Okay, let me update this:
- It is impossible for me to opine on how to be the best without summoning metaphysical laws as evidence. If you do not work within these laws, knowingly or unknowingly, you won't accomplish anything of note.
- I was 100% wrong about not playing a lot. It may not be the most important rule but after a certain point the only way to get consistent, incremental returns on your investment is to play. As much as possible. Play with yourself, play in your mind, play the computer, play the stages, play the techniques, play opponents, play superiors, play inferiors, play peers.
Rule No. 1: Love, Faith & Belief.
If you don't know if you Love the game, you will soon find out. Once you find out if you Love the game, though, don't question it. There really is no explaining; you know it when you feel, or even witness, that magic.
You must believe you are capable and deserving of being the best. There is simply no way around that.
Most people fear success. Why? Success is change. Our brain fears change.
Feel the fear and do it anyway. Every wall you come up against is grounded in fear. Laziness is fear.
Rule No. 2: Absorb everything. Attach to nothing.
Everything is context-sensitive. This is why you cannot attach to anything. Significance changes depending on stages of development. Great advice for a newb may be awful advice for a veteran.
It okay to be overwhelmed, to inundate yourself with information. But always remember the end goal: compartmentalization. Turn the conscious into unconscious. Process, not results. Master the process and the results appear naturally.
Everyone's path is unique. You have to have faith and belief. The unconscious is much (dare I say infinitely?) more efficient than the conscious. This is a process that differs greatly person-to-person; everyone assimilates knowledge differently.
Rule No. 3: Stick with one or two characters. Invest in a great controller.
Your character and controller must be an extension of your Mind.
"I think it, you do it."
The game is too complicated to fart around and spread your attention. You don't need to say, "Okay, I'm going to play this character for the rest of my life." But pick a significant amount of time -- a month-plus, or multiple tournaments if your area is particularly inactive -- and stick with it. If you're having a blast exploring the ins and outs of your character, well there you go.
If you know your character main and you still can't play someone equal or better than you for a couple of hours without switching, maybe you're just not challenging yourself enough with the character you selected. Learning is an active process. The second you become passive is the second you stop improving.
As for controllers, Nintendo is not manufacturing them anymore. Over time this will take on greater importance. There is already a mini-crisis. Top players break their controller all the time. In every thread for a National you can witness M2K campaign for a controller.
You can get a Tri-Wing and collect the good spare parts from broken controllers to create a super controller. Faith in your controller is oft-overlooked but from experience I can say it's where all your confidence resides. Give me control over my opponent's controller and I shall never lose.
Rule No. 4: No johns.
Take a deep breath and ponder at the times you live in. Any question you have can be explored within microseconds. You can communicate with people all over the world and pick their brains. We have been compiliing information and techniques on sports for thousands of years; it's a science, bro. There are no excuses. Again, this all goes back to Rule No. 1. You create your own reality. Play the victim? Become the victim. Play the hero? Become the hero.
I cannot count how many times I have wanted to quit this game. If it was out of my control I wouldn't be here. Fortunately it is entirely in my control. I have free will and free won't. To give up, either explicitly or implicitly, is to play the victim. You don't have great players around your area? You have to drive three hours for a smashfest? You don't feel like your return on investment is enough? There are all kinds of techniques with much higher return on investment than simply practicing all day and playing great players. But they require much more gumption; they are not Smash improvement techniques but life, and soul, improvement.
A few obvious ones: Diet. Exercise. Sleep. The Big 3. This improves your game both implicitly and explicitly. Implicitly because it improves your long-term and short-term ability to compartmentalize, to consolidate your memories and experiences. Explicitly because you are alert and focused.
Not so obvious: mindfulness. Mindfulness is not just meditation, although meditation is encompassed.
Here is an article for sport-specific mindfulness, for example. Check out that whole blog. I mentioned earlier you should play in your mind. Why? Because your brain works visually. There is little to no difference between what you imagine in your mind and what you do physically. The brain displays identical brain activity.
This means you can imagine desired outcomes and train your brain and body as if you alreayd possessed them.
I find neuroscience particularly applicable to Melee because this game is mostly played in your head. Go read some Bruce Lee, some Asian philosophy, the Art of War by Sun Tzu. Don't forget that Melee
is a fighting game,
is war. Humans have been participating in such activities since the dawn of time; absurdly effective techniques and mindsets have been honed to deal with it. If you don't "naturally" possess these things then you can learn to. If you choose not to that is your choice.
One of the most interesting things I've stumbled across recently has to do with choking. There is a host of new and exciting research related to neuroscience and how to perform under pressure, like
this and
this. (Sian Beilock has a blog on Psychology Today that has much of the information in the book.) Again, you have to believe to achieve. Have faith and you will find it. Look for it and it will be presented to you.
Like this thread/post. If you were looking for this, conscious and/or subconsciously, you found it.
Hey Adam, have you read/what do you think of Nietzche's article "Morality as Anti-Nature"?
Googling that I was led to this:
Let us consider finally what naïvety it is to say 'man ought to be thus and thus!' Reality shows us an enchanting wealth of types, the luxuriance of a prodigal play and change of forms: and does some pitiful journeyman moralist say at the sight of it: 'No! man ought to be different'? ... He even knows how man ought to be, this bigoted wretch; he paints himself on the wall and says 'ecco homo'! (Behold the man!)... But even when the moralist merely turns to the individual and says to him: 'You ought to be thus and thus' he does not cease to make himself ridiculous. The individual is, in his future and in his past, a piece of fate, one law more, one necessity more for everything that is and everything that will be. To say to him 'change yourself' means to demand that everything should change, even the past. ... And there have indeed been consistent moralists who wanted him in their own likeness, namely that of a bigot: to that end they denied the world! No mean madness! No modest presumption! ... In so far as morality condemns as morality and not with regard to the aims and objects of life, it is a specific error with which one should show no sympathy, an idiosyncrasy of the degenerate which has caused an unspeakable amount of harm! ... We others, we immoralists, have on the contrary opened wide our hearts to every kind of understanding, comprehension, approval. We do not readily deny, we seek our honour in affirming. We have come more and more to appreciate that economy which needs and knows how to use all that which the holy lunacy of the priest, the diseased reason of the priest rejects; that economy in the law of life which derives advantage even from the repellent species of the bigot, the priest, the virtuous man - what advantage? - But we ourselves, we immoralists, are the answer to that...
Ludwig Wittgenstein's thoughts on language come to mind; quoting Wikipedia:
An aim of the Tractatus is to reveal the relationship between language and the world: what can be said about it, and what can only be shown. Wittgenstein argues that language has an underlying logical structure, a structure that provides the limits of what can be said meaningfully, and therefore the limits of what can be thought. The limits of language, for Wittgenstein, are the limits of philosophy. Much of philosophy involves attempts to say the unsayable: "what can we say at all can be said clearly", he argues. Anything beyond that—religion, ethics, aesthetics, the mystical—cannot be discussed. They are not in themselves nonsensical, but any statement about them must be
I find Nietzsche's prose to be bombastic and superfluous. Why compose such a circuitous paragraph for a relatively simple point? Ego? He loses me then and there. Frankly I've never thought much of Nietzsche. That's to say nothing about the validity of his philosophy, thoughts, writings; it's simply to say that I don't care or not care, that it's not for me, in this lifetime, that I feel no connection of truth when I read it so I move on to what does reverberate within me soul.
