This is not a Simple Trick. It takes time and effort to actively apply this approach, but if you want to make sure you become a better person as you grow, and not a worse person, you’ll have to shift how you self-reflect. Self-reflection is just the act of reviewing yourself. You can think about your choices, but that won’t guarantee that you’ll draw the right conclusions.
To make sure I actually grow in the direction I want to, I’ve been taking lessons from one specific Slay the Spire player. Here’s one way to improve your self-analysis skills below - courtesy of Jorbs, Slay the Spire and online poker.
FOCUS ON ODDS, NOT RESULTS
I often watch Jorbs play Slay the Spire on YouTube. He comes from a background of online poker, so his approach to the game is very cool. I assume he’s not the first person to focus on odds more than results, but his cross-application of mindset into Slay the Spire inspired me to apply the mindset from there into to real life. I pasted the snappy version above, but here’s a slightly elaborated version of the life tip below:
"When you self-reflect, ponder if you had made the best decision with the info you had -- not whether or not your decision ended up being successful."
How did we get here? Let's start by talking about games, since this is obviously good game advice too.
What builds suspense in pretty much every element in life is when you care about something but are missing crucial information relating to it. And hey - it turns out every challenging game has unknown outcomes everywhere! You don't know if you’re fast enough to hit the ball. You don't know if your enemy has a trap card. You don't know if you’re going to roll something amazing or awful. You don’t know if your teammate is going to pull through or fail.
The problem is that you usually need to make decisions without being 100% sure what the outcome will be. Let’s use a scenario to exemplify this.
- You’re in a room with a fountain.
- You only have 1 health left.
- The only door leads to a room with a difficult boss fight.
- Drinking from the fountain will either:
> heal you to full health (60% chance).
> deal 1 damage to you (40% chance).
Do you drink?
Let's say you drink from the fountain… and die. The immediate player reaction may be "Jeez, I shouldn't have drank from that fountain."
But... nope, you had still made the right decision! There's no way you could have killed the final boss with only 1 health. Fate/luck didn't go your way this time, but if you found yourself in that situation a second time, it’d still be correct to make that decision again if your goal was to actually slay the boss instead of just making it to the boss room.
Joinrbs frequently explains this concept in Slay the Spire, when he takes what look like "risky" plays such as fighting difficult Elite enemies early on. As he explains it: while fighting hard enemies now increases damage taken in the next fight (therefore looking riskier), it's actually way better odds for beating the game than taking the 'safe' path.
To oversimplify it, you can think about paths A and B.
Path A: 60% chance of surviving this fight, then a 60% chance of beating the game.
Path B: 90% chance of surviving this fight, then a 20% chance of beating the game.
New players, due to lack of experience, can’t exactly predict what the second percentage chance will be for winning, so they naturally gravitate towards the strategy of dealing with the most immediate threats only. To improve, though, you’ll eventually have to shift towards being okay with taking short-term risks.
Q: What does this have to do with the idea of thinking about odds instead of results?
A: It’s easy to self-reflect on a good decision that went wrong, and erroneously think you had made the wrong choice. Usually when this happens, it’s because you had taken an earlier risk that technically had a better overall chance of meeting your goal, but it didn’t pan out this time.
The focus of your self-improvement should be making good decisions under present variables rather than making decisions that would have worked for last time’s variables. The latter informs the former, but they’re not the same.
Anyway, time for real life.
In real life you'll also have to make difficult decisions without a clear outcome. And sometimes… things will really not work out for you. I’m sorry.
“Do I look like a 0-damage boss to you?”
But what's been useful to me, and hopefully to you too, is to consider all of the information you have at the moment of a decision, and knowing that with the options in front of you, you may have still done the right thing. What matters in self-improvement is optimizing your ability to make judgement calls.
The actual outcome of your choice (ie succeeding or failing) is most useful as a suggestion as to whether or not your original calculation of odds was correct. For example, if the risk you took in your essay or proposal was shot down for a reason you hadn't thought of - it doesn't necessarily mean the risk wasn't worth taking, but rather you had miscalculated the risk in the first place. You can re-calibrate your ability to assess odds, and your ability to execute a strategy. Similarly, if things went great because someone misinterpreted something in your favour, try to have the humility to recognize that you had technically made a sub-optimal choice but lucked out this time.
And, in general, it’s good to know there's always tons and tons of unknowns. You'll kind of always be hit with random stuff that can be accounted for but never circumvented or alleviated. The best you can really do is play the odds, and get better at reading them. Over time, if you're great at self-reflection, you may find that things will start looking just a little more in your favour.
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Stay lofty!
(PS: One important thing to remember is that different goals will change your decisions. For example, the goal of “maximizing your chance of seeing the boss” is different from “maximizing your chance of killing the boss”. Your goal may be to optimize consistency instead of optimizing maximum gain, and that’s just as valid.)