On a quarterly alchemy session with my buddy Matt (yes, we have a quarterly-ish ideation/philosophical debate session), he asked me, “If you were a video game character, with both pre-set stats as well as the stat points you’ve accumulated through experience to date, what’s your play style? How would you best utilize your stats and skill trees towards your goals?” Furthermore, how might someone else with the exact same stats play your character differently?
First off, I like video games. I had a gamer in me in my past. Probably still, if I were given the chance to restart. But alas, a dangerous trade for me. So do note the bias in the intellectual resonance I had with the question.
Secondly, the underlying assumption in this line of questioning is that while the distribution of stat points vary per person, there exist others who would have the same set of stats as you do and the same skill trees. The same builds. But just because you have the same builds does not mean you have to have the same play style.
Thirdly, that last question is probably most interesting. How might someone else with the exact same stats play your character differently? How might someone else reach a different conclusion to “min-max” your play style? Or potentially more critically, how are you not leveraging certain skill trees to maximize your odds of “beating the game”? Skill trees that are underutilized or have been set aside to collect dust so far. Skills you earned as a child. Or in college. Or in your first job that you failed to keep putting the pedal to the metal.
To take the gaming analogy further, every time there’s a new update, your character build has to evolve with the associated nerfs and buffs to certain skill trees. In other words, with each new world order, are your past skills more or less relevant? As such, you need to change your build every world “update.” Be it the internet to the cloud/SaaS era to the AGI era and so on. Given the pace of technology and culture, there will be several “updates” to the world within your lifetime. And no one wants to play a character with an obsolete build.
I can’t take credit for this since I haven’t read the book yet, but when I was telling another friend about the above, she used the phrase “the leash of your past” inspired by a chapter in Björn Natthiko Lindeblad’s I May Be Wrong. Which I think is quite apt to this analogy.
After all, your past self won’t thank you for staying the same, but your future self would wish you changed sooner.
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
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