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I used to be obsessed with Starcraft II.
So obsessed that becoming a professional Starcraft player was my dream job in high school. [1]
For the unfamiliar, Starcraft is kind of like a real-time Chess. You have an army, your opponent has an army, and the objective is to destroy your opponent's base.
Starcraft is a real-time strategy (RTS) game. Rather than players alternating moves like one does in Chess, in Starcraft you’re free to move at will. This not only makes competitive play a spectacle to watch, but it also makes it easy to identify skill.
Skilled players play faster than amateurs. Actions Per Minute (the metric used to measure action speed) can be as high as three-hundred for professional players while amateurs typically have APMs under fifty. Because speed is so important, any good player knows the value of “Hotkeys”.
In Starcraft, Hotkeys are like shortcuts. Instead of executing an action through a series of mouse clicks (which is how beginners play), Hotkeys allow you to fast-track commands by programming them onto your keyboard.
One reason amateurs have low APM is because they refuse to learn Hotkeys. Hotkeys are hard. They require muscle memory which takes time to develop.
They also require humility. When you first learn Hotkeys, you start out playing worse because you’re forced to interact with the game in a foreign way. But in the long run, Hotkeys unlock levels of performance that were previously unattainable.
What I didn’t realize during my Starcraft days was just how valuable learning Hotkeys would be - both in the concrete and abstract sense.
In the concrete: after college, I started my career in finance. And like most finance professionals, I basically lived in Excel. Similar to Starcraft, in Excel you can do everything with the mouse. But there are also keyboard shortcuts.
Given my background, I was eager to learn all the shortcuts. And because of my gaming experience I had a sense for how beneficial learning them would be. As I suspected, the gains to my productivity were substantial and this had a positive impact on my work output early in my career.
Like in Starcraft, some of my finance colleagues overlooked the value of the shortcuts. They either (1) thought they were too cumbersome to learn or (2) figured it was unnecessary - since they could do everything with the mouse.
But (as any serious Excel user knows), overlooking keyboard shortcuts will kill your long-term productivity. It just isn’t possible to operate with the same level of efficiency. Eventually, most people realize this and come around. But there are always some who are stubborn and refuse.
In the abstract: Hotkeys taught me a broader life lesson.
Charlie Munger once said, “If you don't adapt, you're like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.” It’s one thing to hear this but another to see it. Hotkeys helped me see it.
In 2018, investor Dmitry Balyasney reportedly sent a company-wide email to his underperforming hedge fund with the subject line, “Adapt or Die”. It’s a cutthroat version of Munger’s lesson that I sometimes think about.
In this fast moving world - with the advent of AI and other emerging technologies - falling behind often worries me. Becoming someone that either isn’t aware of or that cannot see the value in better ways of operating.
I prefer an optimistic version of the insight: “Adapt and Thrive”
Those who adapt and learn quickly move forward.
Those that don’t often get left behind.
Lesson: Adapt and Thrive.
1// At my peak, I reached top 8 Masters, which is the top 1% of players. But to actually play Starcraft professionally, I would have had to be a top 200 player worldwide (which is top ~0.01%).
