Leveraging Adversity to Achieve Excellence.

**juan** · #1 05-22-2010, 08:54 AM

I graduated from college this last week. Since then, I’ve been thinking a lot about lessons that I’ve learned during my college career, and consequently my gaming career. I thought I’d share one tidbit of knowledge (aka incoherent rambling) that I’ve picked up along the way.

After you graduate from college, you will go through a period of being heavily scrutinized. If you are going to grad school, you’ll have to get letters of recommendation, write purpose statements, and have your transcripts reviewed by admissions officers. If you are going in to the job market, you will be judged by your resume, assessed against your peers, and evaluated in interviews. All your friends and parents will be asking you: what’s the next step in your life?

As you get older, you will be subject to people who will evaluate you. There will be people who criticize you, patronize you, and who generally just don’t think much of you. That’s just a part of life. People have and always will prejudge you.

This happens in the CS community all the time – players labeling other players as bad, incompetent, or insisting that others cheat. And this isn’t only common among lower and mid tier players, but also among the elite. In fact, I would argue that it is even more common among the elite.

I have no doubt that you reading this have at one time been labeled either a bad player or a cheater. I have been – everybody has. There were many times while playing competitively where expectations for me and my team had sunk relatively low. And undoubtedly there will be times while you are playing where others will have low expectations of you. But rather than letting this get you down, use this as an opportunity to surpass expectations and blow everyone away.

One of my greatest moments as a CS player came out of a period of low expectations:

In October 2005, my team attended DigitalLife in New York. Heading in to this tournament, there were a lot of things working against us. We had just come out of a dreadful placing at Summer CPL (25th-32nd). We had just been moved down in CAL because paradox had been banned for “cheating”. We were a CAL-Open team competing in a tournament with 6+ CAL-Invite teams. Out of the 12 teams at the event, we were seeded 10th. Needless to say, expectations were low.

However, we weren’t going to let that stop us from achieving our goals. In fact, we embraced that adversity and used it to our advantage. We worked our tails off. And when we won the event, it could not have felt more rewarding. We had blown everyone away. We had literally come out of nowhere to knock off the best in the world.

When I played competitively, I was never one to patronize another player or team. Why? Simple – because above all else, I was a competitor.

As a competitor, my ultimate goal is to win. If I were to patronize another player I would be doing myself a disservice as a competitor by providing that player extra motivation to work harder to beat me. If my ultimate goal as a competitor is to win, why in the world would I do that?

Let this be a lesson, not only when you are aspiring to become a better CS player, but in all aspects of life. Don’t let adversity exert a negative effect on you. Instead, embrace it. Leverage it. Use it to achieve excellence.