably won't be a melee if you chose the wrong option.

Real life is almost infinitely complex, but we could still navigate it pretty well if we wanted to see it clearly, understand what's happening and what's likely to happen, and choose options that support our life.

But so often, we don't do that. We're often more interested in editorializing or providing commentary than we are in engaging with reality well.

So you're out and about in your life, and someone takes a metaphorical ax out, and you say:

"They shouldn't have an ax."

"Axes shouldn't be used here."

"I'm just walking to the city; who are you? I don't want anything to do with you."

"It's wholly inappropriate to demand money from someone under threat of hitting them with an ax."

"If I hadn't started this dialog, I wouldn't be in this situation, which is stupid when you think about it, why is this even happening?"

And while you're feeling bad for yourself, an ax goes right into your skull. Ouch.

III 3 The Mechanics Know No Morality

Would it be too provocative to assert, "Time spent feeling bad for yourself is not time being spent well"?

This seems true, no? What ever got accomplished by people wallowing in self-pity? 

Here's the thing about self-pity, though: it's a sneaky beast.

It knows that most people won't let it in the front door, so it wants to come in through the back door, or the window, or the basement.

Take the all-too-often-heard complaint that people who politick well tend to get more authority, promotions, and resources than people who just put their heads down and work.

Here is my contention: you would do better by yourself if you looked to understand the mechanics, rather than editorializing or providing moral commentary.

In a video game, the mechanics are set by whoever did the computer programming.

An enemy attacks you. It goes like this:

*Take Enemy's (TOTAL_ATTACK_SCORE) + (RANDOM NUMBER FROM 1 to 20)... If this number exceeds (HERO'S_DEFENSE_SCORE), then the attack hits. 

You can't argue with this equation. There are only three things you can do: lower the enemy's attack ability somehow (cast a spell of blindness or weakness, maybe), increase your defense score (perhaps better armor), or put yourself in a position where you can't be attacked at all (shoot the enemy from a distance with a bow, cast a spell of paralysis, etc).

Forgive me if this is too obvious, but I think it would be completely and entirely futile to argue with the computer that this equation should be different while playing a round of the game.

Let's say you're a playing a round of the game at 5AM. An enemy hits you, taking your last life away; you die.

You run to the bedroom and wake your significant other.

"Get up! Get up!"

Groggily, your SO gets up."Uhh, what? Is everything okay?"

"No! No! Things aren't okay! Why the HELL did that goblin have such a high attack score? And how come I don't get TWO TIMES my defense score in the attack equation? It's ridiculous! It's outrageous!"

That seems absurd, no? Why argue with a video game?

No, most sane people, if they wanted to play the game well, would say, "Alright... next time I need to get the goblin's attack down, get my defense up, make it impossible for it to even get an attack on me, or make it so that if the attack hits it doesn't matter." Then you dive into the numbers and do better. 

Another controversial proposition, then: I think you'd be better served doing this in the real world, too.

Let's get back to that politicking example.

Perhaps the manager you report to has a mental function for who to promote that is something like this:

*Take all people who are (COMPETENT_ENOUGH). Select the three who have the (MOST_VISIBLE_RECENT_PERFORMANCE) over the last (THREE_MONTHS). Then select the one I (LIKE_BEST).

Maybe you this is outrageous. Heck, maybe it is outrageous -- maybe this equation should cause outrage.

But it seems mostly useless, to me, to argue with the equation.

"It shouldn't be like that! It should be 'Take HIGHEST_COMPETENCE.' And that's it! Nothing else!"

So you don't get promoted, despite being the most competent. Yeah, maybe it's stupid for people to overly bias the very recent performance instead of looking at long arcs. And then, promoting the finalist you like best indeed would indeed probably not be the way to select the most effective person.

I'm not disputing that; I wouldn't want anyone who works for me to use that equation to filter and promote people.

But that's not the point.

You can go play a different game. There's nothing mandating you work at a particular company, vocation, role, or for a certain manager.

But if you do, you really should try to deduce what the mechanics of the situation are, completely independently from your morality of what they should be.

Now, you might be able to get things to happen more like your moral standards -- but if you do, it's because you mechanically did it.

For instance, maybe goblins shouldn't attack people.

That's fine. If the game you're playing has a spell called "passivity" that stops people from attacking entirely, you could cast it. If the spell goes through, the goblin now presumably will abide by your standard, and be more passive as you walk through the forest.

Or perhaps there's a way to go meet the goblin chieftain, and become friends with all the goblins. Maybe that's in the game, or maybe it's not. If it's not in the game, it'd be dumb to curse and yell and wake people up complaining that it's not. But if it's in the game, sure, go do it. Go build peace and friendship with the goblins.

Or perhaps you say, "I don't care if the goblins want to be all crazyopathic for no reason; I'm just going to opt out" -- and so you cast invisibility or use stealth to try to get around the goblin without ever knowing you were there.

That, too, will be a mechanical process. If the goblin sees you trying to sneak by, it's going to attack -- that's what goblins do. But if your stealth succeeds, then you don't have to fight.

I think complaining that your manager is stupid -- a common refrain -- is really just self-pity sneaking in through the back door.

The boss does some stuff, by the boss's standards. The mechanics of the real world aren't as clean as video games, but there are mechanics. You can figure them out, and work to either have the success/failure checks go in your favor, or to not be in that same situation at all.

We must do this in games, if we want to win them. If we can learn this lesson from games and apply it to life, we get gains.

III 4. Deserve's Got Nothin' To Do With It

The scene pans slowly. Rain pours down on the frontier.

Coming into focus is "Greely's Bar" -- and on front of it, a middle-aged black man is laying dead in a coffin, beaten to death. A sign hangs from his neck,

"This Is What Happens to Assassins Around Here."

Raucous cheers come from inside Greely's. Cowboys, ranging from young green hands to tough grizzled vets, are getting a posse together under the Sheriff to hunt down the black man's partner, "William Muney from Missouri."

The Sheriff is being bombastic, rallying the crowd. Law and order are going to reign.

The rain pours down.

The crowd slowly gets quiet... someone's in the back of the bar, just walked in...

The voice calls out, a weathered and weather-beaten old hand, trenchcoat, the droplets of water falling off his black cowboy hat.

"Whose the fella that owns this shithole?"

Greely speaks up:

"I -- I'm Ned Greely. I own this establishment."

The weather-beaten cowboy slowly raises his double-barreled shotgun.

Bang.

Greely hits the ground.

The Sheriff speaks up. "That -- that was a hell of a cowardly thing! You just shot an unarmed man!"

Weather-beaten speaks up: "Well, he should have armed himself, if he wanted to decorate his bar with the body of my friend."

Weather-beaten is surrounded by over a dozen men, hostile and raucous and full of bravado until moments ago.

The Sheriff squints his eyes. "You're William Muney from Missouri."

"Yeah."

"You've killed women and children."

"Yeah."

The Sheriff turns to the crowd. "Alright boys, he's got a double barrel shotgun; he's got one round left. After he shoots me, shoot this dog down."

Of course, the Sheriff doesn't say anything about torturing Ned to death, the black man on the front of the bar. He doesn't mention his own sadistic sort of pride. Well, no, it's not necessary. Like the torrents and sheets of rain coming down outside, Sheriff and Muney are less so humans and more forces of nature. They don't justify themselves.

Muney trains the gun on the Sheriff.

Pulls the trigger.

Click.

Hmm?

Misfire.

"Misfire!" the Sheriff yells. "Get him!"

Muney throws the now-useless shotgun in Sheriff's direction, moves for cover, takes out his revolvers.

The gunfight is, of course, intense. A few of the cowboys get cut down; most run.

Eventually it comes down to Muney and Sheriff. As predicted.

Muney gets the drop on him, firing straighter. Sheriff is hit the gut and hits the ground, bleeding. Everyone else has run off.

Muney walks up to this man. Was he a good man? A bad man? He did bad things. He did good things. He's bleeding to death now.

Sheriff scowls up at Muney, then sighs.

"I don't deserve this... I just built a house..."

"Deserve's got nothin' to do with it."

Sheriff looks knowingly. He's not sad or defiant; more resigned.

"I'll see you in hell, William Muney."

"Yeah."

And the weather-beaten cowboy walks into the rain, walking alone; his oldest friend tortured to death; the bounty collected; striding back to his Midwestern farm to take care of his children, their mother having died of tuberculosis not so long ago.

III 5. Han Shot First

Unforgiven, with its plot with no good guys, just more and less experienced people, is probably the finest Western ever made.

We turn now to one of the greatest characters ever made in a science-fiction movie, from 1977, when we first get to meet Han Solo.

A bounty hunter gets the drop on him, tells Han to sit down.

Han quietly, slowly unbuckles his pistol from his boot… the tension builds, there’s no compromising… Han quietly levels his pistol and fires, bang, the bounty hunter dies badly.

Han does an apologetic smile as he walks out, flipping a little pouch of cash at the bartender.

"Sorry about the mess!"

This all changed in the re-released special edition in the 1990’s.

The gritty violence of the 1970’s aesthetic had faded, and Star Wars had gone from being an epic swashbuckling film set in space… to a multi-billion dollar franchise.

It’s all different now: Han gets ready with his blaster, fixes aim on the bounty hunter, but then... sits and waits.

The bounty hunter fires at point blank… and misses. Somehow. Then, and only then, Han fires back.

"Sorry about the mess."

Lame.

There have been many critiques of this change. Han Solo's arc in Star Wars, of course, is that he's a selfish criminal smuggler rogue who is aggravatingly charming and aggravatingly effective to more pure-minded heroes. 

In a tough galaxy a long time ago, Han was a survivor. You don't become a rich criminal in an authoritarian fascist empire without a heck of a lot of pragmatism.

But, no, the conventions of the 90’s were different from that of 70’s.

Good guys don't resort to violence unless it's fully over-justified. Violence is bad, kids. Look, Han had to shoot; maybe the bounty hunter would have hit with his second point blank shot if Han hadn't fired back; he couldn't have just been a pacifist.

The problem with the bounty hunter shooting first, though, isn't that it makes Han Solo's character arc less interesting (it does) or that it's doesn't make any sense with Han's backstory (it doesn't) or even that it makes such an iconic scene watered down and crummier (much crummier, in fact).

No, those aren't the largest problems.

The problem is that it teaches children exactly the wrong thing. 

Han knows he's dealing with one of his enemies. He's dealing with a bad person. A dangerous person with a gun that just alluded he's going to kill him. And Han lets this hostile killer get a free shot off that... luckily misses at point blank range.

It's stupid.

But this type of stupidity is everywhere. It's anti-Unforgiven.

"Deserve's got nothing to do with it" is maybe one of the most truthful lines in the history of American cinema. Muney doesn't say "this happened because you did a bad thing" -- no, it happened because Muney surprised the vigilante posse and then shot straighter.

Han didn't win because he's a good guy. He won because he shot first.

III 6. Protagonist’s Privilege

In almost all media, protagonists win by virtue of being protagonists.

It doesn't matter how stupidly they act. In fact, if they act stupidly out of a sincere genuine goodness, they become more likely to win.

Movies, television shows, books -- and yes, games -- all fall into this convention.

We want good to win. We'll pay $16.50 for a movie ticket to see the good guy win in IMAX 3D. We'll also buy some crummy popcorn doused with pseudo-butter for another $6.50 to enjoy while watching the protagonist win despite repeated brazen stupidity and actions that would be deemed completely incompetent if followed by a leader in real life.

I, for one, think that media greatly shapes culture, and that the views we subtly inherit from our media, entertainment, and mythos determine a heck of a lot about how people act.

The American mythos have some wonderful heroes and arcs in them; we invented so many new genres of art. We created Batman. All of this is amazing.

But "Protagonist's Privilege" is incredibly dangerous.

Protagonists win by virtue of being good people; not by virtue of preparation, training, planning, careful thinking, and excellent execution.

This, I contend, is one of the most valuable things you can beat out of yourself.

In a good roguelike, you don't get Protagonist's Privilege. You better shoot first. You better not let the dragon gets three rounds of attacks while you try to reason with it that you can all be friends. You better study the mechanics.

Games are moving more towards being un-lose-able. Everyone's a winner. How many times did you have to save and reload? Who cares. Look at the special effects.

Mark this down:

Deserve's got nothing to do with it.

Being a good person isn't enough.

The mechanics determine the outcome.

Han shot first.

Section IV.

IV 0. Math Warning

What the heck? “Math Warning?”

Yeah, math warning. Halfway through this section, and for the rest of the book, there’s a bit of math and logic that, if followed closely, might be useful to you and make you smarter.

But here’s the thing: you can skip it. If the math is killing you, skip ahead to the next chapter.

Some early readers loved the math and it’s their favorite part. Others felt overwhelmed. I’d challenge you to try to stay with the math since there’s nothing more advanced than algebra and it’s useful to start to think like this, but you can get 85% of the value of the book by skipping any sub-section with math if it’s getting you down.

IV 1. Will Perfect Play Win You the Game?

As you go downwards deeper into the dungeon in Nethack, the enemies get tougher. You should do so cautiously and judiciously, as you get stronger, and be careful to have escapes ready.

Your starting inventory in Nethack is somewhat randomized. For a class that starts with simple weapons and armor, like a knight, it's not a big deal. For a class that starts with magical items, rings, and potions like a wizard, it's a huge deal.

It's very possible to start a game and have an absolutely awful set of starting inventory, having almost nothing useful. The Nethack community generally has an ethos of trying to play these games; they call immediately killing off or fleeing with your guy and restarting "scumstarting" -- though it's a very common practice.

The idea behind not scumstarting is that you get much more versatile, become a better player, and the game becomes more interesting. If you'll only play a game if you get one of the top 3 or top 5 most useful of the possible magical items, you don't learn how to play well with less resources.

So okay, you fire up Nethack. Your random equipment... is awful. You decide to play it, and because your equipment is so awful, you go slowly and judiciously.

You go slowly, being careful with the monsters, looking for resources. You're not finding much of anything.

Then, two levels deep into the dungeon, you get a CLICK.

What's that?

You fall through a trapdoor... dropping you two entire floors lower, from Dungeon Level 3 to Dungeon Level 5.

You started the game with a pet that could protect you; the pet didn't come with you. You're on Level 5. You've got terrible equipment.

You start looking for the stairs to climb back upwards to safety.

Then, CLICK.

Another trapdoor. You fall down three floors to Level 8.

You take a deep breath. You don't really have many options except to, again, try to cautiously walk your way back.

And then -- yes, this does occasionally happen -- CLICK -- you're down on Level 11 now.

A pack of fast-moving, high-attack insects show up. You're dead. History.

That game was unwinnable, even with perfect play.

You could take a group of the best Nethack players in the world, and for the heck of it, throw in Chess grandmasters, game theory experts, top game designers and computer programmers, statisticians, whatever -- and analyze every single move you made in that brief game... and not a single one was a bad move. There were never better options than what you did. You achieved perfect play and yet, you still lost.

Many real-life games are like this. Two players can both do perfect play in a round of the board game Monopoly; if so, the dice will determine the winner.

In poker, you can have pocket aces preflop (the strongest hand) against absolute junk all-in, and you're still going to lose a small fraction of the time.

Poker players -- winning ones, anyways -- eventually learn to get philosophical about it, and start analyzing based on their Expected Value, or what they statistically would win on average if they played the same way every time.

But here is an illuminative question to put to someone who plays video games: do you think games should be designed so that if you play perfectly, you should be able to win every time?

The original Super Mario Bros is always beatable with perfect play. You can watch runs on Youtube of people getting the timing down perfectly and going through the entire game without even getting hit, let alone dying.

If a game has no random elements or emergent mechanics, and it's beatable, then it's always beatable with perfect play.

Life, perhaps, isn't.

You can make the best sales presentation ever, have a deal almost signed, and then an executive at the company you're pitching that you haven't interacted with takes a kickback bribe from another vendor, a worse company, and you don't get the order. You won't even know that's why it happened.

What's interesting is that this question about game design isn't quite a question of fairness, but it sometimes feels like one.

Most people want to know that if they play a game to a high skill level, they'll win. 

But as you get into real-world endeavors, two things start happening: first, you get complex variance that can't be predicted in advance. Second, you get opposition from other people who are also trying to win.

In this way, I think most games are bad training for life, but great games are great training for life. If you play a game like Mario Bros and memorize the patterns and get your reflexes sharp, you'll win every time. It'll be a comforting solace for you whenever you want to unwind; you can just fire it up, get Mario going, and start stomping goombas. You will win, so long as you don't get distracted, if you're good enough.

Not so in Nethack. No matter how good you are, the game will put you in almost unwinnable situations sometimes. Continuing to keep your composure and adapt, so that you sometimes survive those and go on to win, is useful. And frankly, so is keeping your composure and playing well when the roof does metaphorically cave-in on you, and defeat comes.

IV 2. In Praise of Radically Unbalanced Games

In a major commercial game with a multi-multi-million dollar budget, an intense amount of effort goes into creating all the textures, sound, mechanics, and production quality.

The older roguelikes are built on text characters and simple algorithms that 1980's computers could easily handle.

That made it easy for roguelikes to rapidly introduce different classes and weapons. The developers of these games, usually working as small volunteer efforts, could easily spin up something entirely weird and interesting to add depth to the game.

As such, these games were often radically unbalanced, and it didn't matter. Oftentimes there'd be a class like "Explorer" that got maybe a little bit of extra movement or money, but no notable offensive or defensive abilities.

You wouldn't want to play this type of character unless you were already quite skilled at the game, of course. But if you did -- and won with one -- it was far more impressive and satisfying.

Meanwhile, often there'd be clear "game-breaking" abilities and items. In Nethack, the wizard's first sacrifice artifact, Magicbane, was an insanely good weapon. It (basically) made you able to make yourself unattackable with melee attacks, and it defects/absorbs the nastiest curses in the game, and it boosts your core abilities.

A wizard with Magicbane has already almost won the game. Add a couple more of the best items, and it was over -- the late-game play for a wizard is actually pretty boring. Once you're set up, you just go win.

Nethack is ridiculously stupidly unbalanced. That's part of the joy of it. 

Of all its unbalanced points, probably the most unbalanced are "wishes" -- a wish is (typically) rare and hard to get, but probably the most valuable thing in the game. It can duplicate almost any other thing you'd want to happen.

Usually people use wishes to get the best bodyarmor, boots, helmet, gauntlets in the game, then fill out their repertoire with any elite spells they're missing, and extra amulets of life-saving.

Wishes are rare; you might not get one in a game. I think the average number you'd get in playing would be around two?

The first time I won, I got seven. Just... nice variance. It gave me a lot of defense and a lot of slack to compensate for stupid mistakes I made.

In Tales of Maj'eyal, probably the single biggest gamebreaking combination is the berserker ability "Unstoppable" + the elven ability "Timeless."

Unstoppable makes it so your health can't drop below 1; you can't die. It lasts a short while. Timeless gives you a huge boost to positive status effects.

An elven berserker can entirely ignore his health, health recovery, and all physical defenses and only load himself up with speed items, status defenses (against blinding, stun, etc), and then max out on damage.

That's huge. You can specialize an elven berserker and just ignore whole aspects of the game, becoming unkillable for quite a while.

It still requires skill to play, so you don't get yourself into a situation where you'll die right when Unstoppable wears off. But it's game-breaking, almost certainly the best combination in the game.

And you know what? That's fine. Elven berserkers that get past the early game have a very high win rate, and that's good. Other classes that don't have a gamebreaker win less... but that's a big part of the point. There's about a dozen lessons to take away from this.

IV 3. Paying the Inexperience Toll

The first time I invested in the stock market, I was, I think, 20 or 21 years old.

I opened a Roth IRA with Fidelity. I transferred some money in, maybe $3000.

Then I started thinking about what to buy.

I saw one mutual fund that had gone up a lot. If I remember correctly, it was FSEAX, Fidelity's Southeast Asia fund.

It had returned something like 30% per year for the last few years. That's pretty good, I thought! It said it was "Southeast Asia" but there was actually a lot of Chinese stocks owned. Supposedly, that region was going to keep growing like crazy.

So I bought it.

It promptly lost half of its value.

I held on to it for around five years, by which time it had crept back to slightly below where it started... I don't know the full numbers, but maybe I made a -5% over 5 years, something abysmal like that.

And you know what?

I don't regret it, not for a single minute.

My line of thinking goes like this: it was very, very likely my first investment into the stock market was going to be stupid. I thought I was smarter than everyone else and wanted to learn how to invest more actively than just buying an index fund of the whole stock market regularly (which still wasn't quite common wisdom in the mid-2000's anyways).

I'm actually very glad that my first investment went poorly, and thus, I was humbled -- with a relatively small amount of money. As the old expression goes, "The worst thing that can happen when you go to Vegas is that you win."

It's natural to overrate oneself for long stretches of time; most people do this, not just smart and analytical people. It's too easy to assume that having generally good intelligence, learning, and mental models will transfer rapidly even though you don't have knowledge of the specific domain you're going into.

On the one hand, it's true: mathematics applies everywhere. Humans are human everywhere, with all the good and bad that entails. There's broad commonalities between all sorts of unrelated disciplines.

What that means is, as you get smarter and wiser, you become able to pick up new fields faster. But I think part of that wisdom has to include that you're going to be dumb and inexperienced when you first enter a new foray -- call it "paying the inexperience toll."

In any complex multi-variable domain, especially one with heavy variance or randomness, inexperience gets in the way of doing well.

Roguelikes or other games on "Hardcode Mode" are wonderful at training in this, because they're just the right feeling of "sort of high-stakes" without actually having anything at stake.

When you get into a new game that has long technology trees or specializations, you won't know which ones actually pay off well. You can start thinking about it and make some guesses, but you don't really know what enemies are dangerous, whether the early-game, mid-game, or end-game are the hard parts, and so on.

Sometimes the "super awesome ability" that you can work towards will only become available after you're already so strong that it doesn't make a difference, whereas a modestly faster recovery rate might save your life a couple times.

In real life, if you're getting into a new domain, it's highly recommended you do "Key Decision Analysis" -- meaning, you write down your reasoning and predictions for what you're doing. It forces you to clarify your thoughts.

My mutual fund blunder might have looked like this: "It's been going up, and I think it'll keep going up. The region is good. Uhh, looks good to me!"

(Actually, I don't recall my full reasoning, aside from knowing it was rather shoddy.)

Likewise, I've consistently found myself surprised by what abilities in games are good. The most recent game I got into -- the one that kicked off my writing this work -- was Tales of Maj'Eyal. The first few builds I tried to construct on my own were uncohesive and focused on abilities that didn't scale well at all, leading to a very weak character going into the difficult early-midgame.

Noting that down -- noting down that my naive intuition was unable to spot what combinations of abilities would be powerful together -- this is a valuable lesson in humility on getting into new domains, and a reminder to look for the hidden patterns in things.

IV 4. Gamebreakers, part one: The Enchanter’s Magic Pocket

Dropbox landed like a Category 6 hurricane.

One day, it didn't exist, and all sync and all large-file-transfer software was a disaster.

Then, it was everywhere, on just about all tech-savvy people's computers, and the founders had a net worth in the billions of dollars.

Dropbox's magic wasn't particularly exotic. It got five things right:

1. The product was easy and pleasurable to use. It worked right away.
2. The product worked well for a single person to backup files or transfer them between computers.
3. The product worked well for sharing files between people.
4. The product was very useful for sharing and transferring files between friends, colleagues, and clients.
5. And the gamebreaker -- sending an invite to a friend gave you extra space in your Dropbox in a way that was incredibly pleasurable and addictive to do.

If the company Dropbox was a character in a video game, it'd be an enchanter. This wizard had just three spells:

*Magic Pocket: Creates a rift in the fabric of the universe, allowing things to be stored in there and pulled out in different places. 
*Spacetime Duplication: Duplicate an item from your magic pocket into a friend or ally's pocket. 
*Fanaticize Pocketholder: Take a person who has a magic pocket and turn them into almost a religion fanatic whose whole reason for existence is creating more magic pockets out in the world.

That's it -- Dropbox worked well for one person, worked well to share between people, and Dropbox got people who downloaded it to spread it like crazy.

It was gamebreaking. It was worth billions of dollars. And it made a lot of people's lives much, much easier. (It's merely convenient for a person who doesn't have a very digital life, but it's game-breakingly useful for photographers, videographers, illustrators, designers, etc.)

You can actually reduce all these complicated parameters to just a single number, the "viral coefficient."

If you're making software, the number of people each person shares it with is the viral coefficient.

If Alfred, Bob, Candy, Denise, Edward, Francesca, Gary, and Helen all download a piece of software, and share only Denise recommends it to one other friend who downloads it, then its viral coefficient is 1/8th, or 12.5%.

That might actually not be a bad rate, depending on the industry. 12.5% growth strictly from word of mouth could be pretty good.

On the other hand, if Alfred signs up 3 of his friends, Denise signs up one, and the rest don't sign up any, then they're at 4 referrals from 8 people, a 50% viral coefficient. Obviously, that's better.

Now, there's a magic number -- 1.

If, on average, every person who joins signs up one other person, then you have infinite growth (until you reach the "carrying capacity" of the market you're in).

Facebook achieved that radically fast growth by trawling your email address book once you joined. It was gamebreaking; Facebook went on to be worth billions of dollars.

Eventually, this pathway to getting users for software largely got closed up -- email providers stopped people from doing it, outlawing it in their terms of service, rapidly dumping services that do this into spam, etc.

Dropbox came after the Facebook-email-inbox-wave. It actually got you wanting to recommend the service individually to people you knew. 

Gamebreaking. Billions.

Most gamebreakers are actually pretty simple in retrospect. Tales of Maj'eyal's Unstoppable+Timeless combination is pretty easy to see: you load up on speed, make yourself unkillable, and then double the duration of your fast/unkillable statuses.

Yet, so often there's opportunities to grab money, prestige, fun just sitting around in plain site, and people don't grab it. One of the reasons we'll study gamebreakers in video games is because we want to grab gamebreakers in real life.

So let's start with the question -- why do people miss huge advantages that are so, so obvious in retrospect?

IV 5 Gamebreakers part two

The standard four-character party in a fantasy game tends to look like Fighter, Wizard, Cleric, Rogue.

Micropose's Darklands, that great masterpiece from 1992, turned some fantasy conventions on its head. Instead of being based on Tolkien's fantasy conventions, or the Dungeons and Dragons-type themes that were somewhat inspired by Tolkien, it came at it from a different angle.

It took all the superstitions, prejudices, and beliefs held in the Holy Roman Empire, and just said -- poof, they're all real. 

They set this against a historical background: the German Fugger Bankers, the Medici from Italy, and the Hanseatic League have offices in most cities. There's foreign traders, arms merchants, doctors. Every city has at least a small church; cathedrals tower over the greatest cities. There's various local rulers and garrisons, you can travel by water, and the countryside is littered with bandits and raubritters -- "robber knights" -- have their strongholders with which they harass shipping and commit their various crimes.

The supernatural takes something of a backseat to the historical at first, but as you explore deeper, you find that gargoyles are often alive, witches' covens worship the devil and commit atrocities from dark powers, the Knights Templar is the corrupted version that worships Satan and follows debauched rituals... rarely, demons are summoned. Dragons occasionally ravage the countryside. Mines are sometimes haunted.

The game is brutally difficult. Blizzards hit; they'll kill you. Floods hit; they'll kill you. Passing clerics and bishops demand tithes of you; if you don't pay, they'll send their (rather tough) guards to kill you. If you should happen to kill the bishop's guards, you'll lose reputation in the eyes of nearby cities. It's kind of one of those can't-win type things, when a bishop tries to extort you.

It's incredibly easy to get yourself killed in Darklands. The game is just stupidly ridiculously punishing and unforgiving if you don't know what you're doing, and maybe barely survivable if you do know what you're doing. 

So you need all the firepower you can get.

Thankfully, it's not just the negative arcane and supernatural that lives in this world: alchemy is real, and you can brew powerful potions.

Likewise, you can appeal to saints for epic miracles. If your virtue, knowledge of religion, and divine favor are high enough, saints can shelter you from natural disasters, banish satanic enemies, or just make you really tough in combat.

(When you play the game, you wind up getting not just a knowledge of Medieval Germany, but also of the history and doctrine of the Catholic Church: every saint has a bio that explains when they lived, why they were canonized, and what miracles they can perform if you appeal to them.)

Your bread and butter in the game will be melee combat. It's nice to soften up enemies with a round of projectiles, but they'll almost always close for combat in significant fights. Throwing an explosive potion does even more to even the odds, but you only get good alchemy going late in the game: the ingredients are very expensive and alchemy is very dangerous when you're not good at it. (You can burn entire small villages down if you make a small accident; if you create an explosion in a major city, you'll be arrested and potentially sentenced to death if you can't pay the substantial fine... you can try to break out of jail through a variety of means or appeal for a pardon before they finally get around to executing you, though. Sometimes it works, but not usually -- again, the game is rather punishing.)

So, in Darklands, you don't have these traditional classes: fighter, cleric, wizard, rogue.

But the default party vaguely approximates it: your default leader is charismatic and nimble (rogue), next in line is a burly and useless-at-everything-but-combat guy (fighter), then you've got a religious prayer-caller (cleric), and an alchemist (wizard).

The majority of people who play Darklands will either play with the default party, or will create one that looks vaguely like it. You'll have your religious prayercaller character, you'll have your smart-but-weak alchemist, etc.

But here's the thing: Darklands doesn't have classes. It just has skills.

In other words, it's possible to build a party where everyone can call saints. You get much more effective -- close to devastatingly effective -- if you can set it up.

It's easy to just assume that most of your party won't be able to use religion, because that's how it's set up in most games.

Darklands has a highly in-depth character creation where you go through each character and choose what professions they were in their life, assign stats and skills, etc.

When you choose these "professions" in Darklands, it feels a lot like choosing a character's "class" in other games.

But it is not so.

The only lasting thing professions do is alter the mix of statistics and skills.

As such, one very viable way of playing the game is to ensure that every character, no matter their profession, takes an early profession in novice monk before going on to their future career... it means they'll have some nascent religion ability.

Furthermore, the party alchemist has only two duties: get better at alchemy skill, and make potions.

Once the potions are made, anyone can use them. So, as powerful as alchemy is, it's really not worth ultra-specializing someone in it... most people do, as a default, just because it seems like a thing to do.

But in a party where everyone has religious ability, it's not necessary. You can make a charismatic leader that can also do alchemy. Your alchemy won't be good for a while longer, but given that many saints can boost alchemy and intelligence, you can consolidate two roles into one. 

"Everyone can use religion well" is a gamebreaker in Darklands.

It's also incredibly unintuitive.

Our very conception of the game mechanics, playing ability, and traditional roles in video games mean you don't expect someone to have excellent stealth, wield a broadsword, and be able to use cleric's magic.

And yet, there it is. It's very possible. It doesn't even occur to most players to try unless they play the game a fairly large amount and then really think deeply about the mechanics.

IV 6 Gamebreakers part 3

Okay. You're going to go fight an ice dragon. It doesn't matter what game.

The ice dragon has exactly one attack: breath of ice.

Breath of ice does exactly 40 damage, and it's all ice damage. The dragon has no other attacks. There's no other significant enemies near the dragon.

Before you go, you get a choice: you can get 5% resistance to ice, or you could 100 extra health points.

Now, mathematically inclined people might go like this: "Okay, every attack does 40 ice damage? 5% less means taking 2 less damage per attack..."

That's correct, yes.

The break-even point, then, is turn 50. If the fight lasts such that the dragon attacks you more than 50 times, you'll save more life by choosing the ice resistance than the extra health.

On a quick look, the extra health looks pretty good. It'll let you survive two full additional attacks right away, where the ice resistance won't help you survive until at least 20 rounds in.

But, if we're looking for gamebreaking power, we need to ask some more questions before we decide.

Let's try this one first: what was your ice resistance beforehand?

Because... on the off chance you had 95% ice resistance, that last 5% crosses a threshold -- you become 100% immune to ice.

"100% immunity" is a very special threshold in a game; it means you can entirely ignore it as a factor. As soon as you can't take ice damage, ice damage becomes irrelevant. You can jaunt up to the dragon and leisurely tickle it to death if you want; it can't hurt you.

But let's say you're not at 95% immunity. The next questions to ask are, "Will this choice swing the battle one way or the other?"

Again, if we're playing a roguelike, if you lose, you die. So winning the next battle matters.

But if you're totally good to go in this coming battle regardless of which powerup you take, then you can start thinking long-term.

After that, how much does ice damage factor into the game, and how much is 100 health worth?

100 health sounds like a lot, but what if by the end of the game your health total was in the tens of thousands? That 100 might not mean anything.

Meanwhile, if there's late-game tough enemies who do 4000+ damage ice attacks, that 5% ice resistance might add up to lots of life saved.

This gets to three fundamental points: people consistently underestimate exponential gains, consistently overrate linear gains, and consistently forget to consider thresholds. 

IV 7 Gamebreakers part 4

Thresholds are everywhere. Most people don't see them.

The simplest application of threshold thinking to everyday life is whether your income is higher or lower than your expenses.

In a big picture sense, if your expenses are higher than your income, it almost doesn't matter how much in the red you are -- the endgame, if nothing changes, is bankruptcy.

A consistent slight shortfall, compounded over time, heads towards infinity.

All over the world are hidden numbers and parameters that can be derived by careful thought.

For instance, no video game that I know of has anything like a "stuff you're most vulnerable to" measurement.

For instance, let's say there's a variety of status effects in game. We'll use Tales of Maj'eyal as an example.

Sample status effects:

*Stun
 *Pinned
 *Other physical effects
 *Confusion
 *Cursed 
*Frozen

  Then there how the status effects were generated:

*Physical
 *Arcane
 *Elemental
 *Poison

Etc.

Finally, there's different ways damage comes at you:

*Ranged physical damage (archer, etc) 
*Standard melee physical damage (enemy fighter)
 *Getting critically hit (large damage multiplier on either of the above two)

Etc.

If you have 100% immunity to stun, you can stop thinking about stun. An enemy that has a powerful ability to stun you every single turn, but doesn't do much else, is no longer dangerous.

At 100% stun immunity, that's true. At 90% stun immunity, that's not true and that enemy is still dangerous. Even if you have two healing runes to cure two stun effects, there's still a 10%*10%*10% chance of getting stunned three times in a row, or a 1 in 1000 chance. "Ah, 1 in 1000? Who cares?" But in TOME, you're going to fight a couple thousand battles to beat the game. If three stuns in a row will kill you, and you take that .1% chance of three stuns in a row "because it's unlikely," then you're relying on luck to get through things alive. Meanwhile, if you can bump that anti-stun percentage up to 100%, you can literally just ignore stun for the rest of the game -- as a bonus, you can use those rune slots to do something else.

You can do these same analyses for the most common types of situations in games: maybe it's basically impossible to kill your character unless they get both cursed and hit with a high volume of arcane damage.

Thus, what should you be doing? You should start stockpiling resistance to arcane damage, curse removal items and abilities, and ways to disrupt spellcasters.

It’s too easy to not think about these things.

If you already can do a huge amount of melee damage, it’s tempting to keep choosing abilities and items to ramp up melee damage higher and higher, simply because it’s exciting.

That works great until you come across a wizard with a bone shield that absorbs the first five attacks they make -- who can case curse, and then nuke you.

Threshold thinking would prevent this: you'd say, "Okay, I have enough melee ability to basically kill anything at this point... I'm never going to die because I lose a slugfest. I'm still vulnerable to curse and arcane damage though. How to deal with that?"

This pattern plays out in real life. Consider how many high earners focus more and more and repeatedly double down on earning power, but never get their expenses under control and never translate the income to net worth.

If you're making $220,000 per year and you're spending $219,900 per year, earning more money probably isn't going to solve this issue. You're incredibly vulnerable. If -- when -- your income slides a bit, you're going to be in a world of hurt.

But it’s natural to work on things you're good at, and it’s generally painful and unpleasant to examine one’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities.

More on this in a moment. But first let's look at the seductiveness of linear games.

IV 6. Gamebreakers, part five: The Seductiveness of Linear Gains

In Tales of Maj'eyal, on Normal difficulty, a human berserker will start with 132 health and a health regeneration rate of .25 per turn.

That means, every fourth turn, you'll gain 1 health back. A pretty slow rate of recovery.

Berserkers have an ability that can be trained, "Fast Metabolism," that increases their healing rate by 3.4 health per turn for the first point you put into it.

When you first fire up the game, that looks pretty good. If a fight lasts 20 rounds, it's effectively like having 85 higher health. 

Here is the problem: it's a linear increase in health.

Later in the game, your health will be quite a bit north of 1000; a winning character might have around 1300 health at the end of the game.

That 3.4 health per turn is really rather trivial at that point.

It gets worse, actually. The two best builds for berserkers are the Timeless/Unstoppable berserker, where health literally ceases to matter as you go into an unkillable frenzy, and the Antimagic Berserker, who gets huge multiplicative synergy health bonuses that the +3.4 normal healing becomes a straight rounding error to. An Antimagic Berserker is going to have a healing rate that's something like +50 to +200 per turn, every turn, or even more.

Ivan Mazour, the talented mathematician, investor, and entrepreneur, wrote on New Year's Day 2014: "If instead of buying the first iPod you bought Apple shares, you’d have $26,000 dollars right now. Opportunities like that exist all the time, and we just need to find them."

It's easy and nearly automatic to get attracted to linear gains. If you're at the start of the game and you do 5 damage per turn, and you're offered the choice between "+5 damage per turn" or "+10% damage per turn," the easy thing to do is this: "Hey, if I choose +10% damage, I'll do 5.5 damage. If I choose +5 damage, I'll do 10 damage. No brainer, I'm taking the +5!"

This is usually a sucker's bet.

If your damage ever climbs over 50 per turn (in most games, it will), that's the breakeven point for +5 damage or +10% damage. If your damage per turn gets up to 500 per turn, then the person who chose the +5 gets less than a tenth of the long-term gains. If your damage reaches 2000 per turn...

This is exceedingly difficult to do in real life. Faced with the choice of drinking 30 Starbucks coffees or buying 1 share of Starbucks stock, most people will take the coffees.

Likewise, most people would buy a new $20,000 car for the "cool factor" and "comfort" instead of buying a used $7,000 car and investing the $13,000. Five years later, what difference did the "cool factor" make?

Investing vs consuming is an obvious place to have the discussion, because most consumption gives linear and immediate gains (pleasure, right now) that become obsoleted or irrelevant over time, whereas smart investments grow, multiply, and keep making your life better.

But that can get somewhat preachy, so let's instead look at developing your own personal skills and abilities.

IV 7. Gamebreakers, part five: Combinations and Cohesion

Certain skills and abilities multiply and combine with other skills and abilities highly effectively. Others do not. Whenever possible, you want to take skills and abilities that give you multiplicative gains that help with many important things over linear gains that get obsoleted and become irrelevant later.

For instance, let's say we're playing a video game called "Life Simulation" and there's just two categories you get points in: Professional Points and Leisure Points.

Let’s let the math do the talking. There's two gentlemen who are taking the exact same professional points skill tree in, say, "Accounting."

One of them makes his chief leisure activity snowboarding; the other makes his chief leisure activity public speaking.

The first accountant has a great time snowboarding, becomes an excellent snowboarder, really loves the beauty and majesty of the mountains. I personally snowboard. I've been in the Austrian Alps and in Hokkaido, Japan. It's really amazing and awe-inspiring and a wonderful way to recharge. 

Meanwhile, the other accountant goes to Toastmasters, buys books and tapes on speaking better, practices speeches, and so on.

The snowboarding accountant more-or-less doesn't get any combination value. Training and honing his ability in snowboarding doesn't make him better at accounting (beyond the fact that mastery in anything is good for mastery at everything, and recharging is always valuable).

Meanwhile, public speaking combos decently well -- as you become more effective as an accountant, opening your own accounting practice or making partner at one of the big accounting firms will start becoming more about communication and the ability to reach people than it is purely about understanding and methodically applying generally accepted accounting principles.

What combos well and what doesn't depends a lot on what field you're in. Motorcycle maintenance or flying an aircraft probably combos better for an engineer than someone doing public relations. I took up the study of poetry recently; it combos reasonably well with writing. A graphic designer is going to get better combo ability out of art history than a first lieutenant in the army.

You don’t have to maximize on everything, but it’s inarguable that if your leisure activities also advance you professionally, then your leisure activities also advance you professionally.

It's a tautology. It's obviously true. There's many caveats and exceptions, but -- just like the cold hard math of video games with their clearly defined rules -- when the "points" you put into leisure make you better professionally, you get synergy and combo value, that's probably a good thing.

The only issue: it's sometimes hard to predict what will combo well.

Steve Jobs is probably the best example. In his 2005 commencement address at Stanford University, he discussed how a seemingly impractical indulgence earlier in his life made a big difference later:

"Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

"None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later."

This is where video games diverge from real life. In a game, if you could look at all the code and knew all the areas and challenges that could arise, you could map out perfectly what skills and abilities your character should take to maximize your chances of doing well.

In real life, the boundaries aren't so clear. But at the same time, completely neglecting practical applications seems wasteful. Someone who understands finance, financial statements, and mathematics to a high degree would likely make a better investor in equities; someone who has knowledge of construction, mechanics, interior decoration, and so on would have an easier time improving a property and making higher returns as a landlord. Entirely neglecting that there's cross-training bonuses in leisure, professional life, social life, relationships, investing, and so on -- this seems wasteful. Math doesn't lie.

But, yet, doing things that seem impractical and filling out one's skillset is really not so terrible of an idea. Even in Jobs's case, though, we can note a few things: Reed College offered perhaps the best calligraphy in the country at the time -- learning from the best, at anything, is worth something. Then, the level of sheer fascination Jobs had with it meant that he was able to make huge gains there... obviously anything you're highly engaged with will have higher payoffs than a seemingly-rational choice that you can't stomach and put no effort into.

There's endless ways to specialize and focus in life. This hyper-pragmatism is unfashionable right now in American culture; nevertheless, if your activities and social circles and profession and leisure all support each other well, it will be easier to make big things happen in your life.

IV 8. Gamebreakers, part seven: Linear and Multiplicative gains

Let's look at linear and multiplicative gains.

You're playing a video game.

Every level, you get 10 health points.

So at Level 1, you've got 10 health. Level 2, 20 health. Level 3, 30 health. Simple, right?

You also get to choose a poweup at the start of the game: You can get a “Health Addition” of +10 extra health per level, or you can get a “Health Multiplier” of +10% health bonus calculated after all the addition.

Which is better?

Let’s see…

Level 1:
 Addition: 10 + 10 = 20 health 
Multiplier: 10 * 110% = 11 health

You get that, right? The +10% multiplier means you get... 1 extra health. Instead of 10.

Okay, let's look at…

Level 2:
 Addition: 20 + 20 = 40 health 
Multiplier: 20 * 120% = 24 health

Hmm. The gap is even bigger. Before, the Adder has 9 more health; now he has 16 more health. You'd be a fool to take the Multiplier, right?

Level 3:
Addition: 30 + 30 = 60 
Multiplier: 30 * 1.3 = 39

It's getting worse. Now the Adder has 21 more health. It's getting bigger each turn.

Wait, or is it?

The Adder got +10 health at Level 1... and +10 health at Level 2... and +10 health at Level 3...

The Multiplier got +1 health at Level 1... and +3 health at Level 2... and +5 health at Level 3...

Let's look at the whole scene.

Level: 4 
Addition: 40 + 40 = 80  health
Multiplier: 40 * 1.4 = 56 health

Level: 5
 Addition: 50 + 50 = 100  health
Multiplier: 50 * 150% = 75 health

Level: 6
 Addition: 60 + 60 = 120  health
Multiplier: 60 * 160% = 96 health

Level: 7
 Addition: 70 + 70 = 140  health
Multiplier: 70 * 170% = 119 health

Level: 8 
Addition: 80 + 80 = 160 health
 Multiplier: 80 * 180% = 144 health

Level: 9 
Addition: 90 + 90 = 180 health
 Multiplier: 90 * 190% = 171 health

What’s going to happen at Level 10? We already know…

Level: 10 
Addition: 100 + 100 = 200  health
Multiplier: 100 * 200% = 200 health

So, okay, Multiplier looks stupid from Level 1 to Level 9. He just straight has less health, if you look at that as the final output. And health is good; we want health.

But at Level 10, it evens out. What happens next?

Level: 11 
Addition: 110 + 110 = 220 health
 Multiplier: 110 * 210% = 231 health

The trend is going to get worse for Adder…

Level: 12
 Addition: 120 + 120 = 240  health
Multiplier: 120 * 220% = 264 health

Level: 13 
Addition: 130 + 130 = 260  health
Multiplier: 130 * 230% = 299 health

Level: 14
 Addition: 140 + 140 = 280 health
 Multiplier: 140 * 240% = 336 health

Level: 15 
Addition: 150 + 150 = 300 health
 Multiplier: 150 * 250% = 375 health

It’s, of course, going to keep growing.

Level: 20 
Addition: 200 + 200 = 400  health
Multiplier: 200 * 300% = 600 health

Level: 30 
Addition: 300 + 300 = 600  health
Multiplier: 300 * 400% = 1200 health

Level: 40
 Addition: 400 + 400 = 800  health
Multiplier: 400 * 500% = 2000 health

Level: 50
 Addition: 500 + 500 = 1000  health
Multiplier: 500 * 600% = 3000 health

I promise this isn’t mathematical trickery. It’s counterintuitive; yes. But these aren’t some odd set of numbers that could never happen in real life. If anything, getting +10% long-term multipliers is easier than getting straight addition.

But let’s keep talking about games.

Imagine if in this game, the best helmet is a Helm of Foresight. The Helm of Foresight doubles your health multiplier.

Remember, that the Adder gets a de facto 100%; he invested in raw linear health, not in multiplicative health.

Level: 20 (with Helm of Foresight)
 Addition: (200 + 200) * 200% = 800  health
Multiplier: 200 * 600% = 1200 health

Level: 30 (with Helm of Foresight) 
Addition: (300 + 300) * 200% = 1200  health
Multiplier: 300 * 800% = 2400 health

Level: 40 (with Helm of Foresight) 
Addition: (400 + 400) * 200% = 1600 health  
Multiplier: 400 * 1000% = 4000 health

Level: 50 (with Helm of Foresight)
 Addition: (500 + 500) * 200% = 2000  health
Multiplier: 500 * 1200% = 6000 health

You know what’s terrible? It gets worse. There’s inevitably more combos available.

Let’s say there’s an ability where you take half your maximum health in damage to deal 10 times your maximum health in unblockable damage to one enemy, Let’s say that ability is called “Blood Wrath” damage.

Level: 20 (with Helm of Foresight) 
Addition: (200 + 200) * 200% = 800 health | Damage from Blood Wrath: 4,000 
Multiplier: 200 * 600% = 1200 health | Damage from Blood Wrath: 6,000

Level: 30 (with Helm of Foresight) 
Addition: (300 + 300) * 200% = 1200 health | Damage from Blood Wrath: 6,000 
Multiplier: 300 * 800% = 2400 health | Damage from Blood Wrath: 12,000

Level: 40 (with Helm of Foresight) 
Addition: (400 + 400) * 200% = 1600 health | Damage from Blood Wrath: 8,000 
Multiplier: 400 * 1000% = 4000 health | Damage from Blood Wrath: 16,000

Level: 50 (with Helm of Foresight) 
Addition: (500 + 500) * 200% = 2000 health | Damage from Blood Wrath: 10,000 
Multiplier: 500 * 1200% = 6000 health | Damage from Blood Wrath: 30,000

Remember we mentioned thresholds earlier?

Let’s say there’s a boss with 20,000 life that does 1200 damage and casts a bunch of nasty curses and status effects on turn 1… The Level 50 Addition-user can’t use Blood Wrath to open the fight without dying.

(2000 - 1000 - 1200 = dead)

Meanwhile, the Level 50 Multiplier can take

(6000 - 3000 - 1200 = 1800 life remaining)

… and the boss dies on turn 1. Fight over. Don’t need to run a difficult battle.

As such, The Multiplier is perfectly safe and can kill the boss in one hit on turn 1 with no hassle at all. The Adder can’t use his highest damage ability, because he’d die if he uses it, and needs to open the fight with something much weaker and go through a difficult perilous combat.

Multiplication isn’t always better than addition; it’s of course situational. If the highest level in the game is Level 10 and there’s no Helm of Foresight or other combination, then the Adder would be ahead until the very end, and the Multiplier would only even out at the highest level.

But generally speaking, we have all sorts of choices that multiply and combo, or we can take short term gains that become irrelevant over time. This is true in games and real life.

IV 9. Gamebreakers part eight: linear and multiplicative in real life

The advantage of games in this regard is that we can actually calculate out the math and decision trees. Life isn’t so simple or precise.

But these principles hold remarkably well in sales, negotiations, credibility, cooperation, team-building, communications, project planning, contingency planning, quality control… it’s actually shocking how many multiplicative gains are out in the world.

Let’s say there’s a salesman who is required to do five hours of face-to-face sales meetings per day.

Each sales meeting, giving the presentation and answering questions, it takes exactly an hour.

He’s going to work exactly 8 hours per day, and he can spend the last 3 hours however he wants.

How should he spend those three hours?

Good question.

Okay, let’s look at his weekly performance. He works five days per week. Right now, he’s got —

Week 1: 25 prospect meetings (25 hours spent), 15 discretionary hours

If we add his numbers cumulatively, we’d have —

Week 2: 50 prospect meetings (50 hours spent), 30 discretionary hours

Week 3: 75 prospect meetings (75 hours spent), 45 discretionary hours

Week 4: 100 prospect meetings (100 hours spent), 60 discretionary hours

This is all pretty straightforward, right?

Now, let’s say his closing rate is 10% to start. Right now, he closes 1 out of 10 prospects he meetings. Thus, his average sales will look like this —

Week 1: 25 prospect meetings (25 hours spent), 15 discretionary hours

— 25 meetings * 10% closing rate = 2.5 sales on average total

Week 2: 50 prospect meetings (50 hours spent), 30 discretionary hours

— 50 meetings * 10% closing rate = 5 sales on average total

Week 3: 75 prospect meetings (75 hours spent), 45 discretionary hours

— 75 meetings * 10% closing rate = 7.5 sales on average total

Week 4: 100 prospect meetings (100 hours spent), 60 discretionary hours

— 100 meetings * 10% closing rate = 10 sales on average total

You with me? Still pretty simple, no?

Okay, let’s say he decides to go all-in on more meetings. That’s never a terrible idea for salespeople. His sales now do this:

Week 1: 40 prospect meetings (40 hours spent)

— 40 meetings * 10% closing rate = 4 sales on average total

Week 2: 80 prospect meetings (80 hours spent)

— 80 meetings * 10% closing rate = 8 sales on average total

Week 3: 120 prospect meetings (120 hours spent)

— 120 meetings * 10% closing rate = 12 sales on average total

Week 4: 160 prospect meetings (160 hours spent)

— 160 meetings * 10% closing rate = 16 sales on average total

That’s great! That’s 60% more sales. Which makes sense, because he’s spending 60% more time selling. Great. Terrific. What a champ.

But, hmm, what if he did something else with the time? For instance, what if he analyzed and saw that, “Hey, hold on a moment… in probably 2% of the meetings I take total, I’m *close* to getting the sale… but I barely miss it to an objection I can’t answer.” So he spends a few hours writing down every objection he gets on why he can’t get the sale, and he sits down to create collateral to address those. To the objection “Your product costs more,” he creates a pricing table that shows that shows the longer-term durability and less service costs, and how that turns to savings. To “You seem like a small company, why don’t we go with the big guy in the field?” he goes to two of his best customers, and films a video testimonial where the customer says “These are great, they’re so responsive, I’d never use a big heartless corporation that doesn’t care ever again; I get such great service and I love these guys.” It takes him 30 hours to build all this collateral out, get the videos, get them edited, get the pricing table accurate and cited and such.

Week 1:

“Sell harder”: 40 meetings, 10% closing rate = 4 sales total

“Build collateral”: 25 meetings, 10% closing rate = 2.5 sales total

Week 2:

“Sell harder”: 80 prospect meetings, 10% closing rate = 8 sales total

“Build collateral”: 50 meetings, 10% closing rate = 5 sales total

Okay, the guy lost three sales. What is this guy, a moron screwing around with his iPhone video camera and making some paperwork? He’s not all-star like Captain Sell-Harder with his beefy linear gains.

But wait, our collateral-builder is done. So let’s say he now shifts to “selling harder” and just does maximum meetings like his colleague.

Week 3:

“Sell harder”: 120 prospect meetings, 10% closing rate = 12 sales total

“Collateral built”: 50 meetings at 10% closing rate pre-collateral = 5 sales, then 40 meetings at 12% closing rate = 4.8 average sales = 9.8 sales total

Week 4:

“Sell harder”: 160 prospect meetings, 10% closing rate = 16 sales total

“Collateral built”: 50 meetings at 10% closing rate pre-collateral = 5 sales, then 80 meetings at 12% closing rate = 9.6 average sales = 14.6  sales total

Week 5:

“Sell harder”: 200 prospect meetings, 10% closing rate = 20 sales total

“Collateral built”: 50 meetings at 10% closing rate pre-collateral = 5 sales, then 120 meetings at 12% closing rate = 14.4 average sales = 19.4 sales total

Okay, so after Week 5, dumb people are still crowing in our collateral-builder multiplier’s direction. “You did all that work, and you’re still behind in sales!!” Uh-huh, well, I wonder what happens next…

Week 6:

“Sell harder”: 240 prospect meetings, 10% closing rate = 24 sales total

“Collateral built”: 50 meetings at 10% closing rate pre-collateral = 5 sales, then 160 meetings at 12% closing rate = 19.2 average sales = 24.2 sales total

Hmm.

Week 7:

“Sell harder”: 280 prospect meetings, 10% closing rate = 28 sales total

“Collateral built”: 50 meetings at 10% closing rate pre-collateral = 5 sales, then 200 meetings at 12% closing rate = 24 average sales = 29 sales total

The numbers will further diverge from there.

Week 20:

Sell harder: 800 prospect meetings, 10% closing rate = 80 sales total

Collateral built: 50 meetings at old 10% closing = 5 sales, then 720 meetings at 12% closing rate = 86.4 sales, 91.4 sales total

Week 30:

Sell harder: 120 sales

Collateral built: 139.4 sales

Week 50:

Sell harder: 200 sales

Collateral built: 235.4 sales

Why don’t the numbers diverge as rapidly as the Health example last time? Remember, our collateral-builder only invested in getting a multiplier ONCE, only spending 30 hours on it, and then just went to working as hard as possible and not looking for any process improvements. Nevertheless, after a year, he’s going to sell about 18% more for his two weeks of collateral building. (The next year, he’ll sell exactly 20% more: going from a 10% closing rate to a 12% closing rate is a 20% increase.)

That’s really not so bad for two weeks of work. If they’re both on commission and get paid $500 per sale, Sell Harder (Linear Addition) pulls down $100,000 after Week 50, and Collateral Built (Multiplier) pulls down $117,700 after Week 50. $17,700 for two weeks of thinking smartly about the problem, and then doing everything else exactly the same. It’s really not so bad.

Again, there’s no mathematical trickery here. If anything, with an unrefined sales process, there’s much larger gains than this available.

Once, I was working with one of my clients who was an owner/CEO who provided specialized services to Fortune 500 companies in an expensive multi-step sales process. After being on retainer with his company for around three months and making some good moderate improvements, I just started to have some overwhelming feelings that certain types of deals “that really look like they’re going to happen” were actually garbage.

It was vague and hazy and I couldn’t explain it, but I insisted on taking down certain types of data and adding a few simple parameters to track and see which deals closed.

Eventually, we found two factors that, when present, we had a 70%+ closing rate, and if they weren’t there, we were well under 15% (and they were worse clients, and caused most headaches, etc, etc).

We promptly installed a process that extremely deprioritized prospects that didn’t fit that criteria, we changed our payment terms, and just quickly made “take it or leave it” offers to firms and buyers that didn’t fit our criteria instead of investing in requirements-getting, getting approved as a vendor by their procurement processes, and all the rigamarole that comes with that.

Basically, our numbers did something like this —

Month 1: 25 prospect first interactions (25 hours), 20 prospects to sales stage 2 (40 hours), 15 contracts bid on (150 hours), 4.5 sales total in 215 hours

We realized that around one-thirds of the leads were “highly qualified” (70%+ closing) and two-thirds were “not so highly qualified” (sub-15% closing). Also, when we did that, our closing on highly qualified prospects took a slight bump to around 80%, since we could give them more bandwidth. (It didn’t even really take longer, just with less chaos going on, clear thinking prevailed.)

Thus we modified to:

Month 2: 25 prospect first interactions (25 hours), 15 prospects to sales stage 2 (30 hours), 5 contracts bid on (50 hours), 4 sales total in 105 hours

I’ve simplified the numbers a bit, but that’s the general idea — we kept close to the same sales volume in less than half the time because there was a whole cohort that took lots of time and produced no results.

These numbers often occur in young businesses that haven’t sat down and done some rigorous math. Really, this isn’t mathematical trickery. Obviously, a mature company like Xerox likely won’t have such gigantic boosts lying around (or, perhaps they do) but even small multiplicative gains go a very long way, far moreso than working harder.

Of course, you can then redeploy the 110 hours saved into the newly more efficient process… if you add prospects of the same qualification level to the top of the sales process because you want to be 215 hours on sales that month, the numbers would look like this:

Month 3: 50 prospect first interactions (50 hours), 30 prospects to sales stage 2 (60 hours), 10 contracts bid on (100 hours), 8 sales average in 210 hours.

So yeah, roughly doubling sales in slightly less than the same amount of time.

Better “qualifying” in sales — or rather dis-qualifying people who aren’t likely to be buyers — can produce staggering increases like this. If you’ve already got something like a good process going, multiplication is so much more powerful than addition over the long-term, it’s not even funny.

Again, this isn’t mathematical shenanigans. There’s all kinds of little math problems where you phrase a question oddly and get some odd unexpected result; those things are like riddles which might be fun and good for a laugh, but are mostly useless.

No, no, this isn’t that. Getting a multiplicative gain anywhere stacks up to so much radically more than linear additive gains that it’s almost unbelievable until you start working with it.

Section V.

V 1. Sacrifice

Why don't we all build gamebreakingly powerful builds, both when we play a difficult computer game and, of course, in our everyday lives?

The answer is one no one wants to hear: sacrifice.

Many video games have a level cap; "Level 20" is the highest level in the game.

Every level, you get 3 stat points, 1 class point, and 2 generic points. That means at Level 20 you'll have:

60 stat points 
20 class points 
40 generic points

Maybe there's some cool once-off quests where you get some bonus points; you could add those to the totals above.

But here's the point -- with a level cap, you know in advance what builds are mathematically possible.

And you need to choose.

I already told you about "Fast Metabolism" in Tales of Maj'eyal. It takes your early-game healing rate on a berserker from pitiful to actually quite good.

The question is, do you want to spend 1 or your precious class points on it?

You don't get to max every stat and ability -- you have to pick your build.

And again, the Timeless+Unstoppable combo renders healing rate almost irrelevant.

The problem, of course, is you don't get access to the Timeless and Unstoppable abilities until around level 24, and they aren't excellent until around level 30.

That means the first half of the game, you don't have your killer combo. Health recovery rate still matters, and yours is pathetic. The player who takes the linear increase to health really does make those first few levels easier to play.

The player who says, "Okay, I'm going to take a slight multiplicative boost to speed, accuracy, or damage even though it doesn't pay off as well in the beginning" -- that player is set up for a more difficult early game, but for vastly more power later.

In a game that you're familiar with, you know how many levels you get, you know what abilities become available with, maybe you even know what the challenges are that are coming up.

Sacrificing present-toughness for future-toughness isn't always a good idea, of course. You have to ask yourself some questions. 

Can you survive right now if you take the long-term multiplicative gain? If you can't, make you need to take the linear gain to get to the next level. In real life, if you're on the verge of bankruptcy, maybe you need to take some linear pay gains instead of investing in multiplicative or exponential longer-term payoffs. Cashflow matters.

It might be worth asking if you're going to play the game through to the end. If you know you're firing up the game and you're going to play through the first few dungeons only and then delete it from your computer, then do whatever seems most fun for that session. 

But if the game is hard enough, and you can afford the sacrifice, you can wind up vastly more powerful if you sacrifice things irrelevant to the core build. The Timeless+Unstoppable berserker doesn't care about his health recovery rate; it's almost all about speed and damage, with a little bit of status defenses being important. If you cross the threshold where status effects aren't a threat to you, you basically only want speed and damage after that. Total health, health recovery, armor, dodging -- none of these matter. You're unkillable while Unstoppable is active; Timeless makes it last a long time; make yourself fast and do massive impact in that invincible window.

But that means sacrificing irrelevancies. No armor, no dodging, minimal investment in health, no damage resistance, no healing rate boosts -- this, of course, can be unpleasant until your combinations come together.

When you play a difficult and careful early game and get through it, you get insanely ridiculously tough later.

When you have 40 attack, it's very hard to see how a permanent +4% can be worth so much more than a +10... but if your final attack score is 800, it's the difference between +10 and +32. If there's multiple opportunities like that (and there usually are), you might wind up literally twice or three times tougher...

...and twice or three times tougher might not be "double the betterness" -- if there's a boss who can do a complete heal every two turns with 2000 health, the difference between 840 damage per turn and 1100 damage per turn is the difference between being able to beat that boss at all, or having it be effectively invincible against you.

If you don't sacrifice in TOME, if you do "a little of this, and a little of that" haphazardly, at no point will the roof collapse on you, showing you the folly of your ways. Things just gradually get harder than they would otherwise be, if you were doing things in a more long-term fashion.

You're never explicitly told this. If you haven't run any of the math, you might not even realize how underpowered the character you’re building is. And if you only play on low difficulties, maybe it's a moot point whether you pay any attention to the math and combinations.

But gradually, the character built long-term is able to move faster through challenges, going to places that are safe to him and would be dangerous to the sloppily built character, and then a "rich get richer" effect takes over -- more powerful items, money, quest rewards become available. The long-term built character that sacrificed early gains that fall off, later on, is moving much faster... life becomes a slog for the character who is built haphazardly, as every battle is a fight to the death, whereas the long-term built character breezes through, thus leveling quicker and safer, with less stress.

Optional ultra-powerful bosses with ultra-powerful rewards aren't available to the sloppily built character; the well-built character can take these challenges and get their rewards, which further makes things easier.

And again -- this is just math and planning. Deserve's got nothing to do with it.

V 2. 168

Real life doesn't have specific points where you level up, with explicit points to be distributed between your stats and abilities.

As such, it helps a lot to make some mental models of what you want to achieve in the world, to ensure you're progressing at a rate that's pleasing to you.

The first and most obvious constraint is that there are exactly 168 hours every week.

You can almost always do something worthwhile in a week. A week is a rather long time. If you got at least a minor gain each week, that's 52 gains each year. That's pretty good.

But, in order to get gains, you might actually have to sit down with a piece of paper and figure out what's required to get the stat, trait, or skill boost that you want.

We mentioned previously the smart salesperson who invested 30 hours in documenting, researching, and building collateral to answer the most common objections, and how that increased his sales closing rate -- permanently.

That sounds all well and good; it is all well and good. In our fictional example, his 30 hours of diligent work made him around $17,000 in the first year he did, and he'll be able to reap those benefits as long as he's selling the same types of products and services. (Furthermore, he's a little smarter and more experience, so there's probably some long-term benefits even if he changes career or job.)

If you're playing a video game and there's a quest-giver that says, "Hey, go kill this rabid bear, and I'll give you +2 toughness forever." Is there a catch? There's no catch. Can you take the bear out? You can take the bear out.

What do you do? You go take out the rabid bear and get tougher, forever.

Real life works similarly, but often the "quests" of real life are much more subtle, hidden in plain sight. It's not exactly a novel idea to prepare answers to the most common objections in sales. Preparing explicit collateral, documents, and videos that very persuasively answer objections is a little more rare, but this is not exactly a Nobel Prize quality innovation.

And yet, most salespeople do not do it as individuals, and probably even a majority of businesses do not do it.

Why?

"Too busy" is probably the answer you'd hear. If we want to be kind, let's them have their "too busy" answer. But privately, just between us high-achieving people, let's replace in our mind "too short-sighted" as what's really going on.

Run the math! If you're selling and 10 out of 100 people you present to buy from you, and there's a few more that you're close to closing deals with, it's really worth investing the time to improving so that you can make those sales.

Find the time. It's worth it.

But again, sacrifice. You might need to slow down on frantic "work harder" efforts... much of which are likely motivated less by an actual desire to succeed and achieve results, and more by some vague impression that equates being busy with being successful (as opposed to just looking to be effective).

You don't need to start with a heroic effort to grab gains; you don't need to go from sitting around lazily to conquering the enemy's biggest fortress.

But you can do more to get multipliers and get your build in place.

In 1910, the English author Arnold Bennett wrote a marvelous short work called "How to Live on 24 Hours Per Day."

It's worth reading. One of the recommendations he makes is to find a mere 7.5 hours per week to dedicate to a program of improvement -- any improvement at all.

He then rebuts the idea that this is a "trifling effort" --

"It is not really a trifling effort, as those will discover who have yet to essay it. To "clear" even seven hours and a half from the jungle is passably difficult. For some sacrifice has to be made. One may have spent one's time badly, but one did spend it; one did do something with it, however ill-advised that something may have been. To do something else means a change of habits.

"And habits are the very dickens to change! Further, any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts. If you imagine that you will be able to devote seven hours and a half a week to serious, continuous effort, and still live your old life, you are mistaken. I repeat that some sacrifice, and an immense deal of volition, will be necessary. And it is because I know the difficulty, it is because I know the almost disastrous effect of failure in such an enterprise, that I earnestly advise a very humble beginning. You must safeguard your self-respect. Self-respect is at the root of all purposefulness, and a failure in an enterprise deliberately planned deals a desperate wound at one's self-respect. Hence I iterate and reiterate: Start quietly, unostentatiously."

You want two free levels in toughness? It's a good idea to go get them. When, then, are you going to clear the forest?

Bennett recommends you start quietly and unostentatiously. That's sage advice. I recommend a step further -- actually go in and figure out how to conservatively get those next gains.

Too often, a person in a bit of a slump gets inspired, but instead of being conservative, reaches for some basically unsustainable (and perhaps entirely unachievable) goal, and perhaps doesn't carve out the resources needed to reach the goal at all.

In a video game, you increase your stats by leveling. If you want 6 points in strength and you get 3 points per level... you're going to need to go level up twice to get your stat points.

In real life, you increase your stats by spending time that translates to gains. You must actually find and dedicate the time to do it.

This is a very practical matter, not a theoretical matter. The most likely times to dedicate to improvement projects are first thing in the morning, during a long lunch, immediately after work, or in a dedicated block of time on the weekend.

Where will your time come from? Where will your level-ups come from? Bennett's guidance of targeting 7.5 hours per week is sound; perhaps even 3.5 hours would be enough to start, which is only 30 minutes per day.

But it needs to be found and dedicated. You get your levels by pouring the time into the activities that cause the level-ups. 

V 3. Constructing One's Build, I: Overview

If you're playing a game that's generally unforgiving, you need to intentionally take and build advantages that work together. Randomly doing "a little of this and a little of that" won't get the job done.

In real life and in deep games, you've got limited resources. You need to use them well to get the maximum yield, to make yourself effective, and to keep yourself out of situations that will cause you to fail.

So let's look at one game element again: health. We'll look at Tales of Maj'eyal.

Again, you start the game with around 100 health, give or take, and a rather poor healing rate. Towards the end of the game, your health will range from 800 to maybe 2000 at the very most. 

Your health dropping to zero is what kills you in the game. If you don't take a smart approach to health, you die.

Here's a few ways you can approach health management:

1. Have very high health. If the most damage any enemy can do is 20 and you have 700 health, nothing is very threatening.

2. Reduce incoming damage so that moderate health is more than enough. If you have 200 health but the most damage any enemy can do to you is 5 damage, nothing is very threatening.

3. Out-heal any incoming damage. If you heal 500 health per turn every turn without fail, you can safely face up to 5 enemies simultaneously that do 100 damage per turn.

4. Never take damage by disabling or killing enemies before they can get in range to hurt you.

5. Never take damage by having summons or allies take the front row between you and the enemy.

6. Make damage entirely irrelevant, with something like a shield that absorbs the entirety of an attack regardless of the amount of damage, or making it so damage can't kill you because your health can't drop below 1.

7. Closely manage and tactically navigate battles to keep the possible damage taken low by using things ranged weapons, stealth, teleportation, speed, and limiting the scope of combat.

There might be other approaches. There's certainly combinations of the above approaches.

To win the game, you need to be able to get one of the above methods, or some combination of them, working well enough to get through every mandatory encounter.

Now, not all games require fighting; those games offer lots of other options. Planescape: Torment, Nethack, and the Fallout series were notable having dialog-based options or other non-combat options to navigate most encounters in the game. But Tales of Maj'eyal requires combat frequently to advance the plot; there's no significant non-combat options to winning, and zero health is what kills you, so you need to manage your health.

There’s other considerations besides health, obviously. But we can use this as a lens to analyze your build and build construction.

V 3. Constructing One's Build, II: Cohesion

Everything we've talked about so far -- multipliers, exponential instead of linear gains, combinations, gamebreakers, sacrifice, etc -- you want to employ all these factors to get cohesion in your build.

The short description of the seven approaches to health listed previously could be --

1. Very high health.
2. High damage reduction.
3. High healing/regeneration.
4. Disable/kill before enemy can threaten.
5. Friendly tank between you and enemy.
6. Make health irrelevant.
7. Tactically manage damage carefully.

I would like to again remind you: We have limited resources. We can't do all of these effectively. Nor would we want to!

Some of these combine very well; others do not.

For instance, #6 -- "Make health irrelevant" -- that obviously combines horrendously poorly with #1 -- "Very high health."

Well, if you had infinite resources, sure, you'd do both. You don't have infinite resources, so you can’t think that way. You need cohesion with your limited resources to be effective and win.

#1 and #3 combine rather well. Regeneration is such that it happens over time, and very few things are aggravating as when you've got a big regeneration effective going and barely die.

Likewise, #4 and #7 are natural great combinations. If you can one-shot kill a really nasty enemy and then immediately teleport off, recover your resources, and do it again, you've got a viable build. Disabling effects do largely the same thing: an archer without much health would do well to have the ability to stop tough melee enemies from closing to hand-to-hand combat range with paralysis, stuns, confusion, etc.

#3 and #5 combo relatively poorly by themselves. Again, if you have a high heal/regeneration rate, you're comfortable soaking up damage at a gradual rate. Summons or allies are all about taking damage for you, and keeping you out of the fray.

Why does this matter? Well, if you can choose between two abilities, one of which is damage reduction and the other is health regeneration rate -- if you're using summons heavily, you probably want damage reduction for when someone does break through past your summons, perhaps with an area attack spell.

The reason this matters is because cohesion means looking at qualitative factors, not just numbers.

If you can get a regeneration effect that's +150 health per turn, or you can get a damage reduction that's -70 damage per turn, which do you choose? 

The naive answer is to take the +150 health, because it's a bigger number. Indeed, in some situations, it is the better one. If you have a huge pool of health and the enemies do a very high amount of damage, the +150 regeneration will perform better.

Here's the problem: you can't regenerate above your current health. If you've got 200 health exactly, the +150 per turn means almost a full heal per turn. That's pretty good.

But if there's enemies that do 100 damage per turn, and two of them hit you simultaneously, you die and your regeneration did nothing. In that case, 200 - 100 - 100 = 0, dead. Whereas -70 damage reduction would have meant 200 - 30 - 100 = 70 health left, and you can act or do something.

Again, this isn't some rare tricky situation; this is not some mathematical riddle. Regeneration works after you've taken damage, so you've got to be able to survive the damage for it to be useful. 

Thus, regeneration combines well with high health. A build that's looking to avoid damage primarily via method #5 (friendly tank in front of you) that doesn't have high health would often do better with damage reduction, even if it's a lower absolute number.

How do you determine what's important or not, and what's viable or not? Good question...

V 5. Constructing One's Build, III: Weaknesses and Constraints

Before we go any further, this is very important:

Your weaknesses and constraints are just as important to pay attention to as your strengths.

Depending on what year you're reading this, maybe the craze has finally been put to bed, but one of the strangest experiences of my early 20's was the explosion of a quasi-religious mystical idea called "The Secret" which claimed there was something called "The Law of Attraction." Apparently, this "Law of Attraction" meant whatever your thought about would get "vibrated to you by the universe."

The more hardcore adherents of this idea even went as far as to say that, when tragedies happened, it was due to the person who the tragedy happened causing it by their thoughts.

This philosophy preyed on a number of human biases -- when we make a prediction and it comes true, we remember it; when we're mistaken, we tend to forget it.

People of low skill can't tell why things are going wrong -- Dunning and Kreuger proved that; in fact, if you're very bad at something, you're most likely to way overrate yourself, because you're too bad at the task to even know what real skill looks like.

And indeed, there are two useful points out of this quasi-mysticism: sometimes people do cause what they're afraid of. The shoplifter is hoping people don't know notice what he's up to and he walks in an odd way that causes him to stand out, and he's arrested. Likewise, paying attention to what you want in life is a pretty good idea.

I'm not here to bash "The Secret"; it's been done thoroughly, and it's already firmly in retreat culturally. But I think this Secret-like philosophy pervades far too much of human thinking.

“The Secret” would have you avoid thinking about downsides, risks, and negative consequences that could be prevented with some forethought.

I know lots of entrepreneurs and people who build organizations. It’s a hard thing to do. It requires morale. And they look to keep their morale up by focusing on the positive.

That's fine; that's good; that's all well and good... but isn't it worth doing a little contingency planning?

Contingency planning, actually, is one of those things that has made me look much smarter than I really am. 

It goes like this:

1. "What could go wrong here?"

2. "What will I do if that happens?"

I know this sounds insane, but most young ambitious Americans I meet simply do not do this.

They go in and say, "I'm going to get the sale! I'm going to close the deal! I'm going to get the job!"

They go all-out for it. It often works. They do out-perform and out-achieve their peers. I’m not saying there’s no merit to this extreme optimism. Yet.

When something does go wrong -- and inevitably, something goes wrong -- they're dumbfounded. The reply sounds like, "That wasn't supposed to happen..."

Sometimes I talk to a young service provider -- say, a web designer -- and I ask, "What are you going to do if the final invoice is paid late?"

The answer is often: "Umm, uhh, I don't know, I hope that doesn't happen. I'll deal with it if it does."

Wrong answer! 

You can look much, much, much smarter than you are by thinking these things through in advance.

If you've got some experience, you know there's generally a few ways that invoices get paid late. This isn't all of the list, but here's a short list:

1. General sloppiness and lateness in paying bills. (This is the most common.)

2. The other side having internal problems, like cashflow or a key employee quitting or even something personal like the CEO’s marriage falling apart.

3. Then there's times where there's hidden problems with the work done. This could be within your control (they don't like the colors you chose, but haven't gotten around to telling you) or it could have nothing to do with you (the CEO likes your work, but the head of IT hates it and wants to scuttle the work even though it's already complete).

4. And finally, there's when the other side actually have some evil intent. This is rare in the general business landscape, but sadly too common for young service providers. (Veteran businesspeople that do honest good business eventually settle in with a series of providers they use commonly and regularly, and get a good rapport going. This saves on cost, means mutual trust, means the service provider doesn't need to get up to speed because they already know the goals/parameters of the business... thus, if someone is looking for a new service provider, they're statistically far more likely to be a problematic person. Most buyers are good people, this is true, but all bad buyers are constantly looking for new people to buy from.)

Here's the thing: these four cases of the late invoice are not novel; they apply to almost all service providers that get some sort of paid-on-completion. 

Thus, you can think this through beforehand. What days do you remind the client of an invoice to be paid? What's your schedule of email, letter, calling?

Most veteran service providers actually pre-write their communications, so they don't get emotional in the moment. Most young people just hope this stuff doesn't happen, and take the counterproductive "I'll deal with it if it comes up" tack.

You can ask yourself how you deal with all of these scenarios. #1 is handled by a series of communications on a regular schedule. How you handle #2 is an interesting question: when do you compromise, to what extent, how much can you be flexible if at all? #2 is the one that benefits most from foresight.

#3 is also critical, because your language matters a lot if you get pushback. The line, "If you'll review our contract, what you're asking for is out of the scope -- but, you know what? I want to make my clients happy. I can make this change gratis for you, because I want you to be happy. But the final invoice is still due right now -- I think that's very fair, don't you?" And then what do you say if they reply, "Well I don't want to pay you until everything is done and the IT manager is happy and the new colors are in." Perhaps something like, "I understand entirely. I'll work extra here to make you happy -- because I care about all my clients. But my policy, and this applies to everyone, is not to give an extension on paying an invoice. If I did it for you because of this IT manager situation, I'd have to offer it to all of my clients... it's not fair to give different terms at different times; I believe in transparency and keeping my word. So, I can't accept late payment. I can make the changes you asked for -- again, it's off-scope of our contract, I'm doing this because I care about your happiness and success -- but the invoice is due. Can you get paid by Tuesday?"

#4 is also important to at least consider. If the person just says, "We decided not to pay you. Just because we can. Ha hah. Sue us if you want to" -- I've seen this in developing countries; this awfulness happens more often than you'd think. I dated a woman in Beijing was the #2 salesperson in high-end complex multi-million dollar security sales; the Chinese firm she worked for fired her when she had somewhere between $100,000 and $200,000 in commissions due to her; her commission was 1% of the sale price. She was effective because she worked really well with technical people and could help design technical requirements well, instead of just giving presentations and hoping people bought. She made them tons of money, but they fired her because "no one is worth that much money; you don't deserve it."

This happened to her the year before she met me. I was aghast when I heard the story, I wanted to go on the warpath. She thought it fruitless, they had a lot of pull in local affairs. She got none of the money, though she did quickly get another excellent job and become a top performer there.

Here's the thing, though: when a single purchaser owes you a lot of money, what will you do if they default on paying you? How about if it's purely out of bad intentions?

She could have seen this coming: they paid her late and pressed her to keep working for three months, making some excuses or other, before they pulled the trigger. The company wasn't insolvent or having problems; they're still in business and the owner is still driving fancy cars and wearing watches that cost more than this woman’s parents spend in half a year out in the provinces. (She supports them.)

I get ticked off just thinking about this, but it's another case of how "I hope that doesn't happen" and "I don't want to cause problems by speaking up" works against you.

After they went six weeks late on paying her commissions, she could have asked senior management if something was seriously wrong. Once she ascertained that it wasn't that, wasn't case #2 of internal problems nor case #3 of her not delivering (she was still doing exceptional, right up until the end), then she could have slowed down from closing deals and giving presentations and networking, and instead invested time in getting to know a top law firm.

I don't know if top Chinese law firms will work on contingency. Even if not, she might have started to set aside a legal budget to send them at least a nasty letter if the worst came to happen. She had another six weeks before they dropped the ax; she could have used that time to go network and perhaps make a connection or two in local government, or maybe even go make a couple connections with journalists if she could find one working on the future of how warehouses and shipping facilities are using technology to increase efficiency and keep goods safe.

She was very focused on positive thinking, closing deals, cooperation, win/win. That's good; that's really good. That's the root of success. Really, it does come first.

But you also need to consider worst-case scenarios. If she'd slowed down from her upside just a bit to protect her downside, she might have warded off the shenanigans entirely. A single high-profile keynote speech or presentation at a trade show with government officials there or even the right university department might have stopped this from happening. If she did have a good relationship with an effective lawyer, she could have gotten into action very quickly after they made their hostilities known -- after a destructive and idiot short-term move like that, she's probably unlikely to get 100% of her commissions... but maybe she could have gotten them to pay out 50% or 70% if she'd had her ducks lined up.

All that requires asking, 

1. "What could go wrong here?"

2. "What will I do if that happens?"

V 6. Constructing One's Build, IV: Belgium and Switzerland

Not to beat on the anti-Secret drum too hard, but I do want to leave you with one last case study here.

Wikipedia covers it well enough:

"As Belgium had suffered so much damage in World War I, there was little appetite within the country to involve itself in any potential European conflict. In October 1936, King Leopold III announced that Belgium would remain neutral in the event of another war in Europe. To this end, the Belgian government tried to steer a path away from alliances: leaving the Locarno Treaty, repudiating a defence pact with France signed in 1920 and receiving a guarantee of neutrality from Nazi Germany in 1937.”

The Nazi guarantee was written pretty strongly –

“The German Government considers that the inviolability and integrity of Belgium are common interests of the Western Powers. It confirms its determination that in no circumstances will it impair this inviolability and integrity and that it will at all times respect Belgian territory...”

The outcome?

"The government's policy of neutrality had left Belgium with an outdated and ill-equipped army and air force. Above all, the army possessed only 16 battle tanks between its two cavalry divisions for political reasons as they had been considered too "aggressive" for the army of a neutral power. The air force, hurriedly reorganised into the Territorial Air Defence in May 1940, was taken by surprise and could only field 180 serviceable aircraft out of its total of 234.The military held out against German forces for 18 days..."

Compare Switzerland:

"The Swiss National Redoubt was a defensive plan developed by the Swiss government beginning in the 1880s to respond to foreign invasion. In the opening years of World War II the plan was expanded and refined to deal with a potential German invasion. The German plan, Operation Tannenbaum, was real, but was never carried out. The National Redoubt primarily refers to the fortifications begun in the 1880s that secured the mountainous central part of Switzerland, providing a defended refuge for a retreating Swiss army [...] [and] was planned as a nearly impregnable complex of fortifications that would deny an aggressor passage over or through the Alps by controlling the major passes and the railway tunnels running north-to-south through the region. This strategy was intended to deter an invasion altogether by denying Switzerland's crucial transportation infrastructure to an aggressor."

Did they do a good job with this?

"The National Redoubt fortifications, when compared to contemporary French, Belgian, German or Czech fortifications, were much more extensive and heavily armed than the Maginot Line, the Belgian border fortifications, the Siegfried Line or the Czechoslovak border fortifications. While the Maginot fortifications were typically armed with short-barreled 75mm fortress howitzers or 120mm mortar/howitzers, the Swiss fortifications were armed with 75mm and 120mm guns, upgraded in the 1950s to 105mm and 150mm guns. The Swiss guns were typically casemate-mounted or turret-mounted long guns, not howitzers, and were more akin to naval guns than fortress guns. Because they were typically mounted on inaccessible cliffs or plateaus with an advantage of enfilade over any possible opposing force, they were not exposed to infantry attack or direct artillery fire and could afford to have exposed gun barrels. The French positions, which could be targeted by anti-tank weapons or infantry, avoided any exposed gun tubes."

The result?

"At the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Switzerland immediately began to mobilize for a possible invasion. The entire country was fully mobilized in only three days. The Swiss government began to fortify positions throughout the country. In the course of the war, detailed invasion plans were drawn up by the German military command, such as Operation Tannenbaum, but Switzerland was never attacked."

Of course, the Secretists would claim the opposite is true: Switzerland spent a lot of time thinking about war, and wound up peaceful and neutral. Belgium did everything they could to think about neutrality, and wound up occupied by the Nazis.

We can see here our themes --

Cohesion: The Swiss looked to hold the mountains, deny transport, and make it a very expensive attritional guerrilla war if the Axis invaded.

Contingency planning: The Swiss played war games exercises simulating invasions repeatedly. When the blitzkrieg started raging through Western Europe, they were able to mobilize their entire force in three days.

A huge blindspot among young ambitious Americans is not considering downside enough. Be like the Swiss.

Now, let us turn from the seemingly overwhelmingly high stakes of world wars, and back to learning lessons from the infinitely lower stakes of video games.

V 7. Constructing One's Build, V: Diminishing Returns, Weaknesses, and Whither Flame Mastery?

Again, crucially:

You don't have unlimited resources.

Thus, you need to invest wisely and gain multipliers and combinations.

Cohesion is the rule. 

But cohesion has a flipside danger if taken too far: diminishing returns.

Let's talk about damage. Let's say you're playing a fantasy game and you've got a character that has an attack you always begin fights with that dazes the enemy with 100% success. Then you've set up a cohesive build where you automatically critical hit an enemy who is dazed and you have huge multipliers when you do a critical hit.

Let’s say you’re choosing equipment for this build. You probably want things that combo and are cohesive with what you’ve chosen.

Thus, you maybe take armor like this:

*Two rings of fiery vengeance: When you critical hit, you deal fire damage equal to the melee damage you dealt.

*Gauntlets of impact: +20% melee damage.

*Boots of the Bold-Hearted: When you critical hit, you instantly do two free attacks up to once per turn.

*Cuirass of the Fallen Ranger: You may critical hit more than once per turn.

*Blue-coral Razor: A good short sword that doubles critical hit damage.

If you're doing 50 damage on a normal attack and a critical hit attack is double damage, then your daze/attack combination with that armor would be --

Turn one: Daze, 50 damage with +20% melee = 60 damage total. Turn two: Automatic critical hit, 100 damage with +20% melee is 120 damage; double critical hit damage is 240; two rings of fiery impact means 480 more fire damage for 720 damage total... which triggers two more attacks, which also critical (they're still dazed), for 720 damage twice more.

Thus, your normal damage rate is 50 per turn... but with this build specialized around critical hits, you do a whopping 2160 damage to a dazed enemy on a single turn.

"Is that really possible? Is a game broken if that's possible?" The answer to the first question is yes; the answer to the second question is no.

Most likely, it took a lot of skill points and specialization to get a Dazing Attack that basically always hits with high accuracy. And then, automatically critically hitting when the target is dazed probably also took some pre-planning and specialization to get.

Normally, a critical hit might only happen 5% or 10% of the time. Getting two free bonus attacks when you critical hit wouldn't be a big deal if those were only +60 damage each; it's the combination with the cuirass (can critical hit more than once) and the auto-critical on a dazed enemy that makes that so lethal. 

Let's re-trace the steps of the damage, putting the armor in roughly the order it stacks.

Turn one: Daze attack

*50 base damage + 20% from gauntlets of impact = 60 damage total

Turn two: Melee attack auto-critical hit *50 base damage +20% from gauntlets of impact = 60 damage *Multiplied by two for critical hit = 120 damage *Multiplied by two for coral razor critical = 240 damage *Plus 240 damage for first ring of fiery vengeance = 480 damage *Plus 240 more damage for second ring of fiery vengeance = 720 damage *Boots of the bold-hearted triggers, two more attacks... *...cuirass means you can critical hit again; target still-dazed, another two critical hits... *50 + 20% (gauntlets) multiplied by two (critical bonus) multiplied by two (coral razor) plus 240 (fiery vengeance) plus 240 (fiery vengeance) = 720 damage *And AGAIN, *50 + 20% (gauntlets) multiplied by two (critical bonus) multiplied by two (coral razor) plus 240 (fiery vengeance) plus 240 (fiery vengeance) = 720 damage

It's instructive what removing each item costs you in damage. Take those gauntlets away and your equation looks like,

*50 damage multiplied by two (critical bonus, 100 total) multiplied by two (coral razor, 200 total) plus 200 (fiery vengeance) plus 200 (fiery vengeance) = 600 damage

If you only took that cuirass off, you still get those two free attacks, but no criticals on them (and thus no critical bonuses): that would be the first 240 damage as normal, plus a bonus attack at (50 + 20% = 60 total), plus a bonus attack at (50 + 20% = 60 total), for a total of only 360.

Take away the coral razor only, and you lose half your damage. (50 + 20% multiplied by two = 120; fiery damage is then +120, second fiery vengeance +120). 360 damage total.

Take away the boots only and you've got 240 damage.

So you can see how, when you get a great combination running, you can be devastating.

Herein lies the problem, though: what if you've got a mandatory dungeon to clear with ghosts in it, and ghosts can't be critical-hit?

We could call this the Daze/Autocritical build, and you've got the perfect gear to put it together. But look: almost all your equipment is useless if a ghost can't be critical hit.

This is why you need to always be looking for the weaknesses in your build.

The least important item to doing damage for your build against normal enemies are those gauntlets of impact, which are +20% melee damage.

Now note, if a character normally only got a critical hit 5% of the time, +20% melee damage means more damage per turn than an item that means you double damage only when you critical hit. It's the hyper-specialized Dazed/Autocritical build that means those rings of fiery vengeance, that coral razor sword, and boots of the bold-hearted are firing reliably... and then the coup de grace is that cuirass that means those two free attacks also get all the critical multipliers on them. That's why your character, who normally does a base of 50 damage, can do the ridiculously high 2160 damage reliably.

But if you can't critical hit, the whole build is broken. The only useful thing in that whole set of gear are those gauntlets, which were the least important part of the whole thing against normal enemies.

So let's say you've got this build set up, you're level 20, and you've got a series of three dungeons that are normally grueling coming up; you've got to go kill a ice dragon, lightning dragon, and ghost dragon.

All of them have around 4000 health, and all of them can be critical-hit except the ghost dragon.

You're in the last shop before you go hit the dungeons and you've got enough money to buy one artifact cloak.

One of them gives you,

"You do double fire damage."

The other one gives you,

"You do +20 light damage per attack."

You've only got enough money to buy one cloak. Which do you choose?

Well, we don't even need to do much math here. "Light" damage isn't melee damage; it won't combo with anything you're doing.

So in a standard fight, you'll do the normal 2160 on turn two wearing the Cloak of Holy Light, plus an additional +60 damage (+20 on each of the three attacks) for 2220 damage total.

The Cloak of Flame Mastery gives you double fire damage; that combines really well with your fire rings. When you critical, you do 240+240 damage (two rings of fiery vengeance)... followed by two more attacks, each giving you 240+240 fire damage. Thus, your 2160 turn two damage would become 4080 damage if you had the Cloak of Flame Mastery.

Well, that's pretty good. That means a turn two kill on the ice dragon and lightning dragon; it'll make that fight clockwork.

But... what about that ghost dragon? You can't critical it.

Your damage per turn with the Cloak of Flame Mastery does no additional damage; you don't trigger the fiery vengeance effect, because you don't critical.

So you only do 50 damage +20% (gauntlets) for 60 total per turn. That means, with the ghost dragon having 4000 health, assuming it can't heal, you're needing to survive a grueling 67 turn battle.

Meanwhile, if you chose that Cloak of Holy Light you'd do 50 damage +20% (gauntlets) + 20 (cloak) for 80 damage total, taking the battle down to 50 turns.

But wait, aren't ghosts vulnerable to light damage? Maybe they are. Let's check. Oh, yeah, they are. Light does double damage against ghosts and undead.

So it's actually 50 damage +20% (gauntlets) + 40 (cloak vs undead) for 100 damage total, making it a 40 turn battle.

Still very dangerous. Still awful. But starting to look manageable. If you can swap out another couple of your items to get higher melee damage or something that combos with light or against ghosts, you might make that fight winnable.

See, you want cohesion and that Cloak of Holy Light doesn't mesh or combo at all with your core build. 

Let's face it, if you've got a Daze/Autocritical build and you're doing 2160 turn two damage and then you see a Cloak of Flame Mastery, you're going to get really excited. That's +1440 damage; that's nuts; it's the perfect item to complete your set.

But it sounds to me like you're already set up perfectly fine to go take out the next two dragons that can be critical hit. It's overkill. You don't need it. Assuming you can still go back and buy the fire cloak later, the right move now might well be to take the Cloak of Holy Light with its piddly +40 damage instead of the beefy +1440 damage.

This is so entirely counterintuitive; yes, it makes sense when I talk it out, but when you walk into the store in this game, the shopkeeper won't say, "Hey, you're doing great damage -- but aren't you already overpowered against stuff you can critical hit? It seems like undead are going to be the bane of your existence, maybe you should pick up something to deal with that...

There's no dialog that'll tell you that. And who the heck is going to go into a store and choose +40 damage instead of +1440 damage?

But again, if you're at the point where you can expect nearly a 100% win rate against the lightning and ice dragons, you might want the fixer for your one critical weakness -- the undead that can't be critical hit.

I can't even begin to stress how counterinuitive this is. In real life and in video games, you won't notice this unless you've really thought about your weaknesses in advance.

A player that does that says to himself, "Okay, if I get the gear I'm looking for on a Daze/Autocritical build, I'm going to shred anything that can be dazed and critically hit... but if an enemy has immunities to daze or critical hits, I'm going to be in serious trouble and be extremely weak and underpowered."

If you know that in advance, you can start looking for items that help you fix and survive those situations. This Daze/Autocritical build is going to shred everything that doesn't have immunity to one of the two parts of its combo, but the majority of inventory is useless if the enemy does have immunity. You need to think that through in advance... +1440 damage is sexy, +20 (+40 against undead) is not sexy... but it might be that tiny bit of light damage that swings the battle to your favor in your most vulnerable situation.

V 8. Constructing One's Build, VI: Buy What You're Missing

In the standard fantasy roguelike game, there's broadly two ways to get new abilities:

1. Train them as part of who your character is, permanently.
2. Buy them in the form of equipment.

The following rule has some many small and medium-sized exceptions to it, but it stands as generally correct:

If there's something you're terrible at, buy it temporarily; avoid training it permanently.

In the previous example, we talked about a character in a fictional game with a "Daze/Autocritical" build -- in this case, that character would have invested permanent training in getting their "Daze Attack" high, and invested ranks to automatically get a critical hit against a dazed enemy.

The build was completed by stacking up items and weapons that have multipliers and great combinations with critical hit damage: with no items at all, the Daze/Autocritical combination would do a single 100 damage critical hit the round after you Daze. With that right equipment mix, you do 2160 damage. That's pretty cool.

But it's not cool when you're up against an enemy that can't be critically hit, thus rendering the majority of your abilities and equipment irrelevant.

We talked about a minor fix to this last time: getting a cloak that does a fixed +20 damage and a +40 damage against undead. 

While it's an imperfect solution and you're still looking at a hard fight ahead, the very nice thing about the cloak is that you can take it off.

A lot of players will have their character do "a little of this, and a little of that" to "make them more well-rounded." That's fine if the game you're playing treats you with kid gloves. In a game where one death means the game is over, the balanced approach is far more dangerous than having a gamebreaking combination in place, even with serious weaknesses.

If you do "a little of this and a little of that," you never safely above the difficulty curve. Every single level you play, every major campaign you run, every dungeon you crash -- they're all dangerous.

If you've got an exceptionally good gamebreaking combo, very little is dangerous, and you can watch out carefully for the worst situations.

So, whenever possible, you want to buy the fixes that are off-build for you.

A few examples from Tales of Maj'eyal:

In TOME, some builds have excellent damage resistance. Others do not.

Tempest Peak is an important optional early-game fight that you get some great rewards after you beat it. The boss there does a tremendous amount of lightning damage.

If you're not naturally built for lightning damage resistance, it's a terribly bad idea to put points into some damage resisting skill just to get through Tempest Peak.

But at the same time, it's early enough in the game that you probably don't have your really powerful combination fully in place yet.

The answer, of course, is to start looking for lightning resistance items as soon as you're anywhere near thinking of tackling Tempest.

Okay, that's easy enough to understand.

Here's another: there's an event in the early midgame where you can save a woman's life if you're fast enough killing four cultists in the Dark Crypt.

The cultists are casters; they don't want to engage you in direct combat. If you're a caster too, you're probably fine -- you can blast them.

But if you're not a caster and not ranged, you've got problems. The time it takes to chase them down means the woman might die.

Again, it would be really dumb to "round out" your character by putting skill points into poor quality ranged attacks if that's not how your character is built. 

Instead, your best bet is probably to buy two movement infusions: infusions can be swapped out later, and they make you very fast. That'll help you take out two of the four quickly.

Maybe you've got one ability to close rapidly -- Rush, for instance, will take out a third cultist.

Then, you want to stockpile enough magic items to be able to close with or blast the fourth cultist quickly from a distance. Controlled teleport would work. There's a few items that give you abilities like Firebreathing; if you picked up a couple ranged damage items, that could do the trick to take the fourth cultist out.

It's often tempting to go "off-build" to "round-out" your weaknesses, but it's usually a bad idea. The author Dr. Thomas Stanley does research into how wealthy people made their money, what habits they adopt, what their annual incomes are, what professions they made their money in, what their spending patterns are like, and so on.

One thing that stood out to me in Stanley's writing is that self-made millionaires and beyond almost never do "Do It Yourself" activities, and they don't look to pay the cheapest tradesman possible -- they get good plumbers, electricians, etc.

It makes sense. If you've got an annual income of $150,000 that requires you to work 50 hours per week, you've got very little discretionary time.

DIY construction, installing a new water boiler in the basement, putting in a new deck -- this isn't particularly cohesive with working as an executive, in finance, in high-end sales, and so on.

If you love working with your hands or you already got some excellent training in it when you were younger, go for it.

But the fact is, past basic maintenance, you've got to ask a couple questions: is this really an activity that supports and combines well the life I want to build? And, furthermore, can I ever be any good at this?

If you build a new deck that's against code, you didn't get the right permits, you didn't put the supports in well, you didn't treat the wood enough against the weather -- all of these are common enough mistakes -- this winds up costing a lot of time, money, and aggravation beyond what's initially projected.

You simply can’t be good at everything -- we have limited resources. If your work is demanding and you don't love something that's "off-build" for you, you're far better off finding a way to avoid that entirely (get a condo that requires less maintenance than a house) or pay the money to get it taken care of, instead of putting in the time to develop skills that could instead lead to game-breaking life gains.

V 9. Constructing One's Build, VII: One Point Wonder Caveat

We'll cover two important caveats to "buy what you're missing."

The first is if you can get really crazy gains from a very small investment of time and training. In Tales of Maj'eyal, there's an ability called "Waters of Life" that neutralizes poisons and curses without even taking a full action.

On the TOME discussion forums, players discuss strategy and builds. Sometimes an ability like Waters of Life is called "a one point wonder," meaning that a small investment in it permanently gets outsized large gains.

Even if your build handles those threats other ways, it's really worth a single skill point in it, because it's like an instant "off switch" for two headaches. It's really good.

In real life, a basic understanding of nutrition and of sleep hygiene are "one point wonders" -- a couple weeks of serious study can lead to permanent life enhancing benefits.

Negotiation is a one-point wonder unless you're in a really rare role like a tenured research professor with no material needs who largely works solo. The very basics of negotiation -- knowing your BATNA (Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreement; your "next best option" if the negotiation doesn't go through), understanding the concept of a person's "negotiating range," knowing how to do basic research and get comps, and understanding the basic idea behind making offers and concessions and asking for offers and concessions graciously -- a single focused burst of training in this pays off incredibly well, even if your "life build" doesn't include much people/verbal skills. Getting the basics of this down just saves so much money, time, and headache that it's well-worth anyone doing some training in it.

Basic awareness of your emotions and impulses is worth investing some training in -- mindfulness meditation is the most common way to train that awareness up.

V 10 Build Construction VIII Threshold Caveat

If you can cross a key threshold, even if it's off-build, it might be worth doing.

Let's say you're running that Daze/Autocritical build we talked about earlier. Undead can't be critically hit and that's a big problem for you.

If there's an ability called "Banish" that, with 5 skill points in it, can banish any type of undead resulting in getting no experience points, but removing them from the battlefield -- that might be worth doing.

It's not cohesive. Banish has nothing to do with your core build, which is all about having Daze hit and then doing a massive overwhelming critical damage.

But if undead are your only major threat, and investing a few levels into Banish just handles that entirely, it might be worth doing.

Whenever you can completely eliminate a major threat, it's worth considering. Again, you have to look at the opportunity costs and tradeoffs; if you wind up with "a little of this and a little of that" and you're underpowered, that's not a way to win.

But if you're gamebreakingly powerful but with just one or two critical weaknesses, and you can eliminate one of those, it's worth strongly considering.

For instance, high-income professions that require high hours generally don't combo well with learning advanced investing skills. If you're a dentist, you're probably better off becoming the best dentist in your city, getting Board Certified, getting some specialist ability, and otherwise investing your time into becoming excellent at what you do. The gains from going beyond the basics of investing probably aren't worth it -- you could buy a broad index fund that just tracks the stock market and put that on autopilot; the amount of research and learning about securities analysis and all that time reading financial statements to maybe outperform the market by a bit... it's not worth it. It doesn't combo well. It's not cohesive. It's being all over the place.

But, but, but -- there are a few huge weaknesses in the build of high-earning high-labor professions. First, your income falls incredibly fast if you scale your hours back (whether intentionally to pursue other interests, time with family, etc; or unintentionally through injury, disability, needing to take care of a sick parent, etc). Second, you get into the highest tax brackets fast, and you rapidly run out of deductions and tax-deferred investing accounts.

Interestingly, both of those weaknesses in build are potentially solved by real estate: learning how to invest in commercial real estate effectively takes some time and it's not strictly on-build, but there's a reason that dentists, doctors, and lawyers make up such a large amount of the real estate purchases in America: it fixes both of those potential major weaknesses.

Real estate has all sorts of tax-advantaged properties in the United States, including depreciating the property, writing off mortgage interest, and being able to invest primarily for property price appreciation which isn't taxed until sold, and even then can be tax-deferred if invested in another property.

Governance changes and the tax code changes, but putting a few points into commercial real estate investing and a few points into understanding taxes likely makes sense for a high-earning high-labor-hours professional.

It doesn't "straight multiply" the way the dentist who builds a great practice, great skill, great reputation, and gets the ability to do the most modern procedures effectively.

That should obviously come first. If we were using this as a metaphor to video games, the profession might be putting skill points from Level 1 to Level 10 into getting through law school, med school, dental school. Level 11 to Level 20 would be well-spent on building skill, quality, reputation, and perhaps additional specialization. Level 21 to 25, the basic pieces are in place, and it's worth taking some of those "one point wonders" while continuing to finish specializations and get to the forefront of the profession.

But okay, you're Level 25 now. The game goes to Level 50. Do you want to keep doubling down on the great combo you've got running, or maybe do you want to start fixing some holes in your build? Real estate isn't magical or anything, there's certainly other ways to skin that one, but training a few levels in it around Level 26, 27, 28 might generate ongoing great cashflows to protect against downside that happens if your labor intensity goes down, and helps keep more of one's cash as one's income continues to grow.

V 11. The Abstract and Concrete, part one

I once had a mechanical engineer working for me, doing general assistant and operations stuff. She was way, way overqualified to work for me -- she was in her early 40's, and had spent 20 years doing things like moving die-casting factories from other countries to China.

She'd gone to the best engineering school in Singapore, and had done very well as an engineer there. She had a brilliant mind and a relentless work ethic, but when she came back to China to take care of one of her elderly parents who got ill, she found that there was no work available.

I said point blank to her when I was hiring, "Look, you're way, way, way more qualified than what I'm looking for. I'll hire you -- absolutely -- even if you're not here for very long, which I hope you won't be... but what the heck is going on here? Why are you applying for an assistant's job instead of doing engineering?"

And she explained to me that in China, they haven't evolved the discrimination culture that we have in the West. It's basically understood that an unmarried woman in her early 40's should be marrying and having children soon, and so they don't want to give a key role that takes training and onboarding time to a woman around that age, because they expect her to leave shortly.

(As a random tangent, by the way, there's rampant discrimination against women in China. I'm not talking about the drum-beating constant-outrage stuff we have in the U.S.; I'm talking women who are more qualified sometimes making 30% to 50% less than men for the exact same job. I imagine this will get fixed at some point, but right now, If you're willing to treat Chinese staff well, push them for their best, help them develop as people, and you pay market rates or market rates+ to people who normally get short-sticked in China, you can get some really loyal and exceptional staff.)

So, yeah, I had a really talented mechanical engineer working for me.

We had some extra space in our office that was being wasted and not used, and wanted to rent it out.

I asked her to write up a description of the office space, and said I'd do the same. Sometimes, if it's quick enough, I like to have two people do the same work independently, because they'll see different things. Then you can combine the best points from each.

My description of the office space started something like this --

"Great office space in the Chaoyang Business District. Quiet building with a great view, extremely well-lit with great natural light, excellent aesthetics, and a great inspiring atmosphere for a small company hitting growth..."

Her description went like this --

"XX square meters.
 Copy machine.
 Fax machine.
 Full kitchen.
 Coffee machine.
 Full clean bathroom.
 Conference room with 8 chairs.
 Large-screen TV with input ports for presentations."

That always stuck with me. Her mind focused on almost exactly the opposite details that mine did -- she focused on precise details; I focused on the high-concept and the implications of the high-concept.

Later I'd learn that there's broadly two different kind of thinkers -- abstract and concrete.

The majority of the world are concrete-thinkers, though I strongly suspect that people who read this book this far will lean abstract.

I've seen different studies defined different ways, but abstract thinkers definitely make up a minority of the population. The numbers I see tend to cluster around 10% to 15% of the population engaging in abstract thought.

Concrete thinking: A fortress.
Abstract thinking: Controlling a trade route.

Concrete thinking: A palace.
Abstract thinking: Creating a majestic impression to reinforce authority.

Concrete thinking: Photos on Facebook.
Abstract thinking: Shared artifacts of experiences which reinforce ties.

Concrete thinking: A finely tailored suit.
Abstract thinking: Dressing in a way that pattern-matches wealth and prestige, which has subtle percentage points effects on interactions you have.

Concrete thinking: Let's watch the fireworks; it's so beautiful and exciting!
Abstract thinking: Shared rituals and cultural bonding that reinforce the traditions of the nation.

Concrete thinking: I just got my paycheck; let's go drinking.
Abstract thinking: I just got paid; I've now got purchasing power, and could do anything with it. I could go engage in leisure or looking to socialize, or I could do something else.

Concrete thinking: I want to go to the beach.
Abstract thinking: I want to lower my stress levels and reduce fatigue.

Concrete thinking: This cake is delicious!
 Abstract thinking: Eating cake provides sensory pleasure, but at the expense of a macronutrient mix that I don't really want, and it spikes insulin... I could do it sparingly in moderation if I really want to, but I ought to be careful with sweets in general.

I suppose this is lionizing abstract thinking a bit too much. A purely concrete thinker will typically have more natural effectiveness in communicating and getting things done than a pure abstract thinker.

Abstract thinking requires much more training to bring out the best in it. Being a young and inexperienced person who thinks abstractly is generally rather miserable if you're surrounded by concrete thinkers – it’s easy for an abstract thinker to think there’s futility and pointlessness to people pursuing concrete aims that lead nowhere in particular, but you lack the persuasive ability or power to change things.

A lot of abstract thinkers "retreat" into their mind, effectively renouncing their ability to have impact on the world. They see things that strike them as silly, petty, superstitious, and the majority of people don't understand them. 

So, effectively, they give up. Perhaps they move to an enclave of pure abstract thinking in academia, pure research, or the arts. Maybe they find work where they're allowed to be abstract enough and don't have to deal with too many people who "don't get it," and then they associate with other people who like to operate in the realm of ideas and abstractions.

While this is perfectly understandable, to me, it's a little bit of a shame.

The paradox of the pure concrete thinker is that they seem to be operating on a "lower level" to most abstract thinkers, but they get more done and are more effective. If you look at how pure researchers who pull entire fields forwards feel about the relatively "stupider" people who commercialize and get rich in those fields, you get a sense of this in action.

Of course, it's not really a paradox. It's easy to get caught up in ideas; abstractions can be clean and precise and perfect, whereas the concrete always has a variety of messy details that never quite lives up to perfect plans.

But I do believe and continue to believe that it's easier for an abstract thinker to learn how to communicate and be effective in the concrete world than the reverse; the abstract thinker, thus, probably has the highest ceiling, even if he or she reaches it far less often and is usually less practically effective at getting things done.

The best of both worlds is the ability to see the abstract and invisible patterns, but to act in concrete terms -- and to communicate in whatever terms are most effective at getting things done, meaning, to make your conversation useful and clear to the type of person you're engaged in conversation with.

This is very possible. There are huge gains to doing so. Let's discuss this now. 

V 12. Abstract and Concrete, part two

Abstract thinkers have the ability to dramatically outperform concrete thinkers, because they can -- at their best -- see invisible and intangible forces at work, and start pulling levers that most people don't even know exist.

"Pure" concrete thinkers are typically limited to working with things as they are right now, and maybe generating some novel combinations of things that already exist.

But concrete thinkers as a group, I think, typically outperform abstract thinkers.

Abstract thinkers will work out a model of how reality could be better -- but then they'll try and fall down the stairs when they're going to try to put it into practice.

No, I'm not joking and not being flippant. Literally "try and fall down the stairs" is the type of problem many abstract thinkers fall for. It's often basic stuff.

Consider, for instance, someone that develops a detailed theory of how people connect with each other, and they can actually put together metrics/numbers on things like Relevancy and Intimacy to measure one's network, etc. (I've done that. It's covered in Gateless, which I coauthored with Kai Zau.)

Well, that's all well and good -- but who is going to throw a better party?

The concrete thinker does something like this --

Great Party Checklist

*Great space
 *A few known great people who 100% confirm they're going so we have a good crowd 
*Sending invites early enough
 *Sending reminders
 *Having an easy RSVP on Facebook or something similar
 *Driving/transport directions
 *Easy parking
 *Cool theme 
*Cool lighting
*Cool music
*Snacks
 *Drinks
 *Make sure staff/bouncer/whoever is well trained, friendly, and cool.

Etc.

Now, an abstract thinker -- in theory -- could throw a party that good or better. But under the "trip and fall down the stairs" theory, they often don't because after writing up a theoretical plan for the best party ever, they forget to send invites early enough, or they don't handle parking and it becomes a disaster that slows everything down. Or one of the more marginal invited people brings a friend of a friend who is doing cocaine, who invites other shady people, and you've got no security, and all hell breaks loose.

The abstract thinker often will throw his hands up in the air and say, "People! God, people are so awful! I try to put a nice thing together, and everyone goes and ruins it! Screw it!"

And then retreats to live in a cave.

I wish I were joking. In some cities, having enough parking is really critical to throwing a nice event. Not handling parking might mean it's a bust, even if you have some really cool way to write down everyone's important interests and automatically computationally match people that really ought to be introduced to each other.

The example for video games is looking at theoretical build power without looking at any points where there's stress on you.

We've already looked at weaknesses in build. You could write,

"Enemies that can't be critical hit... a potential weakness."

The concrete thinker who understands the mechanics well can often outperform the abstract thinker. They're less likely to notice truly devastating gamebreaking combinations, but they're also less likely to trip and fall down the stairs.

A concrete approach to beating a game might look something like this --

Most Dangerous Bosses/Events

*Forest troll: Does big melee damage. Regenerates quickly.
 *Rock troll: Like forest troll, but with more resistance to damage.
 *Talia the master assassin: Ranged damage with bow, very fast, doesn't let you close distance to attack. 
*Forest dragon: Large initial damage in breath attack. 
*Ice dragon: Large initial damage in breath attack.
 *Fire dragon: Large initial damage in breath attack. 
*Ghost dragon: Completely immune to critical hits. Some nasty curse and confusion effects.
*Sinking ship: Need enough speed to get out quickly.

Put it like this: If every possible dangerous encounter is considered, you'll likely prepare better, prepare contingencies better, double-check your build, etc.

Abstract thinkers will think about damage per second, weaknesses, cohesion, build, and all the sorts of things we're already talking about.

That's correct; that's 100% correct. Many times people doing the pure concrete thing will make the linear/exponential mistake, taking a +10 now and missing how a +2% can add up to much larger amounts.

But doing some concrete thinking is what stops you from tripping and falling down the stairs, or forgetting to handle parking at an event, or not having any way to expel drunken problem-makers from your party. 

V 13. Abstract and Concrete, part three: Vulnerability to Poison

The abstract solution to vulnerability to poison, in a video game, is to place with your resistance to poison, look for items or abilities to cure poison, etc.

You could also list out every zone that has a poison-dealing enemy, and then avoid those zones until you’re strong enough to handle it.

The abstract solutions to nutrition rely on studying and planning macronutrients, diet plans, training, satiety, etc.

The concrete solutions to nutrition involve having enough healthy pleasant food around, and avoiding places where junk food is eaten.

V 14. Abstract and Concrete, part four: Anti-Top 10 Lists, First Principles

A word of caution:

“Top 10 lists” are often as addictive as crack cocaine to concrete thinkers, and those are very rarely the answer.

“Top Ten Ways to Write Better
1. Write every day!
2. Get motivated!

3. Outline!
4. Give yourself permission to do a bad draft first!
5. Take a break and nap!
…
10. Don’t forget to watch the rainbow!”

Concrete thinking is at its best when used to identify real problem areas or impact areas, when used to sanity check to make everything works out… the bane of concrete thinkers is getting bogged down in details and actions that don’t ever result in any breakthroughs or gains.

Delving into concrete thinking is a great way to sanity check your abstract plans and look for weaknesses, but do beware that you’re not procrastinating or turning your mind off with a bunch of random details that aren’t the important part of the puzzle.

Section VI.

VI 1. The Feeling of a Thunderstorm

How would you explain being caught in a hurricane to someone who has never been in even a rainstorm?

"Water is pouring down around you, fast, heavily, from all directions."

"Like in the shower?"

"Well... a little bit like that, but imagine having 30 showerheads that randomly move around and change direction."

"That sounds nice."

"Well, it's not nice... umm... it's usually not warm; it's kind of cold. And the winds kick up heavily, and it feels somewhat dangerous."

"Winds?"

"Yeah, have you ever been out when it's windy outside?"

"No, I haven't."

"Oh, jeez, well, then, how do I explain this? Umm... you've vacuumed, right?"

"Yes."

"Okay, imagine there's a bunch of gigantic vacuums around being turned on and turned off, sucking things up and pulling things around."

"So being in a thunderstorm is like being in 30 showers and surrounded by 30 vacuums randomly being turned on and off?"

"Uhh, something like that, yeah."

There's a huge gap between a theoretical/intellectual understanding of what a phenomenon is like, and actually having experienced it yourself.

Having this "feel" for situations is crucial to success in both life and games, and it's one of the reasons that people who are brand-new to something have a very hard time assessing their options, evaluating how good they'll be, and getting the long-term planning right. 

Vi 2. Conative, part one: Riot Policing

Let's attack this "feel" problem from a few different perspectives. We'll start with, ironically, the most intellectual explanation I've ever come across --

"Consider a thing such as a strawberry. If we wish to find the word 'strawberry', we look in a dictionary; if we wish to find a description of a strawberry, we look in an encyclopaedia. But if we are hungry, we do not go to the library, but to the field where fine strawberries may be found. If we do not know where there is such a field, we might seek guidance as to where fine strawberries may be found. [...] 

"[Of the two types of knowledge, the first] is called cognitive knowledge, the knowledge born of words and numbers, and other similar devices. The other form of knowledge, conative knowledge, needs no words or other such devices, for it is the form of knowledge born of direct personal experience. So it is that conative knowledge is also known as experiential knowledge. Cognitive and experiential knowledge both have their roots in reality, but reality is complex, and complexity is more of a barrier to cognitive knowledge than it is to experiential knowledge, for when we seek cognitive knowledge of a thing, that is, understanding of it, the knowledge we gain of that thing is understanding only of its manifestations, which is not knowledge of the thing itself."

That's from Stan Rosenthal's "The Tao Te Ching" An Introduction," written in 1984. It can be found online in its entirety and is well-worth reading.

That obscure document, over 30 years old now, is the only place I came across the expression "conative knowledge" -- which is one of the most useful phrases I ever learned.

Instantly, much more of the world made sense. There's cognitive knowledge -- like describing a thunderstorm in terms of water from shower heads and vacuums -- and then there's actually standing outside in a thunderstorm for five minutes.

During the month I was in Istanbul in 2014 with Kai Zau and Bryan Hernandez, the second anniversary of a protest day came around, and people took the streets rioting and protesting.

The police came out in force with riot gear, armored personnel carriers, and tear gas.

We had rented a place in a quiet, lower-middle class religious neighborhood that stayed quiet during the riots. But we were less than a three minute walk from the Istikal, the famous broad street-and-plaza that led the way to Taksim Square where the major rioting took place.

I didn't venture into the most dangerous parts of the riot, but once things had quieted down, I took some time to walk around and observe.

I'm curious about almost everything, and policing, crisis management, protest, rioting, governance, media, etc -- this as interesting as anything else. I've read plenty on the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, or what Gandhi did in India, and so on.

But just 90 minutes observing the riot police and demonstrators gave me probably a better understanding of how demonstrations start and spread, how police respond, and so on.

The media always take pictures, of course, of the action itself. It means demonstrations seem to have a cramped and packed-in, almost claustrophobic feeling to them -- as an outsider watching media reports.

But once you go walk around, you realize the sheer vast amounts of empty space, with demonstrators and rioters either choosing to try to evade the police and start something where the police aren't, or confronting them directly, and with the police looking to control central arteries and choke points in the city.

I couldn't even describe it adequately if you've never walked around during a time like that -- but instantly I understood just about all urban demonstrator/police conflicts much better and at a deeper level than thousands of hours of reading could have given.

This is conative knowledge -- experiential knowledge -- of how riots and riot policing go, as opposed to cognitive knowledge -- theoretical knowledge built around words and symbols.

We'll apply this more to games first, and to life second.

VI 3. Conative, part two: As Applied to Gaming

We talked briefly about the "Inexperience Toll" a while ago.

Inexperience can be seen as a lack of conative knowledge.

You can compensate for it, a little bit, by reading in advance about what comes ahead.

But it's hard to fully get one's mind around. 

If you're playing a roguelike, for instance, what's more dangerous in the endgame -- crowds of enemies, or single powerful enemies?

Often in the early game of a roguelike, falling into a crowd of enemies is fatal, and area-attack abilities make the game much easier.

But in the late game, regular non-boss enemies might be entirely a non-issue and ultra-powerful bosses might be the only thing that matters.

If you didn't know that while advancing a spellcaster, you might take the abilities fireball, firestorm, lightning storm, and so on. These spells might instantly kill a whole crowd of dangerous monsters.

Meanwhile, you might neglect targets-one-enemy abilities like slow, paralyze, dispel magic, and silence... and those might be exactly what you need to stop very powerful end-game enemies from wrecking you.

It might be the case that in the late-game, you can just completely ignore mundane enemies. if you have some sort of damage reduction, regular monsters might do zero damage to you. And if the game has any "grenade"-like items (potion of explosion, etc), then later once you have infinite money, you can simply stock up on those if you need to rapidly clear a room full of weak enemies.

Meanwhile, if you didn't start training in weaken-one-tough-enemy abilities, you're helpless when fighting a very powerful spellcaster who is a required fight on the way to winning the game.

It's impossible to know, the first time you play a game, what the difficult late-game encounters can be. That's conative knowledge you don't have -- experience you haven't gotten. Nevertheless, you can largely remedy it with some cognitive knowledge -- you can read recommended builds and advancement order of skills and spells.

It gets harder when it comes to the, "Am I tough enough to do this yet?" question. You walk into an area, and you see gravestones. Okay, it's a graveyard. Okay, there's probably undead here. How dangerous is this place?

If there's two alternative routes to the next place you're going, can you safely power along through the graveyard, or should you turn back and go the other route?

There can be general guidelines written online -- "don't go into a graveyard before you're Level 12" -- but these are necessarily subjective. If you've got strong fire magic or holy magic, you might be able to tackle a graveyard much earlier, relatively speaking. If you're weak against diseases and curses, you might want to just avoid the place entirely until you're way over-leveled for it.

The games that are the most addicting have a smooth difficulty curve increase, where you feels like the area you're in is slightly too dangerous for your character to be there -- but which isn't actually, really, dangerous.

I've never played World of Warcraft. After seeing a friend's roommate turn into a real-life zombie in front of the game and seeing how bright and colorful and beautiful and interesting the game looked on his monitor, I decided then and there to never play it.

But my understanding from reading some essays on game design is that World of Warcraft is one of the best at getting the difficulty progression to be most pleasing to the player. You always feel like you're pushed and on the verge of being in trouble -- but it's an illusion, you're not really in trouble; you're pretty safe all the time.

I like roguelikes because you don't get that kid-glove treatment: the difficulty curve isn't "fair" and "gradual." Often, due to procedural generation (levels randomly seeded with enemies using probability tables), you can wind up cruising along at a good pace and very safely, and then wind up in a very difficult situation suddenly and abruptly.

I like that, because it's both more interesting and makes for better learning and development on a human level.

But it's absolutely true that the first time you want into a "safe-seeming" situation that isn't safe in a roguelike, you get wrecked and die.

Not an uncommon experience in Nethack: "Oh, look, a cat. Wait, I'm dead? What?"

What do you do about it? Well, there's two potential answers.

The first answer, the one I don't go for that 99% of people prefer, is to find places that'll treat you with kid gloves and ensure you get a trophy for playing.

The second answer, the one that only crazy people prefer, is to do very difficult things to get the conative knowledge, even though the price to doing so is failure and things going wrong, and it's incredibly unpleasant.

There's no hack around it. Generally good judgment and broad applicable experience helps, but if you're facing unpredictable difficulty and you don't have that conative base of experience for if you're safe or not, you're going to take a beating periodically. 

And maybe I'm crazy, but I wouldn't have it any other way. 

Vi 4. Author Interlude to Conative

Will you forgive the author for being self-indulgent for a moment?

It might even verge on complaining about my craft -- may I continue? Really, I wouldn't want to do it without your blessing.

It might be interesting. May I continue?

Okay. That's very kind of you. Thank you.

Here is my issue: I would like to write about conative knowledge as applied to real life.

But, here is the problem: the takeaways, written literally, seem oh-so-very basic.

It's the kind of thing that most people don't do very well. 

Thus, you'd think it would be important to talk about it.

But if you talk about it, try to explain the important point, you get a bored nod. "Yeah, yeah, I already know that."

It's like -- crazy stuff that's entirely wrong can persuade, because they're not bounded by reality or truth. But if you're trying to get to the universals that drive things, it can come out sounding like something people have already heard (but not yet successfully implemented) -- but, does this get due consideration?

No, alas, no, it doesn't. It gets, "I already know that." Are they doing it? No. Does that matter? No. Should it matter? Yes.

... okay, enough of that! Thanks for letting me be self-indulgent. Let me try to create a fresh take on the conative as applied to real life. 

Vi 5. Conative, part three: 40 30 30 vs 80 15 5

Here is my challenge. The following statement is true --

"When you haven't done something personally yet, you'll tend to understand it poorly and make bad estimates. This has unfortunate consequences."

Then, the applications: a non-technologist thinking it's "no big deal" to change scope on one of the programmers they work with; that's bad and slows things down.

Or, a programmer who finishes a cutting-edge highly polished app that might or might not serve any market needs, and then says "I just need someone to do the marketing now" -- not realizing that marketing isn't something you tack on after you've made the technology. 

Likewise, "write a press release, it's not a big deal" or "just go make some sales" -- these are ignorant statements if you don't have the experience and the "feel" for the work you're prescribing. 

Fine, fine, fine. The simplest version of these statements are totally true, but there aren't many takeaways from them. What's the takeaway? "Don't do that." No, that's not a good takeaway. "Don't assume you understand work you've never done before." That gets the 'yeah yeah, already know that, duh' reply.

The first most important application of conative knowledge as applied to work and life is this: until you've got conative immersed experience, your mental estimates and assumptions are usually badly mistaken.

 But how to really get this concept across?

Try this:

40/30/30 vs. 80/15/5.

What's that?

That's how important the top 3 factors are in what you're doing.

Woe be to you if you get this mix wrong.

Let's look at three factors that a new business might have to get right:

 *Quality
 *Speed 
*Price

Let's say they're important in that order: quality is most important, speed (of delivery, of getting the product going, etc) is second most important, and price is the third most important thing.

Here's the question: if we ranked the importance of these three factors and how they matter to the buying decision, does it look like this?

Importance Mix One 

Quality ... 40% of buying decision 
Speed ... 30% of buying decision 
Price ... 30% of buying decision

If so, quality is very slightly more important than price and speed. That means, you need to be constantly balancing the three factors. Quality comes first, but you can't let the costs run high to get max quality. Meanwhile, you need to streamline and simplify so that you don't make deliveries too slowly. For instance, customization for every customer could increase quality a lot, but it increases price and is slow. In this Importance Mix, that's a non-starter.

On the other hand...

Quality ... 80% of buying decision
 Speed ... 15% of buying decision 
Price ... 5% of buying decision

In this case, quality is everything. You should do everything you can to increase quality, even at the expense of making your product very expensive.

Don't totally neglect speed -- it still matters -- but if a little slower gets you higher quality, do it. 

If you do customize heavily (you probably should here), you want to use FedEx or other fast delivery-by-air to shave some time off. Again, quality and speed matter a lot, and price basically doesn't matter here.

Here's where conative knowledge (experiential knowledge) matters. You can look at a business and say "Quality, speed, and price are what matter here" -- but a veteran of the industry can tell you whether they're basically the same importance level, or if one of the factors dominates the decision.

You basically can't know that without experience.

Consider the early days of Walmart and K-Mart.

Walmart: 95% emphasis on low prices; 5% everything else.

K-Mart: 50% emphasis on low prices, 25% emphasis on quality, 20% emphasis on nice shopping experience, 5% emphasis on everything else.

Walmart goes on to be the largest company on Earth; K-Mart eventually goes bankrupt.

Sometimes you can explicitly put numbers and ranks on things. As described in Jeffrey Liker's The Toyota Way, this is precisely what Toyota did when launching the Lexus luxury car brand to target the high-end Western car market.

Toyota engineer Ichiro Suzuki (no relation to the baseball player) started by getting all the reasons that high-end car buyers chose their automobiles in Long Island. The list boiled down to --

1. Status and prestige of image
 2. High quality 
3. Resale value
 4. Performance (e.g., handling, ride, power)
 5. Safety

"More than any other information gathered, this rank ordering struck an emotional nerve because Suzuki viewed a car essentially as a vehicle of transportation, not an ornament. When he listened to people talk about Mercedes-Benz, status and prestige were number one, while performance, the actual basic function of the car, was only number four. Perhaps because of his engineering bias, Suzuki could not accept people choosing Mercedes-Benz's status appeal over performance. It was a car, after all, not an ornament."

Suzuki came around on it, eventually setting objective performance target where the Lexus would exceed all the cars in similar class in top speed, fuel consumption, and lowest noise at freeway speeds -- while simultaneously having excellent styling.

The result? The Lexus became the best-selling luxury car in the United States in 2002, shortly after launch.

He couldn't have done it on pure engineering performance without styling, nor with styling without the objective benchmarks of Lexus outperforming on top speed, fuel efficiency, and lowest noise.

Knowing what's important comes from experiential feel, not theory.

That's critical. An engineer would have bet on performance first for cars; it was the fourth-most-important factor among luxury buyers. Toyota balanced a few factors and aimed for the best at all of them, did it, and won big. K-Mart tried a balanced shopping approach and went bankrupt.

Knowing what's important is hard enough, but can be figured out. Knowing the relative importance of various factors is something else entirely.

VI 6. Conative, part four: Fingerspitz

We don't look to Germany very often for loan-words and metaphors. Sure, we'll take an odd word like "schadenfreude," but we're especially uninterested in German terms from military science or industrial production.

It's understandable. German militarism and German industrial work have always been slightly alien to the English and later American traditions. This even before Wilhelm II's Kaiserreich bids for control of Europe, and before Adolf Hitler created a morbid reconstruction of the worst aspects of the German Empire in a Versailles-avenging outburst of hatred.

No, there are almost no positive metaphors in American popular culture coming from the history of Germany. Horrors, yes; insights, no.

Thus, it surprises the American scholar who begins to study military science to see the Germans represented so heavily. 

Clauswitz, Moltke, von Schlieffen, and Guderian start showing up a lot when you want to understand modern warfare -- and moreover, when you want to just understand how to get things done in general.

But the advantage of studying those Germans are perhaps the same reason they're not popular (even before the Hitler-hangover): there's a certain terse preciseness to it.

In English, you can say, "Hey, if you have a minute, if it's not too troubling, I'd kind of like to discuss what's happening over in the HR department, because it, umm, I'm not sure exactly how to say this, but I think there's some things there that are troubling."

It's basically impossible to talk like that in German. You can ask if your colleague has a minute, but then you're asking if your colleague has a minute. As for the "things that are troubling" -- you basically are just forced to say it. (Or not say it, as it were.)

"Wir haben ein Problem im HR Department.” We have a problem in the HR department. “Haben wir ein Problem im HR Department?" "Do we have a problem in the HR department?"

English so often gets euphemisms and a mix of morality and causality blended together in language. I happen to think this is mostly a strength of English, but we get in trouble when we talk around things and just assume that the listener should figure out what the speaker is saying.

Take schadenfreude: noun. "pleasure derived from another's misfortune." ORIGIN German Schadenfreude, from Schaden 'harm' + Freude 'joy.'

Englishman: "I hope this doesn't make me a bad person, but when he fell flat on his face, I got some sort of satisfaction out of that."

German: "Ah, schadenfreude."

Probably the three most profitable imports to English from German are Auftragstaktik ("commander's intent"), "Worauf kommt es eigentlich an?" (broadly, "What's the heart of the matter?", "What's the center of the problem?", "What's the core of the issue?", and "What really matters here and will make things happen?" rolled together), and -- finally -- Fingerspitzengefuhl.

Stephen Bungay writes --

"Psychologist Gary Klein has made a study of intuitive decision making. By observing experts in a given field in situations in which they made decisions, Klein realized that they did not follow the conventional “rational model” of developing and evaluating options before choosing between them. They seemed to go straight to the answer, using what appeared to nonexperts, and indeed often to themselves, to be a “sixth sense.” On analysis, the sixth sense turned out to be perfectly rational. It was based on pattern recognition. Through years of experience in their field, experts build up patterns of expectation, and notice immediately when something unusual occurs which breaks the pattern. These signals make the “right” decision obvious to them. It looks to others and feels to them to be intuitive, but the intuition is schooled, and rational. Clausewitz gives it the French name coup d’oeil, the glance of a practiced eye. Germans more usually refer to Fingerspitzengefuhl, the “feeling in your fingertips.”"

Fingerspitzengefuhl doesn't and can't make full intellectual sense until you know the difference between cognitive knowledge and conative knowledge.

Fingerspitzengefuhl could be called conative feel.

It's experience and experience alone that lets you get a feel for a situation.

This is one of the bigger problems for the well-studied inexperienced person. You might have a theoretical cognitive understanding of a situation, but you lack the fingerspitzengefuhl -- you lack the feel of the situation that comes from direct experience.

There are some ways around this.

VI 7. Blank spots on the map

“It’s not what you don’t know that hurts you. It’s what you think you know that ain’t actually so.”

Certainty feels good; uncertainty feels bad. Thus, people would rather color in the blank spots on their map with all kinds of terrain and boundaries that don't actually exist.

Thus, one of the more broadly effective countermeasure against a lack of experience: frankly acknowledge it, and take action anyways.

"I don't know exactly how long this will take to get down, but it's been done before, so we'll budget a healthy amount of time for it, and get at it repeatedly."

Doing this successfully is both really simple and really complex.

On the one hand, it's very simple. You acknowledge you don't know, and you refuse to act like you know.

The basic idea is you put a question mark on your map.

You say, "I'm not sure what's going on in that area. I'm not sure how good this all is. I'm going to just put a '?' there in my mind."

It's simple to say, but harder to do.

Consider governance for a moment. In a democracy, politics is how we choose the people who govern us.

But there is such a thing as good governance and bad governance. Singapore is undoubtedly governed better than Pyongyang -- on just about any parameter you want to judge it.

But when a topic comes up, such as to what extent civil service officials in a city should be allowed to unionize and collectively bargain, people instantly take positions.

They don't say: "That's interesting. Can I see comparables from different cities that have taken different policies that led to different results?"

No, not at all. Instantly, people who are generally pro-collective bargaining will take a firm position for maximum rights and privileges on that front, people who are against it will argue against it completely and entirely.

The same is true for energy policy or defense policy.

In this way, people make themselves stupid and reactive. They hear of a political/governance issue, and they immediately take a side based on... based on what? Based on nothing. Based on past feelings or identity or emotions or... all sorts of things that shouldn't have an effect on your judgment of what's good governance and not.

This is true on all sorts of things: energy policy, defense policy, policing, sentencing, social programs, types and magnitudes of taxation, etc.

These are all extremely complicated things in which tradeoffs have to be made. It would at least do well to note what the tradeoffs are. Then, there are universal principles and patterns, but most people aren't even interested in those. They just... make strong opinions for no reason, and then espouse them confidently.

Once you set an opinion, it becomes a hell of a thing to try to change it. Once you say "this is a good idea" and commit to something, you start looking to defend and confirm the idea rather than learn more.

Maybe this sounds like hyperbole, but you almost gain superpowers when you refuse to take positions and explicitly assign those '?' marks on the blank spots in the map.

Q: "What's your stance on the emissions tax?"
 A: "I don't know. I haven't looked into it."

Q: "The jails are overcrowded. What should we do about it?" 
A: "I don't know. I haven't looked into it."

Q: "I think taxes should be lower. What do you think?" 
A: "Which taxes?"
 Q: "All of them." 
A: "All of them?" 
Q: "Yeah, don't you think so?"
 A: "No, I don't think every single tax should be lower."
 Q: "Oh, what taxes should be lower and what shouldn't, then?" 
A: "I don't know. I haven't fully looked into it."

Saying that you don't know and you haven't looked into it shouldn't be used as an excuse to remain ignorant; you should look into it. But I'm much more interested in someone that can first explain the nuances of a particular policy (including the downsides and who loses as a result of it; none of this "it's 100% good at everything and there's no downside!" stuff), and then can explain the major tradeoffs, comparables to other places that have implemented the policy and the good bad things that happened, and then maybe gives a recommendation as to which way they think is best.

Thus, a person that can explain the implications of around 10 major issues through detailed learning on the topic and has strong opinions on just 3 or 4 of them is much more credible than someone who has inch-deep mile-wide fervent opinions on 100 major issues, all of them hot-button and partisan, none of them carefully thought-through.

Section VII.

VII 1. The Unfairness, part one

Sometimes I muse over whether the English language would be better if the word fair didn't exist.

It's four letters: F... A... I... R.

And it so often encodes intensely sloppy thinking that it’s difficult to think of a word that’s more damaging.

It’s not the concept of “fairness” that’s a problem. It’s that the word covers dozens of different cases with vastly different implications.

See, you can say -- "That's unfair" -- without specifying what parameter or outcome.

This is actually a rather big deal.

Consider this statement about a private boy’s boarding high school: "It's unfair to expect the boys to be disciplined right away."

That statement seems to work; it doesn't rise any urgent questions; it doesn't seem to be incomplete or broken.

And yet, what exactly is the unfairness? It could mean any of the following:

"If you expect the boys to be disciplined right away, their first time living away from home, you might be disappointed."

"If you expect the boys to be disciplined right away, their first time living away from home, you might build your curriculum the wrong way and be ineffective."

"If you expect the boys to be disciplined right away, their first time living away from home, you're going to be too harsh and could really inflict some damage to their morale, make them feel bad, etc, for no good reason."

"If you treat the boys in a way that demands discipline right away, they might hate and resent you coming from their previous backgrounds."

"I think you would be more effective at teaching if you adopted an incremental approach that didn't assume good discipline right away."

"I think you would be more effective at connecting with the boys personally if you adopted an incremental approach that didn't assume good discipline right away."

"Be careful you don't make too many promises to the parents about what you'll do -- it's unrealistic to expect immediate change when they come from normal backgrounds and aren't disciplined yet."

Any of those sentences could be the important and salient point from "It's unfair to expect..." -- and maybe the two speakers have the context, or maybe they don't.

Much of the conflict in society is from this kind of sloppy communication and incomplete thinking.

Many arguments start when two people have radically different parameters for what's important for humans to do in the world, and then they just start talking at each other without clarifying that.

Person 1: "That's unfair."
 Person 2: "It's perfectly fair. Doing what you suggest wouldn't be fair."
 Person 1: "No it's not, your policy is unfair."
 Person 2: Etc.

Person 1 could be having any position there -- higher taxes or lower taxes, stricter criminal sentencing or light sentencing, more restrictive or more liberal immigration, or really anything else.

This is not limited to politics, of course -- should seniority determine authority? What about merit? What about in an organization that relies on hierarchy to function, like the military? 

If it's really this --

Person 1: "I dislike hierarchy personally. I also think hierarchy generally speaking is ineffective at everything. Merit should rule to the extent possible."

Person 2: "I don't like hierarchy, per se, but I don't think it's possible to evaluate pure merit without things like charisma, personality, favoritism getting in the way. Seniority is objective -- you know the date someone joined the company or military. It's not perfect, but I think it's better than merit."

Person 1: "I agree with you that merit can be hard to evaluate, but pure seniority systems are most unfair to people who really work to break outside the mold and really outperform, the most dedicated and potentially capable people, who then won't have authority. And by 'unfair,' I mean unfair in terms of the fact that I believe contributions should be rewarded by how they're made, and also that I think it's ineffective for the organization."

Person 2: "I agree with some of those points; however, I don't think it's a suitable way to run an entire organization. If everyone is evaluated on supposedly 'pure merit,' you have an instantly political organization where people focus on getting the credit and being evaluated well, instead of doing their job and knowing they'll be taken care of. I do agree that people who are particularly driven to contribute and perform make out badly in this system though, and I don't know how to address it."

Person 1: "Okay, I see your point about the politicization of an organization if it's all supposedly on merit. And you seem to agree that it'll be ineffective if you don't have a way for people who are driven to outperform to be acknowledged, compensated, and gain greater authority as a result. This is tricky."

Person 2: "Tricky indeed. I think we're on the same page."

The usual dialog usually degenerates.

Person 1: "This seniority system is unfair!"
 Person 2: "No it's not, it's exactly fair." 
Person 1: "No it's not, it's stupid, it's just about time in the company." 
Person 2: "Your head is full of rocks." 
Person 1: "No, your head is full of rocks!" 
Person 2: Etc, etc.

VII 2. The Unfairness, part two: Vision Radius

Most people would agree that roguelikes are incredibly unfair.

And I would argue that life is more like a roguelike than a casual game.

In Tales of Maj'eyal, there's such a thing as a “vision radius" -- that's how far away you can see on the map. It can be increased by getting a brighter lantern, casting a Sun spell, learning to see in the dark, etc.

Enemies also have a vision radius.

Vision radius determines who sees the other person first.

If your vision radius is 8 and the enemy's is 4, that means you see the enemy before they see you. That means you can prepare all your defenses while they're just standing around, and then open the fight by shooting them with an arrow or casting some nasty spell. 

Just like that, out of nowhere, a fireball will explode on the enemy. Assuming they move at normal speed, they'll probably come towards you -- and they'll be 7 squares away on the next turn, still unable to see you.

You fire the next round of your barrage, they advance to square 6, you fire again, they advance to five squares away, you fire again, and finally they move into being able to see what they're dealing with (if they’re still alive).

That means, if your vision radius is eight and theirs is four, you get five attacks on them before they can even see you to respond properly.

It's not infallible, of course -- an enemy standing right behind a door you open means you're in combat right away. But vision radius is one of those things that no one explicitly tells you is a big deal, but is a huge tactical advantage if you're good at using it.

A common complaint of unfairness in Tales of Maj'eyal is that you can get one-shot killed by enemies you couldn't even see.

It's like, you walked into the graveyard next to Last Hope. You walked town into the mausoleum underneath the graveyard. You ignored the fact that it's dark and ominous and that the music is dark and ominous and that the whole area has this thematic uneasiness to it.

You kept walking towards the huge chamber at the end of the hall of coffins and tombs, and then -- bam, you died. You don't even know why. You're dead. Game over.

If you look afterwards at what killed you, it'll be recorded as Melinda the Necromancer. She saw you before you saw her, and her first spell killed you before you even knew she was there.

Many would decry this as unfair. The player might say:

"This game sucks. It's totally unfair that I walked into this place and died without even knowing what happened."

In this case, there's no political or rhetorical advantage to invoking unfairness. It's just him, playing a game, by himself, a solo game. There's no multiplayer to it.

Thus, "It's totally unfair..." is self-directed thought; it's his worldview and how he sees the world.

I argue thusly -- this is sloppy and counterproductive thinking.

Now, this isn't a criticism. If you've ever felt like life is unfair, I empathize and sympathize. We are only aiming to do better here, not feel better.

Let's distill out the possible complaints about the player who got killed by Melinda. They are:

1. I shouldn't be able to walk into an area where I can get killed by an ultra-powerful enemy that I have no shot in early in the game.

2. I shouldn't be able to get killed by an enemy who I haven't even seen yet and was never given the chance to respond to or run away from.

In regards to Complaint #1, the player is absolutely correct that they can walk into the Last Hope Graveyard at levels where they have no chance of surviving. In fact, you're almost certain to wind up in Last Hope before level 10, and unless you've got an incredibly carefully built character, you really shouldn't try to take out Melinda before level 20 or 25.

Last Hope is one of the most useful cities in the early game. You wind up there early. And then you get told of Melinda and the graveyard (which shows up on your map) at any level by the town's alchemist. If you go there immediately, you're very likely to get killed. (I did, the first time I played.)

When the player makes the "I shouldn't be able to walk into an area..." complaint, they're saying that the game developer should make it so players can't hurt themselves.

In fact, it would be very easy for the alchemist to say: "I've got something else for you to do... it's about a necromancer... actually, I don't think you're ready for it. Come back later."

Most modern games do that.

What the complainer is saying at this point is that they want less agency. They want to be protected. They don't want choices that are bad choices made available to them.

Or perhaps, they want to get extreme and explicit warnings repeatedly. For the record, TOME does give you a fair amount of warnings before you do something dangerous.

Should it be more explicit? "You feel like if you stay here, you're certain to die. Continue forwards? Y/N" It could throw those at you repeatedly. (Sometimes it even does.)

But in this way, games become a way to be stupid and become less like reality. When you go to buy stock in Groupon, you don't get: "Warning: The company has a high price/earnings and their revenue channels are not proven as durable yet. You're likely to see significant stock declines."

When you go to have your fifth glass of wine at the company Christmas party, you don't get: "Warning: Your drunkenness is increasing rapidly and your superiors are all here. You will rapidly have a risk of making a fool of yourself that damages your career."

Real life has an exceedingly large amount of bad decisions available to make. You need to hone your awareness, your mental skillset, your ability to protect yourself, and also explicitly hone your intuition to look for warning signs and signals.

I like that TOME has areas that are dangerous that you have no business being in. As soon as you enter an area and get shot with one arrow by an archer, you're forced to say, "Can I deal well with archers?" If not, you should leave. 

Most games don't do that; they stack things in an order where everything available to you is safe.

TOME doesn't. There's areas that you'll absolutely wreck based on your character build, and areas that'll absolutely wreck you. You should tackle the former and delay the latter until you get the items, experience, and abilities to let you take the dangerous areas out safely.

You're forced to use an ability that has no explicit statistic or gameplay mechanism behind -- your own reasoning. You need to stay aware and ask, "Should I be here? Can I handle this? Is this a good idea?"

In my book, that's a good thing -- because those are exactly the questions you should be asking in real life.

As for the second complaint, "I shouldn't be able to get killed by an enemy who I haven't even seen yet and was never given the chance to respond to or run away from."

Could we be more sympathetic to this? We perhaps could.

This is the Inexperience Toll; this is a lack of conative knowledge.

Most new players in the game might not even realize that vision radius actually matters. 

The fact is, actually, vision radius isn't that big of a deal -- except in the few occasions where it's a really big deal. 

How do you learn that? Well, you could read and research the theory, or you could gain it the hard way by experience. 

But the fact is, this complaint pairs with the first one: magic-users and ranged fighters (archers, etc) are typically more dangerous than melee enemies in TOME. Some melee enemies can close rapidly with Rush or teleport or casting some gravity attack that brings you to them, but most can't.

Put this way: necromancers are more dangerous than bears. Bears are slow, cannot hit you until they're right upon you, and you see them coming well in advance. Necromancers are moderately fast, can blast you from very far away, and they probably see you before you see them.

As we see, then, the second complaint is a little bit of "I wasn't aware how important vision radius is" -- but besides that, it's just a derivation of the first complaint.

"I shouldn't be allowed to hurt myself."

I think the magic of roguelikes are that you can hurt yourself. You can put yourself in unwinnable situations. You can blunder your way into a dragon's lair and get roasted. You can advance too rapidly and unprepared. You can try to convert the altar of an enemy god and get an enemy champion spawned to fight you who wipes the floor with you. You can, as a melee fighter with no ranged options, charge blindly against a band of archers and get shot down.

Or you can do the opposite. You can gain complete immunity to fire and wipe the floor with the fire dragon. You can put together game-breaking combos and go destroy an entire fortress full of elite guards. You can choose to gamble to convert the enemy god's altar, knowing the rewards are great if it works and it's death if it doesn't. You can get a bow and speed boots and harry enemy melee fighters to death without them ever being able to attack you.

Choice.

Agency.

When you find yourself saying something is unfair, ask why and break it into its component parts. Yeah, vision radius doesn't matter in most games; it's usually fixed and it's kind of an odd mechanic. But, it matters a lot tactically in TOME. 

And then, yes, be careful walking into an underground dark foreboding mausoleum as a level 3 fighter with no defenses. C'mon dude.

VII 3. The Unfairness, part three: Get Better

Roguelikes are incredibly unfair, under most people's definitions of fairness.

This can help you overcome this hole in one's thinking.

A muddled view of fairness is crippling. It's very possible to feel like the world is unfair without clarifying precisely what a person means, just instead feeling a vague malaise and angst and feeling of alienation.

The great irony, of course, is that this ill-defined sense of alienation makes a person much less effective -- so an individual who has the potential to be outstandingly pro-social and help many people is instead crippled and rendered ineffective if they've got a sloppy-fairness-alienation thing going on.

Said simpler: an ill-defined sense of unfairness makes you ineffective, so you can't actually correct and fix the things you think are broken in the world.

Roguelikes are brilliant and beautiful training grounds for getting over this kind of thing.

They're unfair. They're nasty. Brutal. And you have to learn how to deal with it.

It's just you and the codebase. You're not competing against anyone else.

You could pick your computer up and throw it against the wall when an Arch-Lich spawns and insta-kills you, but what good would that do?

It would do no good.

You could curse and scream and howl that it's unfair, but what good would that do?

No good at all.

You could, of course, quit playing this genre of games. This might actually do some good.

Or... you could learn to play better.

Those are, roughly speaking, your options -- melt down, complain and do nothing differently, quit, or get better.

VII 4 The Unfairness part four: That Won't Work? Or...

"That won't work."

You hear that a lot if you're starting to do anything genuinely innovative in creating, inventing, innovating.

For years, this puzzled me. There were things that obviously worked, that people would say -- even in the face of huge evidence that it's already working -- "That won't work."

And you say, "Well, umm, it's working."

"No it's not. It's a fluke. And if it is working, It'll stop working. It's risky. Dangerous. Et cetra."

This puzzled me for years.

I asked the question over and over: there's clearly things that work and are different from how people normally do things that are twice as good, sometimes ten times as good. Why can't people see them? Why do they say they won't work?

And when they do work, why can they still not see it?

I spent many hours puzzling over this.

Eventually, I just shrugged and wrote it off, figuring it some strange facet of humanity where most people don't have enough foresight to see things that are outside of the norm.

I moved to only asking for the opinions of people highly competent and experienced who I admired, and basically ignoring everyone that wasn't either competent, experienced, or admired by me.

It worked well enough, but around 12 years after my first inquiries on the topic, the answer came in like a flash of a lightning bolt.

These people weren't really saying, "That won't work."

They were actually saying, "That shouldn't work."

These appear to be judgments of facts, but not, it's not so. 

People won't even judge facts on their merits if they can't accept the conclusions.

This is, of course, crippling -- and if it's infected your psychology, you'd do well to root it out. Examples follow.

VII 5. That Shouldn’t Work, II: Air

There's a joke that goes something like this --

"Two economists are walking down the street. One sees a hundred-dollar bill laying on the ground and points it out: 'Hey, 100 dollars. It's our lucky day.' The second economist says, 'Nah, if it was real, someone would have picked it up already.'"

There's many gains and benefits in life that are completely disproportional to the work or effort required to get them.

But if you point these opportunities out and ask others about them, you'll often get, "That won't work" or "That isn't real." What they're really saying is, "That shouldn't work."

Yet, it works.

If you have a good credit score and good income in the United States, credit card companies will give you around two hundred dollars per credit card you sign up for with them.

This makes perfect sense. Businesses know statistics very well, and they know their "lifetime value of a customer" (LVOC) numbers. Likewise, the issuing bank usually gets 1% or 2% of all the spending you put on your credit. Yes, it's true, if you spend $20,000 on a credit card, the issuing bank gets around $400.

That's before factoring in the fees they get if you carry interest on the card with them (and the majority of people that get a credit card do wind up carrying interest at some point) and not factoring balance transfers, the ability to market other products and services to you, market share and efficiencies, etc.

Some of the most popular kinds of these cards are airline credit cards. For instance, Chase Manhattan Bank issues a British Airways Visa Signature. If you have good credit and sign up for it, they'll give you somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 British Airways frequent flyer miles for it.

I don't know how the money changes hands behind the scenes. Does Chase do a revenue split on the spending and interest fees on the card with British Airways? Do they buy the miles in bulk wholesale from BA?

I'm not sure, except that I am reasonably sure that it's profitable for both Chase and BA. Almost every airline and every major credit card issuer offers these types of cards and gives big signup bonuses for them. This isn't a rare obscure strategy one bank or airline is pursuing; all of them are doing it, so it almost certainly is profitable.

I've walked you through the behind-the-scenes business logic, so maybe this is starting to make sense -- but of course, these points aren't advertised. Most people are unaware that whenever they swipe their credit card, the card issuer and a variety of middlemen take somewhere between 2% and 4% of the total purchase price from the merchant you bought from.

You didn't know that?

Oh yeah. It's true. If you buy a television from Best Buy for $1000 on your card, the card issuer and various middlemen take somewhere from $20 to $40 from Best Buy. Given that credit card spending now dominates the U.S. consumer economy, it's a pretty good gig to be a bank. They get a cut on everything.

Of course, most people don't know any of this.

So they see an offer to get 50,000 air miles for... basically nothing.

And they say, "That can't work."

(They mean: "That shouldn't work.")

I've got some tens of thousands of dollars of free airfare; many of my friends have, too. 

(Did my credit score went down? No, actually, it went up.)

But even though I've almost always paid my cards off in full, I still think I'm around break-even to the banks and airlines. I had one period of about eight months where I carried around $40,000 of debt after I'd been a little reckless over-expanding and counting on future business cashflow that should have came through, but didn't. At 15% APR or so, I probably paid around $4500 in interest.

Then, I've paid the annual fees sometimes -- $450 for an American Express Platinum, etc.

Not to mention, all these banks get their ~2% cut on all my spending.

In any event, imagine I didn't explain the logic of how the banks make their money to you, and instead I just said: "Dude, you can apply for five credit cards, and get 250,000 air miles."

What reply do most people have?

"That won't work." (Meaning, "That shouldn't work.")

It just doesn't feel right that having a high credit score would give you such a crazy amount of perks.

But, actually, the logic makes sense. The financial infrastructure of the United States facilitates a ton of commerce. Banks make huge profits off of people using their cards. They'll share some of that with the consumer. If you play it very smartly, you can make out very well.

But I've told a lot of people about this. I get a variety of reasons why people won't do it.

There's about four valid reasons not to do it --

1. I'm earning/achieving at a much higher rate with my time than this.
2. The cash/miles are basically worthless to me.
3. I'm buying a large ticket purchase or otherwise need credit in the next year or two and don't want to risk getting a worse loan.
4. I don't trust myself not to carry a balance on cards.

Those are not the rebuttals I hear when people opt not to do this.

They say, "That won't work." (It does work.)

They say, "What a waste of time, it must take tons of hours." (It doesn't, and can be done during leisure time in the evening instead of watching television or surfing the internet.)

They say, "It'll ruin your credit." (It actually raises your credit score over the long term.)

Or, "I don't know... I just don't think it'll work."

Yeah, because it seems like it shouldn't work, right? And yet, it does. Imagine that.

VII 6. That Shouldn’t Work, III: Solo 401k Stuff

Now is about the best time in all of history to be self-employed with a high-value skill. Much of the old value of taking salary from a large conglomerate has faded -- think of how difficult it would have been pre-Internet to research your own insurance, benefits packages, retirement, and so on. You'd have to know broadly what topics were of interest, and then either spend lots of hours in the library stacks, or spend lots of money with a corporate attorney to get it set up.

Fax machines, copy machines, and similar were rather expensive. Even getting basic telecommunications running pre-Internet, apparently, was no joke.

You got a pension, probably, and job security, probably, if you were good. Now, no more.

So these days, I see my programmer friends and sales-oriented, numbers-oriented, metricians, etc doing a variety of things. Some start their own companies. Some still take offers from growing companies. But many more do projects and contracts self-employed, setting their own schedule and hours, reporting only to their buyer and not to a layer of middle management, avoiding the majority of office politics, and otherwise doing well financially and professionally.

This is all well and good, but -- like just about everybody else -- I see a lot of my otherwise brilliant friends make some absolute blunders due to failure to apply some basic arithmetic.

I get on everyone's case to open a Solo 401k. 

With this, you can -- if your income is high enough -- invest up to $53,000 per year in your Solo 401k in pre-tax money.

If you're in the higher tax brackets, it makes eminent sense to do. And oftentimes, my highest-earning friends are frugal and have fairly a lot of cash sitting around.

So I try explaining it like this: "You have $100,000 in the bank? If you literally move half of that money from your checking account to an investment account in your 401k, your taxes go down $20,000 or so."

No one does this arithmetic. At high earning levels, you can literally choose between having $50,000 in your 401k or having $30,000 in your checking account and writing a $20,000 check as a tax payment.

"Oh man, but, what a hassle on the paperwork. And it can't be really like that anyways."

ViI 7. That Shouldn’t Work, IV: Caloric Density

A common beginner dieting error is trying to "eat morally" instead of actually doing the math and chemistry needed to change weight.

For instance, most people think a bagel with cream cheese is "healthy-ish" because it doesn't feel extremely indulgent, whereas a chocolate muffin would feel much more indulgent.

It's actually usually a toss-up. A chocolate muffin might have less calories than a bagel and cream cheese. Neither is a particularly good choice if you're looking to drop in bodyfat.

Meanwhile, you can actually eating a shocking amount of roasted chicken and have it be a negligible amount of calories.

Nuts are, broadly speaking, a very healthy food -- but they've got an immense amount of calories in them. Most people would feel more pleased with themselves if they ate almonds and fruit for lunch instead of pasta, because it feels "more healthy."

Heck, it probably is more healthy, but it also probably has a higher caloric density.

Fruit juices -- any liquid calories, really -- are an outright disaster. Drinking a half-dozen cups of coffee "feels unhealthy," and certainly, stirring butter into coffee and then cinnamonning the buttered coffee probably feels "extremely indulgent" -- despite it being, for a variety of reasons, a much better choice than juice if you're looking to lose fat.

It's, like, chemistry and multiplication.

The world runs on mechanical processes. We don't perfectly understand them and nutrition science has sometimes been wrong. But we broadly understand things and people who are active practitioners who follow the scientific method and are rigorous can tell you broadly what's going on. And as much as there's been the occasional controversies, pretty much everyone agrees that fruit juice is a disaster if you want to lose weight.

But, fruit juice "seems healthy" whereas butter and cinnamon "feel indulgent," and body recomposition is all about feeling like you tried hard and not at all about biochemical processes, right?

VII 8. That Shouldn’t Work, V: Zig Zag Tunnels

Around two-thirds complete with this book, I realized I should probably beat Maj'eyal to keep my "street cred."

So I did. It was hard. My first was on the Nightmare difficulty, the highest one you can start on. (You unlock a harder one, Insane, by winning.)

Nightmare I barely got through by playing sloppy. Insane takes it up another notch entirely.

You need to have much better tactical play to not get wrecked.

One thing that I didn't appreciate the importance of earlier was solid tactical play -- and one thing I discounted almost entirely was building "Zig Zag Tunnels."

In Maj'eyal as well as many other roguelikes, you can "dig" into walls and sometimes floors with a pickaxe or spell.

If you build tunnels in a "zig zag" pattern at diagonals, you can control combat if enemies want to come after you. It might be outright necessary in an area with tough melee enemies who want to gang up on you.

But as soon as I read about it at first, I discounted it. I said, "Ahh, that's lame."

This is a subtle derivation of the "That shouldn't work" point -- I thought it was "lame" to dig zig-zag tunnels. I was thinking, not only shouldn't it work, but also "I shouldn't have to do that."

Well, you don't have to do that -- if you don't mind getting killed on higher difficulties.

Of course, there's usually other ways to tactically control the flow of combat in Maj'eyal. But you do have to play tactically excellently and limit the ability of enemies to overwhelm you at higher levels; if you come in swinging blindly, you're hitting the dirt.

It's hard to describe exactly what was going through my head when I didn't try to use that technique. It would have been trivial to try out and experiment with -- but I heard it, my "that shouldn't be like that" switch went off, and I just discounted it and forgot about it. Dumb.

VII 9 Confirmation of Worldview

The fantastical fantasy nature of games makes us less prone to blindly insist that they game “should” work in some way.

We looked at it from the fairness / “That shouldn’t work” angle.

The game, of course, does not care how you feel.

It’s a bunch of computer code. It just runs. Melinda killed you before you could even see her. You’re upset.

The game doesn’t care.

The game doesn’t even know you’re upset.

As soon as other people are involved, this goes out the window. Suddenly, the engineer-inventor starts talking about how the marketplace and customers are so incredibly stupid, because they should want his product that his theoretically better specs, “and not buy into all the marketing crap.”

The market doesn’t care.

The market doesn’t even know you’re upset.

What really succeeds in life are often counterintuitive and often aren’t the things we think ought to matter. Generally speaking, highly technical thinkers believe that everyone should make decisions technically. People with very strong moral opinions think that everything should get done on the basis of morality. People with more seniority believe that well-established people with seniority should win. Undisciplined talented people believe that raw talent should win. Hard-working people believe that hard work should win.

Should, should, should.

Yawn.

The world doesn’t care.

The world doesn’t even know.

Roguelike games are great. If you come in with a flawed or incomplete understanding of how to play, you get kicked in the face. If you come in with a perfect complete understanding of how to play, but can’t do it due to not managing yourself well, you get kicked in the face.

But it’s a fantastical kick in the face. Sure, it’s aggravating when your level 34 barbarian is permanently killed because you couldn’t deal with an arch-lich that repeatedly cast curses.

But it’s not aggravating in the same way that seeing someone with less talent and less work ethic than you get promoted at the company, because they’re in with the manager.

When the latter happens, the default reaction is to rage internally and externally, complain to your family and friends, and otherwise tear yourself up apart mentally and condemn the world.

From roguelikes, we can hopefully learn to stop doing that. “Okay. Curses aren’t a problem in the early game, but they become a problem in the late-game. A tough-as-nails fighter that can’t deal with curses is a dead fighter.”

That’s a healthy reaction.

Likewise, “Okay. Talent and hard work are critical, but not enough. I need whoever has decisionmaking authority to like me and be very seriously emotionally invested in wanting to help me advance my career.”

That’s a healthy reaction.

VII 10 (That’s Not To Say It’s Easy)

That’s not to say it’s easy.

Or pleasant.

It’s just that roguelikes get us a forum to experience the whims and vagaries and unpleasantries and unfairnesses of life — without actually taking real damage.

It’s not easy to get outside of one’s head, or to stop insisting that the world should be some way other than it is.

It’s not easy.

It’s hard.

It’s maybe the hardest thing.

And that’s not defending stupidity or shortsightedness, either.

You can consciously choose not to do something that would give you an edge if it’s outside your ethics, but you really ought to make that decision consciously.

That’s the hard part — recognizing that the world isn’t the way you want it to be.

If you recognize that and choose not to capitalize on how the world is for ethical reasons, that’s fine.

You can say: “Okay. I understand that at this company, the person who is at least minimally competent who is closest with the manager is the most likely to be promoted. Becoming more competent and producing results without navigating the politics means you won’t be promoted. I understand that, and I want to get promoted, but I dislike politics and I refuse to play in them, and I accept the consequences of that, which are that I will likely not be promoted here.”

That’s fine. Or maybe you go to another company. Problemsolving, fine, good.

But so many people don’t do that. They get their level 34 barbarian killed. They rant and rage. But then they start a new barbarian, play the game the same way, don’t get some anti-curse protection, and get killed again in the late game.

The inventor invents a better product and starts a company. He doesn’t build any sales, marketing, or distribution. The company fails as inferior products take over the market.

He rants and rages. Then he invents a new product. “Ah, this one is really the right one!” He starts a company. He doesn’t build any sales, marketing, or distribution. The company fails as an inferior product takes over the market.

He could stop and said, “Okay, inventing better products clearly isn’t enough. I need to find a way to sell them if I want to make a company successful.”

Or he could say, “I don’t want to deal with sales and marketing, I just want to invent, so maybe I should find a job during pure inventing and let the lab or company I work for deal with the business side of things if any.”

Or he could say, “I don’t care about having a successful business, I just like inventing for the sake of it. I’m going to focus on that, invent things, but not commercialize them, and that’s fine with me.”

Any of those would be fine. There’s probably a dozen more satisfactory options.

But repeatedly starting a barbarian, not getting anti-curse protection, and repeatedly getting killed in the late game…

Roguelikes can teach us a lot. But as simple as these lessons are, they’re not at all easy to get. A single-player game is impartial and unbiased; it will arbitrate your success purely on the basis of how well you navigate its source code and the random numbers that are generated.

It’s so hard to get outside your own worldview and preferences. It’s so simple to say, but it’s maybe the hardest thing. Getting repeatedly kicked in the face in a fantastical fantasy environment with no real consequences to it — this is nearly miraculously valuable.

Section VIII

VIII 1 Unacceptability of Blunders; Excellence Not Required

Roguelikes are hard. One bad blunder can negate hours of perfect play. Bam, you’re dead, there’s the Grim Reaper; do you want to play again?

The challenge to winning a roguelike isn’t the challenge of being great; it’s the challenge of being fundamentally sound, and then not making any fatal mistakes.

Life often works in the same ways. There are plenty of areas of life where the best possible performance does not excel very much over merely solid performance, but where bad performance is disastrous.

There are many implications of this.

VIII 2 Thresholds

You have heard, of course, of the “law of diminishing returns.” But what does it mean, precisely?

Imagine if you will, that you’re stranded in the middle of the desert with no food at all.

How long do you have to live? Not long. You’re going to starve to death rapidly in a hostile environment with no food.

As you find or acquire some food, the next important threshold is “starvation-level rations” — this is where you’re still slowly wasting away and will be fatal over the long term, but where you have enough food to not completely break down.

The next threshold would be “enough food to live indefinitely but while malnourished” — this is one where you could survive almost indefinitely but without having your full range of energy and strength; you’d be weakened and prone to illness and injury, heal more slowly, need to sleep far more than normal, etc.

Then there’s “enough food to live normally.” This is the most important threshold. At this point, you are squared away on food. You have a sampling of every macronutrient and the micronutrients you need to thrive. Maybe the food is spartan and you’re lacking spices and seasonings, but it doesn’t matter.

What’s above that threshold? “An abundance of food,” perhaps, is one higher — having a wide selection and a slight excess of food. Then the next threshold up is perhaps “the Emperor of Persia’s kitchen and stores of food” — a wide selection of every type of food stretching far and wide, with nearly infinite variety and in amounts that as much as desired can be consumed.

As you can see, food goes from very important to not very important very quickly.

Threshold 0: Starving to death rapidly; mere weeks to live.

Threshold 1: Starving to death slowly; months to live.

Threshold 2: Surviving weakly; can live indefinitely, but in a weak state.

Threshold 3: Surviving; can live indefinitely at normal prowess.

Threshold 4: More than surviving; can live indefinitely and have some luxuries and enjoyments.

Threshold 5: Far more than surviving; there is effectively no more advantage to increasing the amount of food in one’s possession.

In many roguelikes, you need to eat food or die. Nethack is one of those.

We intuitively seem to understand that food has diminishing returns as we get more. At first, you’re looking around frantically for rations, trying to figure out which slain enemies can be eaten, trying to build a buffer of food so your character doesn’t starve to death.

Later, you might build a little cache or storage filled with rations or get an enchanted bag of holding and fill it up with lots of food. At that point, you can largely not worry about it.

If you find a magical item like a Horn of Plenty that gives you infinite food, then, you’re set. The food thing is handled. There’s no more advantages to stockpiling food.

If you had that Horn of Plenty, you wouldn’t keep neurotically searching out more rations to stockpile in addition to it.

Yet, we can often lose sight of this principle in both games and real life.

A new company that relentlessly focuses on sales and gives very friendly pay-over-time terms to sign up customers might be adding a lot of sales numbers and future profit to the books — but might be accumulating a hell of a lot of risk and putting itself in a dangerous cashflow position.

In roguelikes, it’s all too common to see a fighter with excellent physical defense keep layering on heavier and heavier armor — and neglecting the fact that they have minimal magic defenses. Or continue to layer on more and more damage, even though they have enough to kill any normal enemy… and while their weakness are enemies that have shields that nullify damage entirely.

Most thresholds, in games and life, are not clearly marked. What’s “enough” damage per turn? What’s “enough” health? What’s “enough” magic resistance?

But it’s worth periodically thinking about. There’s many endeavors in life where going from “solid” to “excellent” doesn’t make much of a difference, and going beyond excellent is nearly completely wasteful. Meanwhile, neglecting a key area — magic resistance, cashflow — can be fatal.

VIII 3 Defensive Policies

Again, here is the problem we’re trying to solve — a single bad enough blunder can be fatal.

Playing a game (or life) competently followed by a single fatal blunder is… fatal.

Playing a game (or life) great followed by a single fatal blunder is… fatal.

Playing a game (or life) EXCELLENTLY followed by a single fatal blunder is…

… you get the point?

Greater heights of excellence won’t save you if you make a fatal blunder.

Thus, we need to remove the chances of such a blunder.

The first way we’ll do that is to dichotomize, and then set policies.

Okay. You’re playing a geomancer. You have three big healing abilities, that take you to full health. You have moderate high defenses. You have no healing abilities at all besides the big three heals.

How quickly should you run away if a fight is tough?

Remember that getting through a level faster is almost never a requisite, nor is efficiency — you need to not die.

I would suggest that you would do well to set your policy to either “I will run after using my first big heal” or “I will run after using my second big heal.”

Running after the third heal used is too dangerous — if something unexpected happens, you have no more healing ability.

So, should it be after the first or second heal used? Well, it depends. If you’re faster than the enemies around, and the enemies are only melee enemies that can’t hit you after you flee, then perhaps the second heal is safe.

On the other hand, if you’re fighting spellcasters or archers that can hit you as you run, maybe you want to flee after your first heal is used.

Ah, but can’t you decide on the fly?

Sure, you can — if you want to get killed.

Setting policies during peacetime if how you keep your head during wartime. In the heat of battle, you can get tied up and forget to keep a margin of safety. You can get obsessed on beating a particular enemy, instead of staying alive and avoiding fatal blunders.

If you “leave it to judging in the moment,” it’s very easy to overreach.

Take Napoleon Bonaparte. He’s one of the greatest universal geniuses of all-time — but he clearly did not have any set amount of reserves, defenses, or stabilization policies.

After the Spanish monarchy helped the French forces conquer Portugal, he betrayed them — and miscalculated slightly, because he set off an insurgent guerrilla war in Spain.

Despite having his best veteran troops tied down in Spain, he invaded Russia anyway. Game over.

It’s possible that no one has won as many impressive victories as Napoleon in history. He showed great talent in almost everything he did — obviously all the ability in war and leadership, but also things like unifying disparate groups, communications, technology, governance, law…

… but he never set policies to reign in and consolidate. The Spanish overreach wouldn’t have even broken the French forces, had it not been followed up by the urgency of the march on Moscow — he again won most of the battles en route to Moscow and captured the capital, but did not have the supplies to hold it. The retreat, with his very best troops still tied up in Spain, was brutal and the end was then in sight.

You need to set policies in advance to avoid the biggest risks and dangers. It’s very hard if your company is in rapid growth to slow down expansion and ensure you get additional runway and safety. It’s very hard to turn down exciting projects if you’ve just come into high prestige and are suddenly having a lot of inquiries for your skills — but going over your possible bandwidth and seeing your quality fall across the board can easily break you, whereas completing five high-profile projects instead of four in a particular time period doesn’t really add that much value.

VIII 4 Defensive Policies II

We can see fatal collapses when sudden bad things happen. Of course.

The more unsettling collapses are where things are running perfectly, people get cocky and lax, and then are ruined.

When things are going poorly or going excellently, one’s judgment tends to get compromised and it becomes harder to think clearly. You need to have already thought.

Your basic policies should emphasize whatever is most important to success:

— For the writer: write every day.

— For the salesperson: generate new referrals/prospects each day.

— For the PhD candidate: work on the thesis every day.

— For the bodybuilder: follow the fitness plan every day.

Etc.

Just having explicit policies to hone in on what’s most important is valuable.

However, you’ll find that naive and simple policies are least useful when they’re most needed… they often don’t address what to do in the face of a huge opportunity coming one’s way, or a huge crisis.

Here is the author’s “Writing Policy” —

Writing Policy

1. At the end of each day, when I plan the day ahead, my planning will include pre-scoping a piece of writing to do.

2. When the time comes, I don’t have to do that piece of writing if I’m highly inspired about something else that’s worth exploring.

3. If not heavily inspired, I will attempt to do “writing-related” stuff which means usually clarifying the outline of the piece I want to write. If it’s called for, re-reading recent writing or doing some editing might be appropriate in this time. (Usually not, but sometimes is okay.)

4. If none of the above is clicking, I will sit there and just suffer for at least an hour, doing nothing else. Suffering and doing nothing else is fine. Procrastinating or doing something that’s not writing-related, under normal circumstances, is not fine. But sitting there just suffering is perfectly fine.

5. I will schedule this writing to be the first full thing I do of the day. I will put it on the calendar and hold it as sacred as any appointment with a client, advisor, or very important contact.

6. I will add a line to my Daily Tracking Template to tick off at the end of the day.

7. I will add a “Writing Policy Adhered” line to my Lights Spreadsheet.

I’ll draw your attention to these two points:

*If not heavily inspired, I will attempt to do “writing-related” stuff which means usually clarifying the outline of the piece I want to write.

*If none of the above is clicking, I will sit there and just suffer for at least an hour, doing nothing else. Suffering and doing nothing else is fine. Procrastinating or doing something that’s not writing-related, under normal circumstances, is not fine. But sitting there just suffering is perfectly fine.

I’ll argue that those are the most useful items there. Specifying the intent (daily writing), the clear measurable duration (one hour), focusing on the process (time) instead of the result (word count, etc), tracking it (spreadsheet), planning each piece of writing the day before, doing it first thing in the day… these are all useful, but not as useful as what to do when things are going wrong.

“If none of the above is clicking, I will sit there and just suffer for at least an hour, doing nothing else. Suffering and doing nothing else is fine. Procrastinating or doing something that’s not writing-related, under normal circumstances, is not fine. But sitting there just suffering is perfectly fine.”

Sometimes the suffering really is the answer. Last week, I had a large opportunity come on my radar suddenly, and put 18 hours of straight work into doing the work to grab it. It screwed my sleep schedule up and threw my routines off. A couple days later, my sleep schedule was still screwed up, and I was waking up in the very late morning / early afternoon instead of my usual 4AM. Two entries in the journal look like this —

— really don’t want to write 2:20PM… oh well, here we go.

— nearly overwhelming hostility to writing 2:25PM… my god… 

That’s okay. I was sitting there suffering.

It wasn’t so much prescient setting the Writing Policy such; I would often get sidetracked in the past when I didn’t know what to write. Sometimes I’d sit and read and hope for inspiration to come, which sometimes it would, and sometimes it wouldn’t. Putting an explicit caveat for what to do if I’m incapable of writing — “sitting there just suffering is perfectly fine” — is what was needed. I have a very high adherence to this policy, and unsurprisingly, when you just sit and stare at a blank page without doing anything else for long enough, eventually something clicks.

Policies that emphasize that mistakes will never happen are unrealistic. Policies that don’t take into account unusual situations are ineffective.

In almost all roguelike games, time doesn’t pass until you take an action. You can sit and think about the game state as long as you want, just like Chess.

So you might have a policy like this —

*After using one of my big heals or one of my anti-curse infusions, I will run away unless there’s a very good reason to stay in combat.

*If I do decide to stay in combat for some reason (a tough required boss is almost dead, for instance), I will take a break and wash my face, make a coffee, have a snack, and clarify my reasoning before continuing the fight.

These policies might be overly conservative, but that’s the point. Writing projects more often fail due to an inability to manage the rough times than for any other reason. Roguelikes most often are lost in a moment of panic after failing to take adequate precautions for the situation one is in.

A defensive policy to keep one sane during a bad time, and with explicit caveats for how exceptions are made — these can be very valuable. These policies are set by looking at common failure cases, and putting down rules for how to stabilize or remedy those situations.

VIII 5 Piloting I: Skill Required…

Policies are designed to make your life easier. In the span and scope of infinite decisionmaking, narrowing it down to precisely what you’re going to do before getting into the heat of battle is useful.

This gets at a larger point, which we’ll start by looking at games to understand: the ease or difficulty in “piloting” a particular character is very important.

Here’s a question — when you’re playing a game, would you rather have a range of a dozen different powerful abilities that are each nuanced effects and between all of them you’ve got every situation covered perfectly… or have one very powerful combo that’s always correct to run, but never as strong as any of those dozen abilities?

The answer is that, once you’ve gotten enough experience, you’d probably prefer to have the stronger overall character with a dozen different abilities. But when you’re starting out, you’re much better off with a clear way to play well.

This gets into how difficult it is to “pilot” your character. If you’re a spellcaster with a mix of utility abilities and curses that you can cast on the enemy — slow, stun, silence, freeze, drain mana, weaken, disarm, reduce armor, paralyze, etc — then it’s often unclear what you should do. That means that, if you panic, you can easily start mashing buttons and get yourself killed.

Oh, but we already said not to panic? Indeed, yes, but you still probably will panic and lose your cool when you’re new to a game. It’s just the nature of things. Unless you’ve established that you’re always calm and level-headed in new endeavors across the board, you should be skeptical of your ability to be calm and cool under fire in something new.

As such, life is a lot easier when there’s a clear hierarchy of the best abilities to use and the order to use them in, with almost no exceptions to the best order of doing things.

In Tales of Maj’eyal, the berserker ability “Unstoppable” makes you unkillable by direct damage. You can get another high-level prodigy ability called “Draconic Will” that makes you immune to negative status effects. Then there’s the elven ability “Timeless” which extends the duration of all useful abilities.

Thus, an order of combat of…

— use all speed abilities you have

— use all damage-increasing abilities you have

— Unstoppable

— Draconic Will

— Timeless

…is basically bulletproof. Not quite bulletproof, but pretty close.

Thus, if you’re new to the game and trying to win, going with a build that utilizes that nearly bulletproof setup makes it much easier to pilot your character.

There are other character classes that have some really excellent shielding abilities, but they have much more difficult tradeoffs. The archmage, for instance, has an ability to convert health damage into recovering mana — but if your mana bar gets entirely full, there’s an arcane explosion and you take a lot of damage.

That ability is harder to know when to trigger and turn on and off. It’s very good, but it requires a lot more skill and judgment.

When you’re new to something, you want less required skill and judgment.

Thus, it’s often preferable to choose builds where the same basic formula is useful in all situations, and then additionally to remove judgment calls about things like when to flee from combat by setting policies — the end result is that it makes piloting much easier and more straightforward.

VIII 6 Piloting II: Clarification

Thinking is expensive; it would do well to always remember that.

It’s worth doing the work of thinking if there’s great payoffs to it — but paying the thinking cost for no gain is a fool’s errand.

Here’s a great example — I’ve often seen young businesspeople get obsessed over the problematic kind-of-sort-of potential expansion opportunities for their business, while ignoring proven things.

There’s something about the unsettled, the open question, the mysterious, the problematic… that draws us to it.

It’s another thing that roguelikes can teach us — we don’t need to, and indeed can’t, afford to go fight bad matchups that aren’t required or highly profitable.

I would advise as such — always take care of your good clients, referrers, and influencers first and foremost. Too often, young businesspeople neglect their best and happiest clients because they’re not making any noise. Your business and life will largely be built on the collaborations with people who are most happiest and pleased with you; ensure you’re spending your time with them.

Then, move on to the situations that are most likely to succeed.

If you have any time left, move on to the shaky stuff.

This looks all very obvious on paper, of course, but real life is not so simple. I see young businesspeople frequently obsessing over a prospective client who is making all kinds of crazy demands and acting erratic, who really — statistically speaking — has very little chance of buying, and maybe wouldn’t be very profitable anyways.

I can’t tell you why this is appealing to people. I don’t know. Something in our minds makes us want to unravel puzzles rather than win.

You’ll probably bring this mentality to roguelikes the first times you play, and it’ll probably get you killed. It’s like — okay, if a Vampire Lord spawns on one path through the dungeon and you can’t handle it very well, you should just run and come back when you’re much higher level.

That’s the answer. That’s the right answer. If you don’t have the firepower and defenses to take out a Vampire Lord, run.

But games where you can repeatedly reload if you die teach you the opposite. They mean you can bullheadedly charge in and repeatedly try different stuff until you maybe get really lucky with the random number generator and get through the encounter.

This is a very bad lesson to learn, in games and in life. You don’t want to bullheadedly tackle problematic situations; you want to dispense with problematic situations as promptly as possible and get on to winning the game you’re playing.

VIII 7 Piloting III

This is where policies again shine. A defensive policy in a game might look like this — “If I encounter an enemy who can cast paralyze, I will immediately run as soon as I see that enemy.”

Is it noble? No. Is it glorious? No. Is it smart? Yes. Does it make you more likely to win? Yes.

Heck, maybe it is noble and glorious. Winning is noble and glorious. At the very least, we can say that being bullheaded, foolhardy, and vain aren’t noble and glorious.

You can make your life easier to pilot with explicit policies like that. For instance, if you’re a young freelancer, you should decide in advance whether your prices are negotiable, and write your answer down to what you’ll say in response to that question.

Prospect: Can you go cheaper?

You: I believe in transparent pricing — you’re getting the best pricing I can offer, and I believe in being honest with all my prospects and clients so that everyone gets the same great price. The only discount I offer is a 5% professional discount for paying the entirety in advance, which I’m happy to extend to you. And you can be confident that no one is getting a better deal than you, because everyone gets my best pricing.

(That’s a little wordy, but you get the idea.)

Refusing to negotiate pricing is a great way to make piloting your business easier. It might be useful to be more flexible, in theory, but it also leaves open the door to making more mistakes. Having a “no negotiate the price” policy just makes life really simple.

Likewise, many people in business have done well by not committing to any deal until it’s discussed with their business partner, significant other, or even perhaps one of their parents. “That deal sounds great, but I do need to run it by my spouse/cofounder/mother/father/investor/operations director/whatever.”

In theory, you lose the ability to jump on an excellent deal very quickly, and you might lose a good deal. In practice, often people commit to things without thinking them through, and then need to walk them back. You know best of all whether you’re a good on-the-fly dealmaker; if not, you’d do well to adopt a policy of never committing to anything new until discussed with whomever.

VIII 8 Piloting IV

All things being equal, if you’re new at something, you want to choose the more forgivable and easier-to-pilot way of doing things.

Forgivable means that you can make some small mistakes and survive. Oftentimes, spellcasters in games can be described as “glass canons” — they have immense damage output, but they shatter if hit once.

If you’re brand new, it would be better not to do something so fragile — it increases your likelihood of surviving long enough to do something interesting and gain some ground.

Likewise, if the character you choose to play has one very clear set of abilities that are their best abilities, then it’s clear what to focus on and what to max out. A fire mage might be very tough, an ice mage might be very tough, but a mage who puts half their points in fire and half in ice are going to miss the synergies, cohesion, and combinations — they can’t specialization their gear for fire or ice damage, and they’re thus going to do considerably less than half the damage than if they specialized.

When you’re brand new, all else being equal, you want the simpler path of advancement, prioritization, and easier choices to make — it’s hard enough to pilot your character and navigate new ground when the choices are straightforward enough and you just need to execute… you don’t need the added complexity.

In real life, this translates to doing simpler, more straightforward, and less-prone-to-fail things rather than more complex, less straightforward, and riskier things.

Expansive thinking is certainly the root of much progress, and expansionary people are much needed. However, the classical young expansionist’s error is to go expansionist on everything.

Don’t do it. Resist it. You don’t need an innovative, complicated, brand new, and highly expansionary policy on every single aspect of your life.

You want innovation and expansion where it’ll pay off — and that typically means having some experience or having done very careful analysis. In areas that won’t produce major advantages, you’re much better off keeping things more simple and straightforward.

For instance, if you’re starting a business, you generally don’t want a crazily innovative pricing structure unless you think that can be a very major source of advantage. There’s many pricing structures that are known to work, and infinitely more that simply don’t work and can’t work.

Here’s an example of attempting to innovate that doesn’t work — when I was younger, I understood there were risks to a buyer when they buy from any service business. I tried offering to clients that we’d let them escrow their money until the project is completed — they could ensure the project gets completed, and we wouldn’t have to chase down invoices.

This never worked. It didn’t happen once. Despite the inherent (seeming) logic of it, it was too weird and different. Instead, what was effective was asking for a larger proportion of money upfront and the rest on a calendar schedule (not on completion), combined with a very strongly worded and very liberal guarantee, and prominently displaying some excellent testimonials from reference clients.

Having the best quality and best fit for your market makes all other piloting easier — if you have the very best offering, most of your marketing and sales get much easier and you need to be less clever. If you don’t have the highest quality offering (broadly speaking; this isn’t just specs) and the best fit your market, that’s worth spending a lot of time on.

But eventually, you want to get out from a desire to be creative or complicated just for the sake of it. More complexity means there’s more places to make mistakes. The more areas in which the correct actions and investments are simple and easy to pilot, the better.

Section IX

IX 1 Service

I love to work. I love to produce. I love to take the shape of this rock we’re on and reshape it to be better for the human race.

If I could work nonstop — no eating, no sleeping, no resting, no breaks, no leisure — I would.

But it don’t work like that.

I get immense pleasure out of difficult and challenging work that produces results… but I found, over time, that if I didn’t take my leisure intentionally, my body and mind would rebel and take it unintentionally.

I can do no leisure, no breaks, and no procrastination… for a week or two, here and there. Followed by a certain backlash and collapse.

I came to terms with the fact that I need leisure — but it doesn’t change my fundamental orientation to the world. I want to get the most out of my leisure. I want to be recharged, but I also want to get smarter and stronger and tougher.

I have this rule — “Everything in my life should serve me, and I serve my ethics.”

I don’t serve convention or fashion or convenience or expediency. I work for what I believe is right, and everything else in my life must make the cut as to whether it supports that or not.

And very few things do that as well as a roguelike game. Yeah, if I could never eat again without getting malnourished, I’d do it. If I could never sleep again while staying at peak mental ability, I’d do it. If I could take no leisure, I’d do it.

I can’t. But I can do the next best thing. I can find the rare activities that push myself to my limits in a relaxing and enjoyable context. I can come out recharged — and stronger, smarter, tougher.

IX 2 Mettle

Yeah, I said it — stronger, smarter, tougher.

I’ve played team sports.

I’ve competed in one-on-one individual sports.

I’ve done weight training, martial arts, and learned marksmanship.

You know what? I’m not sure any of those outstrip the patience, steadfastness, coolness as things ho wrong, foresight, analytical ability, and anti-panic needed to excel at the hardest type of games.

Isn’t this odd, though? Who would celebrate this? It’s not “cool.”

But don’t we admire Chess players? Roguelikes and the similar outstrip Chess by far in the range of lessons available.

By all means, learn how to use your body and how to work in teams. These are critical, too. But if we look past petty fashions and “coolness,” we see one of most the fruitful lands to harvest self-development and learn to channel our analytical ability to higher powers while controlling our emotions.

It tests your mettle. It builds your mettle. Harvest from that fruitful ground.

IX 3 Win

And finally — it teaches you how to win.

You don’t need to be creative or brilliant.

You need to not make mistakes.

You need to work with a gameplan that has a chance of winning.

Some stuff is game-breakingly powerful. Using it will make you game-breakingly powerful.

Knowing your weakness is key.

Being cohesive is key.

Staying in control of your emotions is key.

All of this leads to winning.

It’s easy to spin your wheels in real life, wondering if you’re really making progress.

A roguelike will tell you if you’re doing it right. It ain’t always easy. But it teaches you how to win.

Table of Contents

Section I. A Brief Look Backwards

Section II. Lessons

Section III.

Section IV.

Section V.

Section VI.

Section VII.

Section VIII

Section IX