Record yourself to coach yourself

Hi everyone,

This is the weekly free issue of “Overthinking Everything” which goes out every Wednesday. There is also a paid issue every Sunday. The last one was How do we treat unique talents?, which explored the way we treat “difficult” people who are too valuable for us to ignore.

I’ve been planning to do some shorter pieces. Writing two long essays a week turns out to be a lot of writing! I’m still planning to keep to the Wednesday/Sunday schedule for now, but some of Wednesdays free posts (and maybe some of Sundays paid ones) will be shorter pieces than they have been so far. Today is the first of these shorter free posts, in which I’ll tell you about a fun experiment I did.

In which I become a Slay the Spire YouTuber

I play a lot of the game Slay the Spire, and would like to get better at it. A recent notebook post explains both the game and what I’m doing to improve at it.

As part of my attempts to improve, this weekend I did an experiment and recorded myself playing through a complete run, explaining what I was doing as I played, and thinking through my reasoning out loud. You can see the videos here.

The goal isn’t to become a famous Slay the Spire YouTuber (though people do seem to enjoy them, and I may record more), but by recording it I am forced to be a bit more conscious of what I’m doing, in ways that let me notice my weaknesses and improve on them. It lets me notice bugs in my play as a prelude to fixing them (cf. Errors vs. Bugs and the End of Stupidity)

Additionally, recording just improved my play fairly directly. I tend to play Slay the Spire very intuitively, where I don’t think through my moves as much as I could. Explaining them out loud slows me down and makes me articulate the reasoning. Often it turns out the reasoning is wrong, and there is something better I could do.

Two particularly interesting bugs that became obvious in the course of those runs were:

• I’m very bad at “state management” - I tend to forget I have certain things, and then run into them the hard way. e.g. I kept forgetting that I had velvet choker (which limits the number of cards I can play) and being suddenly surprised when I couldn’t play any more cards this turn.

• Often there is a way out that I would miss unless I think harder than I usually do. There were probably at least five times when I said something along the lines of “I’m definitely dead” here and was wrong each time (spoiler: I won this run).

The former suggests I should try playing Slay the Spire with a notepad or something. A list of things to definitely not forget in this run, that I add entries to the first time I swear at myself over them. Hopefully with time I’ll no longer need it.

The latter suggests that doing more of these videos will help build my intuition for what is possible, although I doubt I’ll ever get to the point where I don’t need to think at all, so that I can more reflexively catch myself before giving up.

A general lesson here might be that it’s worth explaining out loud why you’re definitely doomed before giving up. Rubber duck debugging as a safety net.

Self Coaching

Because I’m me, I can’t do something as simple as try to get good at a computer game without immediately thinking about generalisations (cf. Thinking through the implications).

In this case the generalisation is this: If you have something you want to get better at, try recording yourself doing it. If you’re brave, you can put the recording up on YouTube. If you’re really brave, you can even watch it yourself.

This can be thought of as a form of self coaching. You are enlisting a coach, who is better or at least differently good at the task than you are, it’s just that coach is also you, but you in a different mode than you are while doing the task. When speaking out loud, you are coaching yourself in the moment by using your verbal intelligence to comment on the task at hand more explicitly, and when reviewing your video from the outside you are “coaching” your past self, pointing out things that were not visible to them at the time.

Whether this works or not probably depends a lot on the specific task at hand, but it at the very least seems like something worth trying.

Recording myself writing

Because I’m ridiculous, I thought I would record myself writing this newsletter, so here is a video of me writing this newsletter. I’m not sure what I learned by that, but the commentary is entertainingly self conscious.

Unfortunately the video quality is quite poor, sorry. I had settings optimised for Slay the Spire rather than for text, which is high frame rate and the graphics quality doesn’t matter that much. If I do this again I’ll have to use better encoding options. In the meantime, the audio should be fine and you can at least read the final product in high res right here.

Coaching Auction

Every week I auction off a coaching session based around the Wednesday free newsletter issue. We spend an hour talking about something loosely based on the theme of the issue and discussing relevant ways you can use it to improve your life. You can bid for this week’s coaching session here. I must admit I’m not entirely sure what that will look like with this week’s theme, so feel free to go quite broad - if there’s something you want to get better at, we can work on ideas for how to do that even if it’s not literally the method talked about here. I guess I’m also happy to coach you on Slay the Spire if you really think that’s a good use of your money.

The auction uses a mechanism called a Vickrey auction, where you submit a sealed bid, and the winning bid pays the price of the second highest bid (so you never pay more than you bid, but will always pay less unless there is a tie, in which case you pay the amount that you bid). Last week’s How to do everything, the winning bid was £72, paying £50.

In addition, although I’m currently reluctant to take on new recurring clients, I do offer one off troubleshooting sessions, currently at £95 for an hour session, so if there is some problem on your mind that you think I could help you with (anything from feelings to software development), feel free to drop me an email at david@drmaciver.com to enquire.