I screwed up.
This past month was absolute chaos for me. Two flights to the East Coast and one to the West Coast. Considering I live in Nashville, it was a lot of time spent on an airplane.
Being the good nerd that I am, I brought my Nintendo Switch and downloaded a game I’d heard great things about:
Subnautica.
A quick, non-spoilery premise: your spaceship crashes on an alien planet, and you need to survive, build a base, explore the planet, and figure out how to get back home.
Unsurprisingly, this game got its hooks in me, and I played…a lot. Yesterday, I had put in a few hours after work, and the game crashed.
No big deal, right?
But as I rebooted the game, I started to feel a pit in my stomach:
“…does this game have autosave?”
I went to the most recent save file: it was from the day prior, when I luckily (and accidentally) manually saved the game.
But that still meant I had lost hours and hours in the crash.
To borrow liberally from The Shawshank Redemption, my Subnautica progress “up and vanished like a fart in the wind.” (What an all-time line, by the way.)
If there’s one thing I hate, it’s wasting time. If there are two things, the other is mosquitos.
I started to think about all the tasks and things I would have to re-do. The parts of the map I would have to re-explore. The resources I would have to re-gather. I was dangerously close to quitting.
But I told myself: “Just go do the first task.”
So I went and got one upgrade for my base. I realized this had taken me just a few minutes because I knew exactly where to go, compared to two hours the first time.
Then I got to work rebuilding my base. I now knew what equipment belonged where. I knew how to design the base for optimal efficiency.
In less than an hour I was back to my previous spot, with a better base, and more momentum.
I had panicked for nothing, and forgotten one of the core foundations of a great video game:
As our character progresses in the game, we also progress in real life, with knowledge and experience.
We might have died or the game crashes, but we don’t forget the patterns we memorized, the skills & muscle memory we developed, and the knowledge we uncovered.
(FromSoftware’s Elden Ring and the Dark Souls series are masters of this experience).
Which brings me to the point of today’s newsletter:
No matter how often we feel like we’re starting over in real life, we never restart at Square One.
When we try to build a running habit or change our diet, we are embarking on a fact-finding mission. That’s it. Even if we “failed,” it was still worth it. We gained knowledge. We learned what worked. We learned what didn’t work. We learned about our environment and about ourselves.
No attempt is a failure. No effort is wasted. It’s not a reflection of who we are as a person or our identity. It was another attempt that could help each future attempt.
Let me give you an example:
Let’s say we joined a gym last year but gave up after a few weeks. Which happens all the time. We’re ready to try again this year, but bummed out that we “have to start all over.” Luckily, we are not starting at Square One.
We know the exact route to the gym. We know how to sign up for a membership. We know where the equipment is and how it works. We know where the stretching area is, where the treadmills are, and where the free weights are. We might even have a workout we used last year that we can use as a baseline.
We might be “starting over” in regards to our current weight or how much we can lift on the bar, but our brains still work and our muscles remember how to lift.
Because we don’t have to exert effort on the toughest parts (joining the gym & walking through the door), we can put more effort into building the routine of exercise. Each past attempt paved the way for our current attempt to have a better chance of succeeding.
No matter how much we feel like we are starting over, we never go back to Square One.
And that’s a great thing.
-Steve
