Why you suck at {x}

When you're new at something, or don't practice it often, you're going to be absolutely garbage at it. I first learned that at 13 when I first played Counter Strike for the first time, and I had no idea how the game mechanics worked, I never played with a mouse and keyboard before, and the only experience I had with FPS titles up until that point was Halo, and Call of Duty. It took me years until I hit FaceIT 8 (for those who don't know, FaceIT is a separate matchmaking service that specifically caters to more competitive players), and was at one point— top 1% in standard matchmaking.

I will be completely honest, skills are generally really hard to learn. They are something that is fundamentally built on habitual practices, and unless you don't know why a certain habit is affecting you negatively, you are more than likely to repeat that bad habit. For example, for a long time in Counter Strike, I had a really rough time with almost everything— from the game's movement, recoil control, theoretical awareness, and especially with my crosshair placement. As time went on however, I eventually learned how to do all of that, and I went on to being an expert on how the game worked. I was able to compete with high level players in the game.

Every skill is like that, you're going to suck at everything you have to learn at the beginning, and that doesn't even just apply to gaming, it can apply to any area in your life that you feel like you can improve on.

How to notice your bad habits: A comprehensive guide

The first thing you do to improve is to notice what you're doing wrong, and more importantly: why it's wrong.

That's something that is really not easy to do, you can't possibly know what you're doing IS wrong until you know that is indeed— wrong. So how do you do that?

Something that Counter-Strike taught me is that you can always watch how a professional player handles the situation, then watch your own gameplay and compare the two.

• What differences are there from your style compared to theirs?

• What are some of the methods, and tactics that they use to make sure they're efficient?

• What is the logical reasoning behind WHY they do that particular thing?

The latter of which is going to be the most difficult part, but it's the most important. If you don't know WHY a particular thing is bad, you're going to keep making that mistake over and over again, and question yourself on why you aren't seeing any improvements. The best way to do this is to learn from an expert who analyzes a professional's work, and understanding why X is done a certain way on a macro scale.

In a competitive setting, your opponents are going to exploit your bad habits, and gain an advantage over you— via your own mistakes. In the real world, that can have very serious consequences: i.e. critical vulnerabilities in software you write; lapses in security protocols that are caused by bad habits; or even just being too incompetent at completing tasks in the workplace. Any and all of these situations could be easily avoided if you knew how to recognize those very same habits that affect you.

How to improve: Remove those bad habits!

Great! Now that we are able to recognize those bad habits, it's time to put theory into practice.

In my life as a software developer, it was common for me to not compartmentalize my code, or to refactor ineffeciencies because I wasn't able to recognize those bad habits. However, as time went on, I was able to realize why not doing that is generally, a bad thing: less readability, increased time complexity, and even just straight up writing dead code.

Something to note is that you're not going to be perfect at everything, and it's not feasible to try and learn everything about something all at once, however the more you improve at something, the more those skills naturally come to you.

I have been writing code and learning new languages for many years now, and I noticed how much I have improved as a developer once I started to implement good habits into my development cycle. So the best thing you can do is to learn from your mistakes, practice good habits and you'll eventually improve at whatever it is that you're learning.

Moreover, you eventually replace those bad habits with those good habits— which can lead you to being able to analyze future bad habits not only for yourself, but even for other people.

Conclusions

While this is a very short blog post, I hope that you learned how to recognize your own bad habits, and come up with a plan to improve on them. With the length of this post, I more than likely cannot give you all of the necessary information you need to improve and more meticulously nitpick your short comings. For which, I highly recommend you check out Atomic Habits by author James Clear. Clear's book had done a wonderful job at helping me learn my own bad habits not only at an interpersonal level, but also at an intrapersonal level. Highly recommend that book as it was the inspiration of me writing this blogpost.

You can find the link to the Amazon page for his book here, or at your local bookstore.