Practice Courage | j7shen Sociology

Practice Courage

What is to Reasonable, if 2024’s New Year Resolution is to 2023’s?

In the past 10 years, all that I think about for my New Year’s Resolutions is to do more stuff. Stuff that I don’t do and stuff that I don’t do enough. It’s all that I CAN think about because it is what drives change. The reason I don’t try to do less is because of the productivity trap. In brief, the productivity trap is the second biggest trap in self-improvement. It happens when you identify an unproductive activity and focus all your efforts to cut it out of your life. It makes you think you are home-free to success because doing less unproductive stuff necessarily makes you more productive. Fallacy! All it will do is create an activity vacuum. Like a retiree struggling to fill the 8-hour hole in their daily life, so too will the victim of the productivity trap. And that’s why I only try to do more things rather than less things.

To do more specific things require practicing doing more things in general, so my goal this year is to completely normalize things that I feel are scary. Emphasis on scary, so my resolution for 2024 is to have courage. Last year I emphasized being reasonable because things that I feel are scary are things that I know are not scary, and the resolution was to focus on uniting doing and knowing. That wasn’t enough, so this year I will regularly do scary things so I can develop a general skill to do scary things until I internalize them1.

And what better ways to practice courage than with stuff that I want to do? Video games. Difficult video games. Competitive video games. It turns out that just because I learned the lessons from video games, it doesn’t mean I fully practice them. Starcraft 2 and Street Fighter 6 are both difficult competitive games that I enjoy. They are both 1v1, so no teammates to carry me or bring me down. I love it when everything is my fault. They reward labbing it out2. Most importantly, they reward future-oriented thinking. In other words, they are exactly like academia. Well, almost. Researchers often collaborate and reviewers usually have a 3v1 advantage, but practicing behind closed doors and sticking by something without immediate rewards are core tenets of any science. Indeed it is as scary to play video games as it is to submit papers. You may lose. You may get rejected. Worst of all, you may feel discouraged even though failure doesn’t matter. You do know it doesn’t matter, right? It’s not about winning the next game or even the next 10 games; If you want to rise in the video game ranks it’s about winning more than 50% of your games in the next 200 games. Likewise, it’s not about having the next submission be instantly accepted; If you want to rise in the academic ranks it’s about landing the paper in a decent journal. It’s like fishing: Every second you don’t get a bite may feel like a failure, but in the end, only the catch matters3. Point is, both are scary. So scary that some people freeze up at the thought of writing. For Starcraft 2, it’s so scary that many enthusiasts watch professional gaming tournaments but barely play the game themselves. If there is some general skill in overcoming the scariness of an activity that you shouldn’t be scared of, playing scary video games might teach it to me. Not just playing them at all, but regularly, every day. The same as you do with daily writing, except it’s more analogous to submitting your papers frequently because labbing out an essay that never sees the light of day means you’re not putting yourself out there3.

Barring a 100% winrate or acceptance rate, you aren’t competitive if you don’t have the courage to fail. So have courage. Practice courage in 2024 and beyond.

  1. This conundrum has many different names and each of them plage me in different ways. There is wanting to want but not want, seeking contentment, the rhythm of the downward spiral, rationalizing the journey, too many disclaimers, the dual audience problem, becoming socially trapped, proving agency, future-oriented thinking. and of course, the productivity trap. ↩︎

  2. To repeated drill and experiment techniques or mindsets. Can be done alone or with friends! It’s different from practicing only in its nature to be behind closed doors or be self-contained; e.g. Practicing interview questions with your friend would be labbing it out, attending real job interviews would be practice. All labbing out or gymming out is practice, but not all practice is labbing out or gymming out. ↩︎

  3. But the catch needs to be good to be worthwhile. Not so much with video games unless you play in professional tournaments, but in academia, you won’t go far or get tenure with many publications in bad journals. Any publication is not good publicity. This fact contradicts the spirit of practicing courage because it makes you worry about the outcome of the next game - which I said isn’t what it is about. Ultimately, there are pros and cons to seeing everything as a competition to win as there are to seeing everything as a training exercise, and employing either of them could lead to the same future equilibrium. One encourages a fearless pursuit of opportunities because it is a numbers game that we live in, but it exposes you to the danger of forgetting your original goals. The other encourages a relentless pursuit of your goals because to be distracted will be the death of you, but it prevents you from seeing the bigger picture. All of this is a problem under the false dichotomy I created. One can obviously do well under either mindset. Which one to choose depends on your needs: If you need to up your numbers to practice courage (like I do), everything is training; If you need to win everything so life is worth living, everything is a competition. ↩︎

Thinking Tools · Lessons From Video Games