Playing StarCraft 2 reminded me that you need to fail in order to improve.
What is StarCraft?
StarCraft is about resource and supply chain management. It's also about destroying your competition while forming allies and alliances.
It's very similar to the business world except that you get to blow things up.
UC Berkley even has a class on StarCraft Theory and Strategy.
I went from unbeatable to WTF just happened and why is everything burning in about 2 minutes
I had been playing StartCraft 2 and kicking my computer generated enemies ass. I thought I was really good and then remembered that there are 6 levels.
- Very Easy
- Easy
- Medium
- Hard
- Very Hard
- Insane
I had been playing Medium so I jumped right to Insane. I lasted about 2 minutes.
It was a crushing defeat. I felt demoralized and instead of goind back to "Medium" I went down to "Easy". Easy felt good and I could win everytime.
While it felt less stressful and almost peaceful to know the outcome of every game...I wasn't getting any better.
I went back to challenging myself and failing.
I increased the difficulty level back to "Medium" untill I could win almost every game. After each failure I was able to make changes to my strategy and then try again. In many cases it was how I would lay out my base or in what order I built up my forces.
In StarCraft there is a build order or tech tree to everything you create but you have options as to when and where to build. I was optimizing my build process with small incremental improvements. I was perfroming a kaizen on my game strategy.
I then moved the game setting up to Hard and lost the first 17 games and then started winning. When I could win almost every game I moved up to the next level.
While I haven't tried insane again I have it flagged as my "True North". I don't know if I'll ever make it but I'm going to have a fun time failing while getting there.
