# Kien **May 18th, 2023**  Practice makes perfect. It’s that simple. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of self help books with different techniques that attempt to help people become more productive. This is where the problem lies. The best system(s) won’t work for someone that simply doesn’t want to put the work in. I think this is what most people have trouble with. Spending hours studying/practicing in order to overcome an obstacle doesn’t seem appealing to most people. We live in a microwave society where everything needs to be instant or it simply isn’t worth using the willpower on (unfortunately). I’ve read multiple self-help books and I’ve come to a certain realization: most self-help books can easily be shortened into a [single blog post](https://twitter.com/vaxzem/status/1654930985639632900?s=46). I’d even go as far as to say that there’s only a handful of self-help books that are actually worth reading. What you usually end up receiving after finishing these type of books is some sort of system that you’ll probably never use, and they might even include tasks that you’ll most likely never finish. I’ve always been a procrastinator, which led me to read various self-help books to figure out the most efficient way of doing things. In retrospect, I was probably reading these books as an excuse to prevent myself from actually trying to complete an objective. It almost become a never-ending loop. Almost. As time passed by, I started to appreciate how beautifully simple minimalism is. Removing the unnecessary noise and distractions while allowing only the necessary entities to remain. It helps you focus on what actually matters instead of having your brain occupied with irrelevant bullshit that only makes focusing more difficult. I started eliminating the different kinds of systems I had collected from reading various self-help books and decided to take it back to the basics. Taking action. For some strange reason, I seemed to have discarded this fundamental lesson the older I became. I used to be a heavy gamer, and I realized there was a common theme in each game I became great at: time & practice. I put in thousands (hundreds if not thousands) of hours into whatever game interested me at the time. The beginning of every new game I played decided if I would end up sticking around. For me, it usually went something like this: 1. Start new game 2. Get my ass handed to me 3. Quit 4. Return 5. Stick around and play more challenging players 6. Stay 7. Become good I jumped right into most of the games I played and almost never watched YouTube tutorials on how to play them. The usual exception was learning how to perform a certain move or accomplish a certain task that couldn’t be resolved despite spending hours upon hours of trying. I figured everything out as I went along and corrected whatever mistakes I made that caused me to lose. Most of the time, I didn’t even read patch notes. Whether this caused me to miss out on a huge competitive advantage remains unknown, but I still outperformed anyway. I didn’t use any unconventional systems I learned from someone on how to play these games, and I didn’t pay much attention to various metrics to see how well I was performing (for the most part). I was simply playing and putting the hours in. There was always one thing that stuck out to me after I stopped each video game I played: I was never aware I was getting better, I just knew I was having fun.