Head-Driven

Boring entry that people would only fully read in college.

A while back, Lee, Blair and I had a Halo 3 session and it was awful – I was the worst player by a fair margin. It’s actually kind of strange to me how much worse I am at Halo 3 than Halo 2. Anyway, we played again today (with Dong in the mix), and it was completely different – I did really well, even winning the majority of the individual games. The improvement in my performance was so marked that Lee commented that I must have been playing at work.

Which I haven’t been doing. What actually happened was, after the last session, I was so frustrated that I spent a few minutes that night in bed thinking through my game, identifying what mistakes I made, coming up with lessons learned, and possible alternative strategies. And that was the difference.

For me at least, success in Halo is identical to that in poker, investing, and a host of other things. The danger in all of them, and the primary cause of failure, is getting caught up in emotion. Success requires coming up with a sound strategy when I’m in the right mind, and having the fortitude to stick with it in the heat of the moment.

Anyway, it’s just weird to me how heady and thought-driven I am such that just thinking about things can make such a difference. I’m like this with everything. The first time I snowboarded, on an FiCS trip, I had heard about Davis who did really well just kind of feeling his way down the mountain. Michelle had said she’d give some pointers for beginners, so I decided to go without a lesson. It was one of the most miserable days of my life. I can’t feel my way through anything, and mistakes in snowboarding take a particular toll on your body. It was enough to make me not try again for years.

The next time I did, I took a lesson with Jieun. And it made all the difference in the world. Just thinking through exactly what I need to do is the only way I can do things. My body is just incapable of intuiting things. But tell me exactly what to do and I can force it to do it reasonably well.

This is true not just for things I’m mediocre at but things I excel at as well. Becoming an expert at any activity requires repetition, until it’s mindless, relying almost entirely on muscle-memory. (It’s theorized that the reason Russian girls dominate tennis and Korean women dominate golf is that for various reasons, foremost being a lack of good courts or courses, they place a heavy emphasis on repetition, doing the exact same thing over and over and over and over, and that this is the key to expertise.) Over-thinking things causes people to “tighten up” and screw up.

This is true for me as well with, for example, piano. As a kid, when I got good at a piece, it was primarily muscle memory. But even with that, I needed a cognitive backup. Before every recital, I would think through the piece, recall every note as it looks on the sheet music, not just the feel. And I couldn’t always. I’d say about half of those times, when I couldn’t recall things perfectly in my mental map, I’d make a mistake. It’s a sign of my laziness that I didn’t practice enough to always perfect that mental map and I could only assess things immediately before I had to do it, but yeah.

Even now, I barely practice piano or guitar physically, but I’m constantly thinking it, practicing in my mind, and it’s enough that when I do play, my playing is passable. Jieun used to be able to tell when I was thinking it because my fingers would absentmindedly tap chords and runs. That’s pretty much how I practice; entirely in my mind.

So yeah, it’s crazy to me how head-driven my physical activities are. I can’t feel my way into anything, and thinking things through makes a profound difference in my physical performance.

That’s why I resonated so much with Socrates’ ideas that what we do reflects what we really think. I’ve come to believe that’s wrong; I think Scripture and experience tells me that there are many competing forces within me that vie for control, of which the rational mind is just one. But it’s a struggle to really accept that, along with ideas that my emotions aren’t necessarily rationally justified. In the moment, I always fall back on thinking that my emotions stem from my rational thought, even that I can control my emotions by thinking correctly. But that’s not true, and accepting that would improve how Jieun and I fight. It’s just hard to get that to sink in.

SN. Dave has this notion that I’m somehow really good at games, even unbeatable, such that beating me is some great accomplishment. I have no idea where this comes from. I’m probably above average in most games, but I don’t think I’ve ever been the best at anything. Eddie beat me most of the time in Tetrix and Madden 64, Brian M@ was better at Puyo Puyo, Brian Y7e at Snood, Chinsan at Bust-A-Move, and now Dave himself at Dr. Mario. Really, beating me at anything is no big thang. Happens all the time.

Just not the first three games today of Halo 3.