Getting good at anything is the same as saying you have a high degree of control over outcomes. Simple statement, but lots to unpack, since having a high degree of control means *knowing* what to control in the first place. The struggle of getting better at Smash or anything
is mostly not knowing where to go next, and this is because, like I've said before, making meaning out of huge loads of information is extremely tough. Better control means finer-tuned understanding of small parts, but those small parts get more and more abstract
for example, one way in which I personally exercise a fine-tuned degree of control over a match based on what's really just an arbitrary packaging of abstract information is categorizing my opponents into three or four styles of approaching
but ultimately, this might not be the most productive way I could be framing the available information to me in a match; there might be better ways to package the information for my use
and here you see the giant pain in the ass of improvement once improvement becomes largely abstract rather than mechanical, as it does in most things: finding new ways to think about the game until you arrive at progressively finer-grained levels of conceptual detail
if this sounds too alien to be the case, I don't mean that you have to articulate all this stuff to yourself the way I am, but rather *at some level* this *is* what happens as you get better at something
even if you can't explicitly verbalize the process like I am right now, the process is largely the same: clawing deeper and deeper as you figure out concepts and ways of thinking you weren't aware of before
Crude example would be a beginner seeing everything as "attack" then when "attack" isn't good enough, they break it down to "approach" and "defend" and when "approach" isn't good enough, they break "approach" into "approach at X angle" and "approach at Y angle"
and again, that's why it's all so difficult: it's hard to keep breaking down already abstract concepts. For a final, probably better example, think of particle physics or something
We got down to the atomic level, but then the atomic model didn't cut it, so we had to dig deeper to quantum particles, and even still the current model of quantum physics isn't good enough and we're still struggling to break it down further
People've asked me before what makes Leo the best, and while idk that, I'm confident in saying that it's fair to say Leo is working with a quantum physics model while everyone else is still working with an atomic one: he understands and acts upon concepts
that others may not be aware of, so he's playing at literally a different level and has a higher degree of control over the outcome of the match for it
@threadreaderapp unroll
