Some rambling on "the process"
As I was approaching the end of my time in college, I had no plans for post-graduation. I was about to finish a Bachelor’s in PoliSci from an unremarkable school. I had limited work experience, working a couple jobs in high school and a handful of internships on unsuccessful campaigns while at college. Job prospects were bleak. What did I do to get myself into this position? I dedicated much of my time between the ages of 15 and 23 to Magic: the Gathering, of course. Often that meant neglecting more traditional extracurriculars and social activities. A completely sane and healthy way to approach life. Did I at least dedicate my time in a systematic way that would result in an improvement in my process, which would ultimately result in an improvement of my ability to learn, which could then be applied to other areas of life?
No.
For more or less the entirety of that time, when I was playing Magic, I would just queue up random games and play, whether at local game stores in the Chicago suburbs, or on MTGO. Of course this resulted in some amount of learning, it would be impossible to learn nothing while physically awake and doing anything. But this offered very little progression in any meaningful way. I had no goals, no good habits, no reflection. To me, improving at Magic meant playing Magic. If I wanted to improve, I should play another game. Am I playing against a merfolk player stoned out of their mind in a modern league? Who cares, I’m playing Magic and that in and of itself should be enough to improve. This is a recipe for mediocrity. This is not how you become Good at something. This is how you become resoundingly, overwhelmingly, Okay at something.
Despite a truly horrible process (If you can even call what I was doing a “process” at all), in Spring of ‘22, my second to last year in school, I won a MOCS open. It was Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty sealed, a format which I had enjoyed a lot and “practiced” a lot. When I say practiced, I should clarify that I mean I played a bunch of games without much, if any, reflection on what was going right and wrong, and how I could be doing better. This qualified me for my second pro tour (I had the stars align and spiked a MTGO Qualifier 2 years prior, which qualified for “the first PT after COVID”. We all know how that went.) and the MOCS, an 8 player tournament where the winner wins some money and qualifies for another pro tour. My friend also vouched for me to join one of the best Magic testing teams in the world for the last online PT, and I did ultimately end up joining them. While my result in that PT was unspectacular, I learned a lot about what true, dedicated practice looks like for the first time in my life. Everyone on the team embodied “professional”, dedicated to clear communication, discussion of every detail, whether it be which removal spells to play, how many lands, what hands were keeps and mulligans, how sideboarding differed based on play/draw, and anything else you can think of. Egos were a complete non-factor (a rarity in Magic circles!) because the ultimate pursuit was getting every detail right. As someone who started approaching a remotely reasonable skill level in Magic by playing Eldrazi Tron leagues with the same 75 over and over while wearing my hoodie in the back of a lecture hall, it was night and day compared to what I had been doing on my own. After my uninspiring 1-4 record in that PT, it was time for the MOCS. I had something like ~6 weeks to prepare. I felt lost. I had learned a lot testing for the PT, and I was determined to use that knowledge to give my best shot at the MOCS. That said, it was much easier when surrounded by professionals who had been mostly been doing this for the last decade than on my own. Due to this, I reached out to one of the other 7 people qualified to see if he wanted to prepare with me. Thankfully, he did. Collectively, we reached out to some of our friends who happened to be strong players and we put in a lot of true, dedicated practice. We tried a bunch of off the wall decks and strategies trying to beat the metagame we expected. At the end of the day, we had a pretty good read on the metagame and chose a good deck. I picked a good day to have luck fall my way, and things broke in such a way where I won and got the invite to the next PT.
The following Spring, I saw a social media post from a Magic player about a friend looking for people with experience in competitive gaming to work in trading. No experience required, but it was in person in Chicago. I was stunned. Being from Chicago, living in Illinois my whole life, and having pretty limited other options meant I’d be a fool to not apply. So I did. The aforementioned Magic player wrote me an incredibly kind recommendation, and I got the job. They liked me and I liked them. I started a couple of weeks after I graduated. Trading was something I had zero experience with prior to this job, and so that meant I had a long road of learning ahead of me. I was working mostly with former poker players turned traders, people with a history of dedicated processes to intentionally improve. As stunned as I was seeing firsthand what goes into testing for a Pro Tour with one of the best teams in the game, I was similar stunned going from Pro Tour testing to working with professional traders. The level of attention to detail that goes into being successful in some of the most competitive markets in the world is honestly astounding. It sounds obvious when I say it aloud, but I cannot emphasize enough how good habits combined with intentional, focused work can lead to astonishing results in any and every field. Things like physical note-taking, brutally honest self-reflection, and quickly admitting when you are wrong are extremely valuable. Ultimately, trading did not work out for me. I like to think I gave it my all, I know I certainly put a lot into it and tried harder than I have at anything else in my life, but you always can work harder, which makes me hesitant to say I really, truly gave it *everything* I had. In any case, what I learned from working as a trader is invaluable to me for the future, and I remain extremely grateful for the opportunity I had, though it has been hard to shake the feeling of “blowing it” since getting let go.
Despite some questionable decisions in my earlier years playing, I am immensely grateful for what Magic has given me. I had always “known” that a process oriented mindset was critical for success in any field, but I hadn’t truly internalized it, and I’m not sure I would have by now without Magic. As I’m writing this, it’s the beginning of Spring of 2024, a little less than 2 years from when I first started to truly get exposed to really smart people working intentionally to achieve their goals, and while I have a long way to go to achieve my personal goals (don’t we all?), I feel like my perspective on these things has undergone a significant shift in the last ~2 years, and I hope this post was of some interest/value to a couple people out there.
As a last note, I recognize that this article hasn’t really provided any actionable advice for people looking to achieve their goals, I don’t feel really qualified to do that. I just wanted to share my perspective as I feel I’ve learned a lot in the last couple years, after spending quite a lot of time coasting through life without much intention or focus. If you are looking for some more actionable advice in this area I would recommend the very popular (for good reason) book Atomic Habits by James Clear. I would also recommend these articles
How to be more agentic by Cate Hall
Pain is not the unit of effort by “alkjash”
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bx3gkHJehRCYZAF3r/pain-is-not-the-unit-of-effort
How to get worse at starcraft II by “brown bear”
https://illiteracyhasdownsides.com/2020/06/13/how-to-get-worse-at-starcraft-ii/