EPTOn January 05 2014 06:26 radscorpion9 wrote:
I don't want to be too depressing, but some people search deeper and deeper, and they never find a strong enough 'metal'. Life is not necessarily a fairy tale, sometimes people simply lose, and in spite of their best efforts to overcome, continue to lose to better opponents until they are too old to continue or are worn out.
So many people want to believe its all a matter of willpower, but I wonder whether that is based on anything besides wishful thinking? In any case I do wish you good luck and hope you win at least one competition before you can retire. Maybe then it will all be worth it; but if not it at least hardens your character and makes it harder for you to feel pain. I suppose that's a useful gain as well
I don't want to be too depressing, but some people search deeper and deeper, and they never find a strong enough 'metal'. Life is not necessarily a fairy tale, sometimes people simply lose, and in spite of their best efforts to overcome, continue to lose to better opponents until they are too old to continue or are worn out.
So many people want to believe its all a matter of willpower, but I wonder whether that is based on anything besides wishful thinking? In any case I do wish you good luck and hope you win at least one competition before you can retire. Maybe then it will all be worth it; but if not it at least hardens your character and makes it harder for you to feel pain. I suppose that's a useful gain as well
Success is definitely based on a hell of a lot more than wishful thinking. Just a few things would be raw hours practiced, lots of custom-game practice and conversation with other pros to recreate teamhouse learning experiences, eating healthy, exercising, balancing a healthy social life outside of progaming and many hundreds of ways to tweak focused practice and choose builds based on your own strengths. Even moving somewhere with stable internet and close to the hubs of eSports would be a big part of edging towards success.
The thing that people (myself included) complain about with eSports is there isn't enough infrastructure and reward for up-and-coming players and general consistent prize money, but all that just just means that there isn't really a professional system to compete with: even in Korea it's dwindling - kespa teams are folding and changing slowly. This opens up a lot of opportunity for those who are multi-skilled or motivated enough to try and imitate aspects of professional organisation on their own. Doing so takes a lot of positive energy and consistent effort, but I believe it means there are windows for those whom are motivated enough to be successful despite maybe not being smart or fast enough to be at the tip top of competition if it was a fully professional system. In other words, natural talent isn't as important as motivation/effort in the current system.
That all being said if progaming isn't the right decision for me at some point I would step down as a player, no doubt about it. I wouldn't stand there saying to myself, "It's ok man, YOU CAN DO IT!". I regularly assess my goals and status and I'm nowhere near giving up yet. If one day my hands are just too old to compete, or I have a long slump which I'm not coming out of, then I won't be writing blogs like this. This blog here embodies the process of owning and dealing with a huge amount of pain from a defeat, and also using the loss as impetus to work harder at my professionalism, and to tinker and improve my training schedule.
Do you write much outside of this? 
