In my life I've bore witness to many great people and their achievements both close and afar.
I say this as a man who isn't easily impressed. These people i aspire to be like are in the upper echelon of achievement and in my quest for growth I've always asked myself what sets them apart, and the answer I always come back to is that these people never simply do. In fact these people do the hell out of things.
Take for example a hypothetical solodev that builds their own language. Someone inclined to do such a thing doesn't have a drive just to make a language to polish their resume rather they do it because they have a passion for languages. They have OPINIONS, opinions on how a language should operate from simple principles like basic arithmetic to the deep end of standard library operations like string interpolation. They are not building a language, but building the HELL out of a language you could interrogate them on any principal of their design and get some form of an answer which they've internally refined for the life of the whole project (consciously or subconsciously) this is the dedication that delivers novel and oftentimes good results.
This mentality has become rare in society as of late, we live in the tiktok lifehack era where people are so ill informed they aren't even aware they can simply do, and those who can figure out that much are rewarded enough they never go past that. Comfort is a step twords stagnation and stagnation is a step twords death.
Many people in the social media scene are all looking for shortcuts, a cliff on the mountain of competency to pitch a tent and die on.
They take in gospel from the grifter gods who only live mere feet above them using this perspective trick to fool those below into thinking they have in fact gotten to the top of the mountain. Never going much higher themselves they cannot even picture what the summit looks like, rather providing their made up idea of what it should be.
This pattern sickens me, its a robbery victimizing those who want to reach the summit in earnest but are entirely misguided by what they believe to be good information from someone who is in a slightly higher position than them.
Those who do the hell out of things however don't care about the description and false paths to the summit provided by those types, skeptics at heart they forge their own path through the rough and dangerous terrain the grifters dare not tread on simply because the summit is the goal not the glory of reaching it.
The key lesson with this analogy is really how to tackle adversity, if you truly care about the summit you will crawl through the jagged hellscape to reach it. Who the hell cares if its hard? If you fear the difficulty more than your goal you are doomed to fail more often than not. You aren't committed to your goal.
To move to another anecdote, i learned some of my Python skills from a book by Zed A Shaw which embodies these concepts. The book is called "learn python the hard way" this title is likely to intrigue the right type of person and scare away those who lack commitment. Going through this book you dont just learn how to write pytoh, but you learn the mechanics of writing python. You learn what python is actually doing and this information is immediately transferrable to learning any other language. It values the time commitment and rewards the student.
Of course if you wish to do things the hard way you first need to develop the mindset, the mindset drives growth through doing things the hard way. Without the mindset you will likely give up and seek shortcuts. Frustration, risk and confusion will be part of any hard process. The trick is knowing when to take a break and re-evaluate and that's where the growth comes from. In this bout of hopelessness is where the muse likes to hide, its where the real shortcuts can be found. By finding these shortcuts yourself you've been trained on how to identify and abuse the patterns that exist everywhere which is infinitely more valuable than a specific route given to you (give a man a fish).
So you might be asking where can I learn the mindset? Well in my opinion the best way to learn something in an environment that allows you to fail gracefully with minimal risk but also forces you to grow yourself twords doing something that might be hard or scary. I believe there are some video games (which in my opinion are very accessible to a variety of backgrounds).
Im writing this right now waiting patiently for my health to recover in between grinding mobs in everquest (project1999). I could easily also recommend any of the games from the soulsbourne franchises.
Both of these games share some interesting design principals that get you used to failure and difficulty. Neither provide any kind of save state that allow you to scam the encounters.
They provide mechanical disincentives upon death. In most souls games you loose your progress twords your next level as well as your in game currency and must overcome the same obstacles to reclaim that progress, repeated failures will cause you to lose everything.
Classic everquest as it was in the late 90s does something similar; upon death you lose everything you hold and around 10% of your gathered experience; you are free to go reclaim your resources where you died but with no gear it presents a risk of death in which you lose more exp and still would have not reclaimed your gear.
The interesting thing about how EQ implements this mechanic is that its designed to be a social game first, if you are dedicated to understanding the mechanics you can mitigate these penalties to a degree by finding another player who has class based abilities to resurrect you which allows some of your exp to come back or at least the basic ability all players have to move your corpse containing your gear and money. Players are likely to do this because the game has a universal level of shared suffering and they "know the feeling"
Going back to the mountain analogy the closer you get to the summit the more authentic climbers you meet. These connections are invaluable and allow you to learn tricks from people who have have actually figured these things out rather than being bullshitted by someone looking for undeserved admiration. The only way to meet these people is to climb the hard parts, these types wont be hanging out on a lower cliff.
Once you meet them the principal of real sees real kicks in and a coherent and mutually beneficial exchange of ideas can commence. The shortcuts they can teach you are actually of value because you already can understand the mechanics of them rather than blindly following a guide, you can abstract out the mechanics and reapply the same method to other situations and you become more powerful in a sense.
Going back to everquest and the "souls" games though, another lesson they teach was already disclosed earlier in this post.
Patience.
In everquest there is no easy healing item or spell for a lot of classes; it teaches patience through its slow health regeneration. Perceptive payers might notice however that bandages are available buy acquiring them you can partially heal yourself up to 50% health and any subsequent use will only waste your resources. You still have to wait for the other 50% this creates a loop in which you go into battle and afterwords are forced into a period of reflection.
It is advantageous to use this time to try and understand where improvements in your technique can be found; its also a nice excuse to take a break and see the real world for a bit.
Darksouls teaches this lesson differently, it teaches a form of active patience; if you work too quickly to recover your souls you could misstep and lose everything. Only by understanding the gauntlet will you be successful in your mission and that's only done by multiple failures and setbacks. Each failure you should be learning a little more and eventually have a coherent understanding of the arena you're operating in.
By playing these games you can train your mindset to accept the hard way of doing things and accept failure on the route to perfection and become one of the greats in whatever it is your ambitions manifest as.
Once you have the mindset of learning by doing and accepting failure nothing can stand in your way. If you feel like games are a waste of time then apply these lessons to your craft IRL. It doesn't matter the medium you just need to cultivate the skills and the mindset to be successful.
Thanks for reading