Locke

I am having an internal struggle and I need some help. Right now I am 3 and a half months in on a 9-month commitment that I told myself I wanted to do in order to see how much potential I have to get good at a competitive video game. 3 and a half months ago I told myself that I wanted to commit to playing only one character for the next 9 months to see how I can develop in the game as just that character, since before I would be switching characters every 2 or 3 months. I am once again at the part where I am contemplating why I am doing this again and it's been putting a lot of stress on me. My main question would have to be about how to have a better mindset on getting to the end of the tunnel, if that makes any sense. Of course my thoughts are not necessarily dictating my actions, as I am brute forcing this commitment because I believe if I don't do it otherwise, then I will never truly get to know what I am capable of if I just commit to the long-term action that I set out to do. I know that there are many ventures in life that will take you way longer than 9 months to just get to the end of, and I am afraid that when I reach the end of this theoretical tunnel, there will only be assertion in the fact that I truly am incapable of being good at the competitive game I am playing. Don't get me wrong, I have been practicing on a daily basis for the past month now and even since I started this 3 and a half months ago, I have been studying about the game and basically putting in as much effort as I am comfortable with or I am feasible of accomplishing, since I am in college and so much of my time cannot be dedicated to getting better at this game. I've thrown away the concept of trying to have fun with the game since I started this because every time I have done this in the past, it just keeps having this cycle repeat and I feel like I don't actually go anywhere. It's what I have been struggling with for almost 3 years now and this 9 month journey will hopefully provide me an answer when I'm done with it. I'm familiar with the concept of "No Pain, No Gain" when it comes to exercise and building muscle. I can accept that I have to do the same thing mentally when I am on this journey. It's rough. I'm filled with a lot of worries and anxieties that this won't work out in the end and I'll reach an unfortunate truth at the end. It's hard for me to visualize me being successful at the end because I feel like when I have done that before, I get way too ahead of myself and then I have expectations that I will consistently let myself down on. So I don't have any "real" expectations or goals with this 9 month period other than to give it a good consistent effort and see where that takes me. I don't know if this is a pitfall or not because I don't have much experience with making these kind of commitments. Maybe at the end of it even if I do reach the worst-case scenario, I can at least be a little more enlightened in what I should actually do with the game and pursue a different path that focuses more on my enjoyment of the game instead of trying to improve and get better. Of course I feel totally fine when I actually perform well at a tournament to my satisfaction, but it feels especially defeating when you practice for a whole month and then you actually play and then see that the practice doesn't actually come into play. It feels like a constant guessing game where I have to keep going deeper and deeper down this tunnel just to see what happens and I'm afraid that I am wasting my time. This game is what I am currently invested in with most of my free time when I am not occupied with doing college work. Another negative feeling about all of this is that in my quest to see if I'm actually good at the game or not, there are other people who have been naturally staying committed to a character for longer than I have and are starting to surpass me in skill and results, even though I have been playing the game competitively for almost 3 years and they have been playing for less than that. It's nice to know that my friends are catching up and even surpassing me, but it just feels like more walls are being built in front of me that I now can't get past. It feels better now to have written this stuff out instead of just keeping it bottled up inside. I might not even need to change much of my actual routine, but I probably need to be thinking about it in a different way so that I'm not distraught every time I don't perform to my satisfaction. And what if that's just the way thing are for anything competitive? Is it just inevitable that you will be upset when you don't perform the way you want to in any case? I'd like to think not because I've seen people in my community who look as though they handle losses and their under-performance pretty well, but that is only what I see on the surface and I have no way of knowing what is really going on inside their head. How do people stay committed to just one thing for such long periods of time? There's so many things that I want to do and I feel conflicted on doing any of them because I feel like I'm missing out on the things I'm not doing. Do they just accept everything that comes along? Never give up?

I like forums. They allow for me to write lengthy paragraphs about whatever I feel like without having to feel clustered by the way a website is designed (thanks Facebook) I decided to make an account tonight to just have somewhere to write some things down or to just share my thoughts/ask some questions here and there to get my head on straight. As of right now I'm 21 and am in my third year of college pursuing a Computer Science degree. I have known since I was 8 years old that I wanted to make video games and I'm still chasing that passion today. I didn't really start to think much about self-improvement and fixing my mindset until September 20th of 2014, where I got a wake-up call from a friend of mine. For many years in my life, I have never really had something to open my eyes to how badly my mind was in terms of wanting to get better at something. Never before had I been challenged on such a scale to improve myself than when I got into the Super Smash Bros. Melee community back on April 10, 2013. I had always wanted to play in a competitive game of some sort when I was growing up, but everything that I was interested in didn't really have a competitive scene or required me to find team mates that I didn't have. It was after playing the game competitively for roughly a year and a half that on September 20th, 2014, while at a major tournament in Atlanta, GA, I was told just how bad my mentality was. I was told by someone who was being realistic with me and not sugar coating anything and making sure that what he said stuck in my mind, and it absolutely did. Ever since I had this epiphany that I needed to put in more work into the game in order to actually get better, it kick-started more than just a quest to improve at the game, it jump-started a journey for me to improve myself as a person, because I believed that I had many flaws back then that I really wanted to fix in time. You don't need to know much about the game to understand where I'm coming from. The game has brought out my competitive spirit that I never knew was there and made me realize some positive and especially negative things about myself. Since December of 2014, I have been keeping a weekly journal entry of my progress in the game, so that when I look back on it later, I can see how much I have grown. It wasn't until December 1, 2015 that I decided to start a life journal of my own, where I keep track of what life goals I want to accomplish and what my thoughts are at the current time. I have been watching Actualized videos on Youtube for several months now, and with the recent announcement of the forum, I felt like this was a good opportunity to use this as a platform to see if I am on the right path and seek help in making some difficult life decisions that come my way. As of right now my daily routine is to do 40 minutes of meditation a day, where originally I was listening to one of the Actualized videos on the background while my eyes were closed and I sat down on my bed as soon as possible, but I'm feeling more like I should be meditating in silence with only the white noise of my fan for me to listen to. For me, trying to sit completely still for 40 minutes straight is a challenge of my mental fortitude. I've done it a few times where I hardly move at all and when I am done I feel much better usually, even though I tend to feel pretty numb in some areas, it is a nice way for me to meditate. I've seen the numerous videos on how to meditate, starting with the one where it is suggested that you try to quiet your mind and have no thoughts, but I have also liked experimenting with the "loose-monkey" meditating where I just let my thoughts do what they want to do, and catch myself when I feel like my thoughts are going on too much of a tangent. I feel like throughout the day I am constantly thinking about a lot of different things and I can very easily get distracted by my thoughts. Just dedicating the 40 minutes a day to meditating I feel like helps me feel at peace and at ease when I am doing it, especially when I have the sessions where I don't move at all and I have total concentration on my thoughts, as if my body is slowly fading out of existence. I also try to make it a habit of working on something I want to get better in on a daily basis for an hour. Lately I have been doing it with Melee and I have seen some slight results for the short time that I have been doing it, so I believe that if I were to do it with my other passions like artwork or game development, I could learn to master those things in time. I guess you could say that I think a lot lately about how I want to manage my time, and how I can eliminate distractions outside of my mind in order to achieve a more productive habit. I'll be graduating college soon and I really want to make a portfolio for myself to get a solid job in the game industry. I know that there are sacrifices that I'll probably have to make, and I'm more than willing to do them, but I also believe that anything is possible if you truly try hard enough. I'll probably be posting my own stuff here later on and maybe participating in some occasional discussions. Forums are typically nice because they don't take up too much of my time as long as I'm disciplined about what I consume, which I feel I have been doing a much better job in the past few months than where I was a year ago. If I get a self-actualization idea, then I'll likely post it here from now on.