Ideas that changed your life (but from Starcraft)
I really enjoyed this Ask HN thread: Name one idea that changed your life (which credits this David Perell tweet).
As mentioned in a few recent posts, I’ve started playing Starcraft (Remastered) again. My recommended videos have been taken over by Day9 Learn Starcraft tutorials.
During all this, I’ve been writing down 3-5 sentence notes whenever some kind of life lesson comes to mind.
In an attempt to not just have a bunch of unfinished drafts, I’ll grab one now to share some ideas that changed my life that I (at least partially) learned from Starcraft.
Focused attacks on one unit can be good (but be careful)
One of the early micro-ing lessons in Starcraft was to focus attacks on one unit at a time. If you have some group of marines against some group of hydralisks, really any unit probably works here, you’ll stand a better chance if you focus the attack so your group targets one unit at a time. When that one dies, set the group to another single unit, etc.
I’m sure there’s some useful graph of this somewhere.
Anyway, as each unit is killed, the amount of damage your group is taking per second goes down as well.
(This all assumes they aren’t also focus targeting your units as well.)
How this relates to life is to realize the importance of focusing and the unimportance of being good at multitasking.
That said, getting focus blocks is more about environment design. You need to be able to design your day to have fewer interruptions. It’s a longer game.
A short-term skill worth practicing (which could take a while to develop) is to be good at getting into that focused state. So if you’re interrupted, which will happen, your entire next hour isn’t thrown away for a one-minute interruption. Yes, having the deep block without interruptions is good. But things happen. Prep for it.
As for the “be careful” part with a focused attack, if your opponent knows you’re targeting then they can make that unit retreat. Your units will follow it without attacking, taking damage from the rest of the group.
How does this apply to life?
You should reflect on what you’re focusing on regularly. Having complete focus on the wrong thing can be as much a waste of time as doing a bunch of things without focus.
And check this other post out with some other Starcraft Life Lessons (along with some notes about Tobi Lutke, Shopify founder, and how Starcraft shaped his thinking).
Michael Lewis had Jacob Weisberg and Malcolm Gladwell had a conversation that was reposted to the Against the Rules feed. Weisberg and Gladwell started Pushkin together. From their site:
We started our company with a few simple precepts. We would put artists and creators first. We would produce work that we care about and believe in. And we would have fun.
In this episode, they touch on that principle of fun and discuss still being able to have fun during this current crisis. Part of that, of course, is that they’re still able to make the thing that they make: podcasts. They talk about the flexibility of the medium and being able to just write around the current situation.
This is one of my favorite topics: writers who are podcasting who are podcasting about podcasting.
Some other topics they touch on: getting a nice office with good coffee (it can never be too good), risks with starting a business with a friend, and why they thought building a business around podcasting made sense but that it can’t only be podcast advertising to drive things because that can be inconsistent.
I need to check out some of the other Pushkin podcasts, probably starting with Tim Harford’s Cautionary Tales.
Tobi Lütke: Building lings, hydras, mutalisks (and Shopify) | Podcast Notes
Tobias Lutke is the founder of Shopify (and a hobbyist Starcraft player)
In this interview he goes pretty deep on the things he learned about life and business through Starcraft.
If, for some reason, you’ve decided to get all your life lessons by playing games, Starcraft is a good place to start. You might not end up with a multi-billion dollar company like Lutke, but you can still learn a bunch about systems, attention, and efficiency.
This episode is a great example of the unique content that podcasts provide. The founder of one of the most successful e-commerce companies in the world dedicates an hour talking about Starcraft and how he’s applied the concepts in his life and in business.
After listening to this, I re-installed Starcraft and have been quickly reminded of concepts I learned through Starcraft.
Let’s say you have a chaotic day to day…
… you have dozens of things that you could focus on.
Which of those things will you try to tackle first?
Well, let’s say most of those tasks are interceptors but a couple are carriers. If you destroy the carriers, the interceptors die with them. Things in your life can be similar. There are a few things that are way more important to take care of and can make the other things unnecessary.
(There are plenty of games where a boss has a weak point that you need to target, but something about RTS really just maps better to all the unpredictability of the day to day.)
Tobi Lutke offered a pro gamer an internship at Shopify based on the student’s success as a professional gamer. He talks about that on this episode. The way he sees it, there are just a ton of positive characteristics required to get that good at a game as difficult as Starcraft.
At the highest levels, there’s just an amount of mental grit involved. There aren’t many activities where you sit at a computer that have as much pressure as competitive gaming. Solving a programming problem can be mentally strenuous, sure, but you’re probably not under the same type of time pressure and there’s not someone on the other side actively trying to destroy you. (I mean, unless, I don’t know, you’re in a hacking scene in a movie.)
Don’t believe in the growth mindset? Play Starcraft for a few weeks.
Lutke calls out how Starcraft makes the growth mindset obvious.
It’s difficult to learn, but you can very clearly see yourself getting better if you stick with it long enough.1 Whatever your first RTS was, it can be an incredibly jarring genre to jump into. You’re in control of a whole bunch of stuff instead of the usual focus on one character.
Focus on attacking your opponent? Check your email? Check on your expansion that’s being attacked? Respond to that ping? Keep building units? (Learn to prioritize and shift your attention.)
One similarity (of many) that Tobi points out between Starcraft and running a business is that you very clearly have a limited amount of attention. If you’re paying too much attention to a battle and forget to continue producing units, then you can end up way behind when the battle ends.
If instead you’re just monitoring things at a high level and don’t pay enough focused attention and get sloppy on an attack, you can lose a battle you should’ve won based on the units you have.
Maybe that battle won’t matter.
Maybe it was the only battle that mattered.
Just understanding what the tradeoffs are when shifting your attention in different directions is important. And it’s invaluable to be able to do it over and over one after the other and learn to make those decisions.
Remember when you didn’t know anything? (You probably don’t!)
At least not really. An expert has a really hard time picturing what it’s like to be a beginner who doesn’t even know what they don’t know.
In 6th grade, I remember playing a bunch of Starcraft before learning there was even a concept of build orders. That seems silly at this point but it really is this thing that seems obvious and you might forget that beginners don’t know about build orders at all.
It reminds me of something Thomas Frank (of College Info Geek) said about students who take some of the productivity courses he’s made. He’s talked about overthinking things and considering teaching some advanced tactics that might be more useful.
But when the course is released, what do plenty of people say?
“Oh yeah… putting stuff on a calendar does make sense!”
The scary thing with this is that, ten years from now, there’s probably some things looking back that you’d do differently and probably think it should’ve looked so obvious.
Take the time to reflect on what you know now and what you would tell yourself from 6 months ago.
Writing this reminded me of this old video I made about some life lessons from Starcraft.
Book Notes: “That Will Never Work” by Marc Randolph
Check out the full notes for “That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea” by Marc Randolph
Marc Randolph was one of the founders of Netflix. In That Will Never Work, he writes about the early days of Netflix, before they started their original content empire. (He left in 2002.) Near the end, he mentions some of the things that happened after he left:
As I write this, the company has just passed 150 million subscribers, with customers in nearly every country in the world. Netflix makes its own TV shows, produces its own movies, and has changed the way people consume entertainment.
(Shout out to the “Skip intro” button that I’ve pressed countless times before rewatching Arrested Development episodes.)
They started small (How do you get to 150 million subscribers? One at a time)
Here’s the first day:
We’d expected 15 or 20 people to use the site to order a DVD. We’d gotten 137—and potentially we’d gotten more than that, since we didn’t know how many people had tried to access the site when it was down.
The printers also jammed all day. And that’s just one many reminders of the state of the world back when Netflix started. DVDs weren’t the clear standard yet to take over VHS. You couldn’t start an online business in a weekend by connecting a few cloud services together.
He praises Reed Hastings throughout the book and knew he was the right CEO to get them to where they are today. That was pretty refreshing after reading Hatching Twitter earlier this year and seeing all the scheming, navigating, and backstabbing going on in their leadership. (Good drama for a book, though!)
Remember when you weren’t online, everywhere, at all times?
The most enjoyable parts are descriptions of the world before everyone was online, everywhere, at all times. It was great to learn how data and recommendations were core to their business, even in the earliest days.
As we talked, I learned that Mitch ran a small chain of video stores called Video Droid. He had ten locations and managed thousands of titles in each one of them. I was interested in the way he talked about the practical challenges of maintaining an inventory of both new and classic films, but what really fascinated me was his deep knowledge of movies and his even deeper connection with his renters. He paid attention to what they liked, what they asked for, and what they wanted. He was a movie buff, and he wanted to help his customers find the kinds of movies they’d love. That meant giving them not only what they thought they wanted but what they didn’t even know they wanted. Mitch was a walking, talking IMDb. He watched movies all day at the store, then went home and watched a movie while he was eating dinner, then stayed up late watching even more movies.
“Mitch” here is Mitch Lowe, who was also a part of Netflix and was later part of leadership at Redbox and MoviePass. Some people love movies. Some people really love movies.
Go home at 5 p.m. sharp (Well, at least once a week)
Another quote I highlighted while reading was about knowing yourself:
“As you get older, if you’re at all self-aware, you learn two important things about yourself: what you like, and what you’re good at. Anyone who gets to spend his day doing both of those things is a lucky man.”
If you do something you like that you’re not good at, there’s good reason to keep that as a hobby. If you’re do something you’re good at that you don’t like, you’re probably being paid for it right now. Once you’re aware of where you are on most days, you can build awareness around what aspects of the day you do like and make it a goal to add more things that you enjoy to your day.
And the last clipping is this quote about prioritizing time.
He always kept his date nights.
Why become a millionaire many times over if you can’t go home to your family when you want to?
Outline for a video about the iPad Magic Keyboard
Thought these questions cover the keyboard at a high level:
- How’s the keyboard itself?
- How’s the trackpad experience?
- What about form factor? Lap? Size?
#1: How’s the keyboard itself?
- Okay so the keyboard feels pretty good. That said, I didn’t actually have too much of a problem with the butterfly switches on the last five or so years of MacBooks. And I didn’t think the Smart Keyboard Folio was terrible by any means. (Though I didn’t type a ton of stuff on it.) I was thinking about getting a MacBook Air for the keyboard and portability. But… that’d be stupid. Okay not really. Getting it would make my previous purchase stupid. I have a 16-inch MacBook Pro. There’s no reason to have both the MacBook Pro and the MacBook Air really. The hedonic treadmill of devices. The perfect device combination is always the next device combination.
- Oh yeah so the typing experience feels great. The keys feel great. I read a good review (maybe it was The Verge? Or TechCrunch?) where the writer definitely knew all the terms used to describe a keyboard. Squishiness and things like how much the keys move when you’re touching the different corners of the keyboard. I mean, this thing feels the same as the 16-inch MacBook Pro to me. BUT one thing that’s nice about the smaller trackpad is that the front of the device isn’t always cutting into my wrists.
- What kind of caps lock person are you? I went with Esc after finding that I needed to press Esc somewhat often. (I switched it after trying to get out of a crop menu in Figma.) On the MacBook, I usually set caps lock to ctrl and will usually caps lock for any ctrl+tab input.
- Yes, it’d be nice to have brightness and volume on the keyboard. Those are the things I miss on this thing.
#2: How’s the trackpad experience?
- Clicking it down feels cheap compared to the glass/force touch MacBook trackpads. I haven’t used any other kind of laptop for years so I can’t really compare other trackpads. It’s fine though, because I usually just do a finger tap for clicking. But I do have to click all the way when clicking and dragging things (which I feel like I do a lot more in iPadOS than on MacOS but that’s probably a use case thing).
- As for the OS stuff, it works pretty well but there are definitely times where I’m not sure exactly if a click will work as expected. I’m sure with time I’ll get a sense of when a click will or won’t work on something. It also took me a bit to figure out how to turn the page on a split screen view on the Kindle without popping up the multi-page preview each time. (Just click the edges of the split window and it’ll go next/previous. This was one of those things where I went “Oh, duh.” after.)
#3: What about form factor? Lap? Size?
- It’s heavy. My main devices before this were a 16-inch MacBook Pro and an 11-inch iPad Pro with the Smart Keyboard Folio case. The weight of the 12.9-inch iPad Pro with the Magic Keyboard makes it feel mentally closer to the 16-inch MacBook Pro than the 11-inch iPad Pro. I have a hunch that it’s actually closer to the 11-inch iPad Pro. But I never stopped being delighted by the form factor of the 11-inch iPad Pro. It just felt like the right size to take everywhere.
- I wrote about this (and a lot of the above stuff) in my rambling post, but I really want to see how portable this is when quarantine is over. I doubt I’d take this and the MacBook Pro. The more I’m using the iPad with trackpad support and the Magic Keyboard, the more I think I’d want to have the MacBook Pro when I’m on the go. The two apps I really, really need MacOS for: Screenflow and Descript. (And recently, Starcraft.) But for anything I’m doing that’s writing and static images, I’d really rather do on the iPad Pro. Especially with desktop-class browsing. Or whatever they call it.
- In David Epstein‘s Range, there’s a chapter that’s about Nintendo’s success and one of the devices highlighted is the original Gameboy. There’s a phrase for the philosophy that they used when making it: lateral thinking with withered technology. (Which I’ve read is supposed to translate more like weathered technology.) Anyway, the Smart Keyboard Folio reminded me of the Gameboy in its durability. You could grab a Super Soaker and use it for target practice and it’d be fine. I’d take it everywhere and not worry at all about the surface I was putting it on. I’m somewhat worried about spilling on this but definitely not as much as I am with the MacBook Pro.
- Oh yeah, one GREAT thing about the iPad and The Magic Keyboard (and really any keyboard case for it) is that the processor and whatever else gets hot in a computer isn’t right on your lap. So it doesn’t get hot. That’s a huge plus for longer writing sessions.
That’s probably long enough and I’m realizing I’m sort of just repeating a lot of the points I made with what I wrote this morning. I’ll try making this into a video. The timer on my camera says I’m at 22-minutes. Good writing session on this keyboard.
There are way too many other reviews and I don’t know if I have much of an interesting angle at this point. More thoughts to come as I continue using this.