Know yourself

If you find yourself repeatedly failing to be effective in a role, it might be that you don't fully understand what your role is.

Problem

• You find yourself uncertain about what you should be doing at a certain time period.

• You find yourself trying repeatedly to do something but you're not getting the results you want.

• Your teammates struggle to work with you, or struggle to predict how you would behave or act.

Recommendation

• Understand demand - Assess whether or not you are clear on what role you should be playing. What does the situation require?

• Distinguish needs vs. want - Understand that there is a difference between the role you or your team needs versus the role you want to play. Sometimes, these are two different things and you need to find the balance of what role to play "now" versus what role you want to play "later".

• Accept change - You may have played a role before that no longer suits you now. You may play a different role next year. This is normal. Know that a lot of things change in life, and that knowing oneself is continuous.

• Be gentle and kind - You will be a constant companion to yourself until you die. Be kind to yourself. The journey is long- you might as well make yourself a friend along the way.

Effective use

• Balance - By knowing clearly what role you can play and should play, you can better find situations or teams that will work best with your toolkit. This would mean a technologist would partner up with a businessman, and a farmer would partner up with a salesperson.

• Clarity - Once you have clarified what role you want to play, you'll be able to quickly disqualify distractions, or questions that might cause you to lose focus.

• Peace - There are various elements of chaos outside of oneself, at play in the world. Many things are outside of our control. But knowing one's self, inclinations, desires, and preferences enables you to maintain order within your mind and your realm. This enables you to have stability as you go out and face the challenges of the world.

Misuse

• Experiencing distractions and dawdling - When you don't know what role you should play, you end up getting distracted and wasting a lot of time. There is a fine line between dawdling (mindlessly wandering without directions) and being lost- which can become frustrating.

• Overwhelm - When you repeatedly play the wrong role or force something against your nature, it can feel like things are stacked against you.

• Misalignment, miscommunication with teammates - By picking a role (e.g. position 5 support) and then suddenly playing differently from that role (e.g. roamingposition 4 ganker), it is very likely that your teammates will misunderstand or be confused about how to work or integrate with you.

References

• As a carry, your goal is to farm. As a position 1 carry in DotA 2, BSJ explains that you build your farming item first so that you unlock your scaling capability and open up a variety of options such as clearing waves fast so you can push towers.

• Recognize your cards and your teammates' cards at play. As a position 1 carry that has a greedy midlaner, BSJ explains that you can opt to get kill or gank-oriented items instead of your usual farm item, with the foresight that most of the map space will be taken by your position 2.

• Assess and compensate for your hero's weakness. Once you unlock your farming capability, you'll need to be able to survive so that you can take up more of your enemy's side of the map. BSJ demonstrates this with how he leverages his Linken's Sphere on Weaver to initiate skirmishes that he has low commitment to, while causing his enemies to put themselves in bad positions.

• Ask the right questions about yourself and the environment around you. BSJ frames three key questions to ask yourself as a carry: How do I kill the enemies? How do they kill me? How do they survive? "These are important questions to get into the habit of asking yourself."

• Jordan Peterson instructs his students to Clean Your Room which is related to this idea of starting with setting order to what is within reach (or what is within you) before trying to change something out in the world.

• My blog writings on the difference between wandering and dawdling, and how to figure out what you want.