From Setbacks to Success: How Gaming Inspires Personal Growth
You might be wondering why I have this obsession with games, especially League of Legends. To be honest, I haven’t given it much thought until now. If I did, it was probably just a simple “because I enjoy it.”
However, the right answer is that gaming provides a competitive environment and an opportunity for improvement. “Results,” if I can call them that, come as a reflection of your efforts.
You can’t expect to achieve a higher rank if you’re not interested in learning the game’s mechanics and fundamentals. Over the eight years I’ve been playing, I’ve always sought to understand the game better and play increasingly well each season.
I aimed to reach a higher rank than the previous season, though it didn’t always work out that way. Some seasons, I even ended up lower than before.
Something curious happens when you advance to a higher rank: you want to climb even further. You climb, and you want to climb higher still. The more you desire it, the greater the frustration when you face demotion, which occurs when you lose enough games to drop to a lower division.
That’s precisely what happened to me last night.
In yesterday’s article, I talked about my desire to play. After completing all my tasks, I played, even though I was extremely tired. Due to this, I only managed to play two matches, both of which I lost, leading to my demotion.
Experiencing demotion can be incredibly frustrating. Why? Because climbing is challenging, while demotion is almost too easy.
But I doubt you’re here to witness my gaming experiences or, particularly, my failures in League of Legends. You’re here to see that such things also happen in real life.
I want to emphasize two key ideas:
1. Self-Improvement:
In our journey of personal development, we continually strive to become better.
Better than yesterday, better than a week ago, better than a month ago, or even better than a year ago.
We do this by trying dozens of methods, scribbling on hundreds of pages, and installing entire gigabytes of productivity apps on our phones.
It’s not a bad thing at all. The pursuit of self-improvement and aspiring to reach your full potential is extraordinary. And not everyone pursues it. If we all did, the world we live in would be different from what it is today.
2. Embracing Failure:
Success is not final, failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts.” — Winston Churchill
In our growth process, failures play a significant role. They come more easily than promotions.
While promotions require considerable effort, failure can happen with just a few mistakes or some external factors beyond your control. And because it’s so easy to fail, it leads to burnout, endless “breaks,” recovery periods where you do nothing, and so on. More specifically, it leads to frustration and other consequences.
Now, turning back to my game, what am I supposed to do? Do I dwell in my frustration, give up playing, and abandon my goal of reaching the highest division? Of course not! I’ll continue to play, but let’s focus on how.
The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.” — Henry Ford
First, I’ll assess why I was demoted, what went wrong in those games, and where the issues lie.
In such situations problems are opportunities for personal development and change.
In my case, with demotion, the issue was playing while being very tired. In my eagerness to play, I forgot my main goal: winning LP to climb. I mean, of course I wanted those LP. But my exhaustion caused me to prioritize my simple desire to play games at an inappropriate time.
In reality, it’s no different.
Failures can become the fuel in our personal development process if we maintain the right attitude. Instead of complaining and letting the consequences of failure take over (burnout, breaks, etc.), we should seek solutions to our problems.
Problems are opportunities to make changes. But these things should not be forced. They should happen naturally.
That’s all for now. Hope you got the point.
I feel great when my gaming experience inspires me to write. That’s why, as soon as I finish, I’ll start a gaming session. 😄
Untill then thank you for your time reading this and please don’t forget that I like to hear hands clapping. 😄
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