The Little Things - Start up lessons learned from StarCraft 2
I got into StarCraft 2 lately, and part of my learning routine
involves watching a daily youtube shoutcast by a top player known as
day9.
StarCraft 2 is bad enough, but watching a YOUTUBE VIDEO of SOME DUDE
playing?!". I concur. I am ridiculous. Nonetheless, the one I've just watched this morning was inspirational
enough that I'd like to share it. Since no one is going to click on a
YOUTUBE VIDEO of SOME DUDE playing StarCraft 2, I’ll just paraphrase
the relevant bits. The following is day9’s take on analyzing losses: "…when people lose, they'd typically look for some big, strategic
error, such as not having unit X, or not building the counter to unit
Y. But really if you break a game down, it's the incremental mistakes
they make that adds up to their doom... ...For instance look at this
resource gatherer just sitting here when it could have been mining for
the last 7 seconds. That's 15 minerals he could have had. It sounds
minor but those 15 minerals is going to cause supply to be built a few
seconds later, which is going to cause him to delay the expansion, and
before you know it when the battle happens he could have 4 more dudes
than he did which would have swung the battle..." What he’s talking about here is not some crazy butterfly effect, but
rather failure through the accumulation of small mistakes. I’ll attempt to draw an analogy to something way more important, such
as being a badass entrepreneur. For example, every "failed startup
lessons learned" postmortem I've come across mentions big, strategic
errors, such as "we just lost virtual traction with the team and
failed to make the customer really happy". But how did you lose
traction? And how are you going to fix it next time? This is a bit of a stretch. But could it be that for a few nights you
stayed up playing rockband instead of coding and as a result 10 productive hours
were lost, which equated to one feature cut, which caused the deadline
to be shifted a week, which affected team morale, which led to the
loss of virtual traction and your doom? Could the lesson be as simple
as "try saying no the next time someone invites you over for rockband
and jello shots"? Our instinct is to look for big reasons because they call for instant
solutions. But maybe there is no instant solution, and you just have
to slowly and deliberately work on the little things. To (horribly) paraphrase day9 again: "It's important not to poison
your own mind with negative thoughts. Sometimes you lose really badly
and you just go: 'I tried hydras, roaches and mutas, and Terran still
owns me everything. There is simply nothing I can do. I must suck, or
the game is just imbalanced! I hate life.’ Where in reality, if you’d
just focused on building drones half a second earlier every game, at
the end of a month you’ll magically have 12 dudes instead of 8 in the
mid-game and all of a sudden you are no longer losing." Occasionally, one of my non CS friend will come up to me and say: hey
Tian I wrote this iphone app in 2 weeks and I made like $200k. And my
initial reaction is just: wtf how come I didn't do this? This guy is
not even a real programmer but he just went out and did it. Why didn’t
I do this even though I can code 15 times faster? I read about all
these great coders on Hacker News and they all sound super motivated
and I am clearly not that. I must be just lazy and unmotivated. I
should just give up being a wantrepreneur. A more productive way to analyze the situation is to try to pinpoint
the exact moment that caused me to "fail": In the winter of 2008, my friend Sushant who was taking the first
iphone course offered at Stanford was kind enough to share his lecture
notes and homeworks with me. For the first few days, I'd been working
through them at night having a blast learning about Objective C and
XCode. On around the second week, when I was about to dive in again a
friend called me and said: "hey let's go play basketball", and at that
moment I was like: sure I'll just pick this up tomorrow. And the next
day another interruption came(I think it was rockband and jello shot
in fact) and I never ended up finishing the course. Over the next 2
years I’ve occasionally had the urge to “bust out this idea over the
weekend”, but the added overhead of having to learn objective AND
build the app in a single weekend was great enough that I never did
it. If I had been proficient all along, I might have done something,
and gained a little traction, and took that momentum somewhere. Sure,
the iPhone gold rush is probably long gone, but something else will
come along. My takeaway in the mean time is to simply focus on the
little things, because they add up to everything. In StarCraft and life, you lose by the accumulation of small mistakes.
Conversely, you win by the accumulation of small advantages.
