Esports is built on blue-sky thinking, the belief that you can become the very best if you dream big and work as hard as possible. Inside, it is a world of constant optimization, analysis, and compromise and every part of your life is shaped to the the goal of improvement. That ambition is powerful and it drives you forward, but it also brings with it a certain pressure resting in the back of your mind; that you should win at some point, and maybe you even think that you are not the reason you are losing matches…
You start measuring yourself against an ideal version of who you think you should already be, and that is where the problem is.
In order to dream big, you have to accept where you actually are. You are not at the top yet, and you are faced with many obstacles in life that deter you from reaching it and it is very easy to point your finger at the multitude of external factors that kept you from performing your best.
I felt that myself when I missed qualification for the recent EGC Finals S-tier event. I came second in both qualifiers, and my first reaction was to blame the format for its extreme demand on player endurance requiring around 12 hours to make it through the bracket each day. While I think there is some truth to that, playing a best of seven from 2 to 8 in the morning is a rough situation for any competitor, the reality is that both my opponent and I played under the same conditions. The rules were fair, and maybe even in my favour, if you consider the fact that my opponent was in the Chinese timezone.
Accepting that is difficult. It is much easier to point to circumstances than to face the fact that sometimes you fall just short. Coming second in a qualifier is not the same as being a loser. I came as close as possible to winning, and that result does not define my worth as a player. I am almost there. For me, balancing the acceptance of external factors with the discipline not to use them as excuses is one of the hardest things for me to learn. The factors are real, but they are not the reason I lost, and they are not who I am. Learning to separate those things is an absolute necessity of being a good competitor and sportsman.
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