good lessons in odd places
what you can learn from going off the beaten path
I want to discuss three good life lessons and the odd places I learned them. Nobody along my highly educated elite academic path taught me them—in fact, discussion of such practical life lessons is considered blasé and beneath the dignity of academics.
As I have transitioned from the insularity of academia to doing things out in the world, these lessons have proven to be true over and over. I think they will be especially useful for academics or those pursuing academia, but I hope they will be generally useful as well. Practitioners in various domains outside the academy are well aware of similar types of lessons.
lesson 1: never overestimate your opponent
I have played a lot of a video game called Dota 2. Like, a lot a lot. Precisely 3762 hours. That’s nearly 2 work-years for a standard 40 hour a week job. I am not good at Dota. (For those in the know, my MMR peaked at 3700 when I was Lone Druid spamming in like, 2015?).
Dota is a highly complex game which was chosen by OpenAI to develop AI on. It has a huge following, ranking as one of the most played games on the internet for over a decade. It’s a real-time 5v5 “battle arena” which requires both high level strategy and micro-level reflexes.
Dota matches last nearly an hour. And when you are losing, you can often figure it out quickly—in the first 5 minutes or so—and then you proceed to wait to actually lose for 55 minutes. This is painful. I used to play with my friends. When stuff wasn’t going well we’d yell at each other. We’d feel bad about losing for an hour. And then try again and yell some more.
The difficulty makes winning feel miraculous and like a genuine accomplishment.
After thousands of hours and lots of arguments in my friend group, we figured some stuff out about teamwork in a competitive environment. The biggest lesson we repeated to each other was don’t overestimate the opponent. As in, your opponent is human, too. They make mistakes. They have weaknesses.
This sounds basic, but it is not. When you are losing, such as when you lose an election or your business is under pressure or whatever, the urge to give up is strong. Your opponent—the forces arrayed against you—can feel overwhelming. But they’re not.
You obviously have to decide if you want to put in the effort to continue the fight. Sometimes it really is better to let a business fold than to stick it out. But if you want to keep at it—your opponent will make mistakes. There will be opportunities to get back in the game, so to speak.
We see this in business all the time—small and nimble companies exploit weaknesses in larger competitors and, despite having no chance on paper, manage to take over a market. The sneaky thing is how fast little wins compound when you are behind. In Dota, if you are behind and can just take a pretty good fight, you can flip the game from a 5% win to a 12% win. And that’s a much better spot to be in. With a little patience, you might be able to get to 25%, and so on.
The other lesson embedded here, as I just mentioned, is patience. When things are going bad, we all have an action bias. That is, a bias to DO STUFF. That makes sense in a lot of circumstances, but sometimes quieting yourself in the storm, evaluating your opponent, and reacting to their errors is a better strategy.
lesson 2: take what the world gives you
Dota is a complex game, but Europa Universalis is even more complex. It is a macro-scale simulation of the world from 1444-1821, roughly from the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans through the Renaissance, the Age of Discovery, the Enlightenment, the first Industrial Revolution, and the Napoleonic Era. Again, I have logged some hours here.
To give you an idea of the complexity, here is the starting map for the Holy Roman Empire. Wow, that’s a lot of provinces, and you can choose to play as any of them. Or you can play as the Timurids in central Asia and continue the legend of Timur. Or perhaps you’d like to play as a South American native civilization.
You can play as any “country,” loosely defined, in the world. Even easy nations like France are quite difficult. It’s insane this game exists.
When you play EU4, you are immediately overwhelmed by how many choices there are to make. The garden of forking paths forks so quickly if you play too intentionally, you’ll be disappointed. You might not lose, but things won’t turn out exactly as you planned.
Perhaps you’d like to unite the Holy Roman Empire as Bohemia, but Austria has an iron grip on the internal politics of the Empire. Well, you might be able to fast forward the game and wait for them to make a mistake (see Lesson 1 above), perhaps they get drawn into a bad war and that creates an opening for you.
Or you could flip the question around and say: given the board state, what is my best play? So instead of having an abstract concept like “I want to run the HRE,” you are asking a more dynamic question of “what’s my best play?”
So perhaps as Bohemia you notice you can get some good allies and start taking some Hungarian land because Hungary is in a war with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. And then when Austria does make that error, you’re more prepared to step in as Holy Roman Emperor and Revoke the Privilegia to turn the HRE into an actual Empire under your control.
This style of play teaches you to focus on identifying opportunities rather than executing on specific strategies to do something. It’s one step before strategy development. It’s the art of figuring out what you should develop a strategy for. Quite literally, you have to learn to take what the world gives you.
lesson 3: never negotiate against yourself
As you may know, me and a friend/co-owner run a local card shop called Card Shop Near Me. I have another friend that I like to go to trading card shows with. It’s fun and a good thing to do on the weekends.
Trading card guys are masters at drawing you into a seemingly friendly conversation to get you to reveal private information with the goal of you negotiating against yourself. Well, not all of them are masters. Some of them are very bad at it. And from the ones who are bad you learn in simple language what the masters are trying to do.
If you set up a booth selling trading cards, the most common question you’ll get is “what’s your best?” As in, a potential buyer knows you have a sticker price of say $40 on the card, but they want you immediately to give them a lower price, which is your “best price.” As in, the lowest number you’d possibly accept.
If you spend some time going down the rabbit hole with these types of negotiations, you’ll hear all kinds of crazy stuff. People will tell you the item they are trying to buy from you is flawed, or it doesn’t sell for that much, or nobody really wants it, or they saw another one for cheaper. And so on.
What you’ll learn by indulging the “best price” thing (which I sometimes do like an sociologist doing an ethnography) is to take only their side and to disregard yourself completely. After all, it’s for their kid, or for their friend, or it used to be cheaper, or it’s a little off-center.
The thing is—at no point is the other person treating you like an equal. They’re not telling you how much they value it at, or what they want to do with it (resell!). They’re asking for all of your private information with both no reciprocation and also no commitment to purchase. It’s a pretty bad deal!
The thing you learn is—you should not negotiate against yourself for two reasons. One sort of spirtiual and one practical.
First, you want to show yourself respect. One of the most important things about being a human is that we come with pre-installed software. We have a conscious and decision-making part of our brain, but we also have a sub-conscious and evaluating part of our brain. When we make decisions that show ourselves a lack of self-respect, the evaluating part of our brain takes note and all sorts of bad psychological things start happening. The specifics depend on a lot of different factors.
But not negotiating against yourself—asking the buyer to treat you as an equal (“I say a price” / “you say a price”), you are showing yourself respect. This is part of living a healthy and whole life. We all deserve respect, and part of that means showing it to ourselves. Love others, yes. But also love yourself! You must do both. And if you do not love yourself, it is difficult to then love others.
Second—and more practically—if you indulge in negotiating against yourself, you will attract people who want to get into these long struggle-session negotiations where they talk you down and down and down (well really, you talk yourself down). Even if you don’t end up selling stuff to them, you lose time. And you encourage them. So you lose more time next time. And even more time as they tell their friends and their friends bug you. And so on.