barfing onto the page about how I'm washed up

I have always imagined self-improvement to be this abstract concept that is difficult to understand and difficult to explain. After all, if you know what to do to get better at something, you should just do it right? Then why do people struggle with it? Why does any self-improvement, whether it may be physical, mental, emotional, or skill based, feel so difficult at so many points in your life? I think I have tried putting my thoughts on it years ago, but I can't find where it is, so now with puberty past me, I shall aim to write about it once more! Let's explore and see what we find.

One day years ago, in a Tekken Tag 2 stream chat I had the epiphany that, "You are only 50% on your journey to improve." The logic behind it was that you can only realise so much about your play that you can improve, and given what you can do currently you're only half way there, but the more you improve the more you realise you have to improve, and thus you are forever stuck at that 50% barrier because ultimately the potential you realise within yourself just keeps expanding with more knowledge, situational awareness, reactions, or execution you gain. At the time it felt like an infallible argument and style of thinking, and it seemed to be very supportive and encouraging, because the more you learn the more you realise there is to learn, and learning is fun. However as the years have gone by I would really like to revisit this analogy and try to see what old me was thinking about with regards to this. This also is how I have seen my own improvement, so maybe this doesn't apply to other people, so maybe just take this as my own journey rather than some sort of overall guide or big mantra to getting good.

The best analogy I have now with regards to improvement is to imagine that you are at the bottom of a really really tall staircase. You have to keep climbing to reach the top, but you don't know where the top is - it kind of tapers off in the distant horizon. You can see you're at the bottom when you start off, and you know you can climb a certain amount given your current skill at climbing, which is quite low. This is the difference between your personal realised potential and ultimate potential - with your personal realised potential you know what -you- can improve towards, which is how far you think you can climb, and with the ultimate potential it's what the best players in the world can do and what you see as the peak play possible.

As you climb your first step you realise, "This is not so bad!" and then see that you can climb one more and reach two steps. Now that you've climbed two steps you realise, "Yea I can easily climb two as well!" and then you keep climbing. This is analogous to starting out at the gym with low weights and putting in the effort to build some muscle mass to go from, say, a 15 second plank to a 20 second plank. In a fighting game sense it is learning the game so your in game sense improves and you start to see more clearly what you can do, what openings you can find, and build up your combos and movement.

As you climb, you start to get tired. Your legs hurt and every step is a chore. However you look back at how far you have climbed and you see that you can go that much further. This is the 50% kicking in. You see that you can do that much better because you have seen yourself do so much from before. Maybe in a gym sense it's not exactly thinking you have the capability to lift twice as much weight as you can, but also the sets you can do. In a fighting game sense it means you can react to that much more stuff than you could before, or you can do that hard combo you couldn't before. For learning instruments it can be that you finally learned how to play a decently difficult song, so you realise you can play an even harder song.

The more steps you climb the more you get tired, so it gets progressively harder to improve. Improving when you are already good is often times not fun and not easy, because as you get better, the stuff you have to fix often is not very obvious or not very easy. Learning to improve your situational awareness when you already are working so hard to be aware in every spot is very difficult and taxing, and so is learning to do a difficult execution trick when your mind is already working so hard to play well. This also ignores having to spend time learning difficult execution in a vacuum, because you already have a good enough grasp of what is considered basic.

Also the more you keep climbing, you see the staircase is still longer, because as you improve you see that there is that much more possible in the game, that there are that many things you can improve at and gain a higher understanding of the game and the variables. Maybe this is not possible in games with low skill cap, such as tic tac toe, but that is why I love fighting games or other skills like learning instruments, because you can keep improving for a very very long time and they still have so much more for you to understand and improve at. You see that you have come so far, yet you can still become twice as good by putting in effort, which to me is really fun!

So an hour and some amount of words later I'm here looking at the screen (hehe) with not a good way to end this, so I'll just say that I think I will never fully recall the language past me used. Maybe I have to find some way to go back to my old blog to find it and compare what I thought then to what I think now.