I used to play competitive multiplayer games, including one game that was about controlling resource points. It could get very intense, but it taught me an extremely important lesson: if you spend all your time playing defense, no matter how well you play it, you are going to lose. It may feel like you’re winning when you hold the line, but you are losing. Sometimes you have to look for opportunities to slip past the obvious fight and make strategic attacks elsewhere.

Secondly, from World of Warcraft raiding: a good player is nothing without a good team. But a team needs a certain density of good players to be good.

Finally, kind of a meta-lesson: one day, while playing the resource point control game, I found myself getting very angry. I was worked up, red faced, yelling. And I had this moment where I realized - I don’t have to feel this way. Nothing is forcing me to. So I put it down, uninstalled it, and never played those types of games again.