A confession to start. I used to play ranked Dota 2, Starcraft 2, WoW arena, Halo, Rocket League, a few others. Different games, same pattern — I would climb to the top ten percent, get obsessed, push for top one percent, and at some point realize I had been awake for eight hours doing nothing else.
I stepped away from ranked games about two years ago. The losing started to eat me in a way that was not healthy. The wins were unbelievable focus. The losses were anxiety and despair. The math stopped paying out.
But the experience of being locked in — totally absorbed, every decision seven moves ahead, time disappearing — was some of the best of my life. Most people who have played competitively at any level know exactly what I am talking about. There is a reason it is hard to walk away from.
The thing I am working on now is moving that capability into building. Not the addiction part. The focus part. The locked-in part.
What carries over
The conditions for flow are the same in business as they were in ranked games:
- A clear goal you actually care about.
- Immediate feedback that is mostly honest.
- Difficulty matched to skill — slightly above, ideally.
- Distractions surgically removed before the session, not during.
The cheapest version of this for me: a two-hour block, phone in another room, one browser tab, one document. The first twenty minutes feels like nothing is happening. The next ninety minutes is where the actual work lives.
What does not carry over
Two things.
The intensity is built differently. Ranked games are tuned by engineers to be maximally engaging. The match-three-and-you-rank-up loop is dopamine engineering. Business does not give you that for free. You have to build the loop yourself. The flywheel of writing a post, watching it land or not, writing a better one is real but slow — measured in weeks, not minutes.
The losses do not sting the same way. Shipping a post that flops just means you write a better one. There is no MMR decay. Nobody is laughing in your team chat. The asymmetry is in your favor for the first time.
The current experiment
Two ninety-minute writing blocks per week. Phone in another room. Single tab open. If I hit eight of those in a row I will know the model is working. I will log how it goes here — that is part of the point of this format.
There is a thing competitive players say about climbing: if you are not improving every patch you are falling behind. I am trying to mean that about building now instead of games. We will see.