video games made my career (kind of)

I talked a little in my last post about how I competed in Fortnite and Valorant. Top 500 power rankings in Fortnite, briefly top 70 Radiant in Valorant. I don't bring this up to flex (jk I definitely am), but because I genuinely think it's one of the most underrated reasons I'm where I am right now. Obviously I could be doing better, and I still need a full-time position, but that's for future me to worry about.

the grind is the grind

Here's the thing about getting good at a video game at a high level, it's not really about the game. Like yes, I learned the mechanics and game sense and all that, but what you're actually learning is how to get good at something.

When I was grinding Valorant or Fortnite, I wasn't just mindlessly queuing ranked or scrims in the hopes that I magically would become the GOAT (most of the time). I was watching tournaments, studying pro players, identifying why I lost a fight or a round and what I could've done better/differently. I even discussed it often with the people I duo'd. I was treating it like a job, because as a teenager, it was my job. At some point, you just start improving rapidly because something just clicks. I think it's a feedback loop that people have to develop if they want to get beter at anything in general, whether that be sports, content creation, or becoming the champion of Sperm Racing.

So I think this has a lot to do with starting from nothing to getting a dream internship or something similar. You feel like your goal is so far away until it just isn't. This feeling never goes away but I think it's very easy after being in the top 99.9% percentile in anything to see that it is plausible to get good at anything that is in your control. This may sound super egotistical to people, and it very well might be, but I can't recall the amount of times I would tell people about my goals and they wouldn't believe in me until it happened.

winners keep winning

There's this idea I love to reference: winners keep winning. Once you've experienced the feeling of winning, of being really good at something compared to the rest of your peers, it becomes easier to believe you can get good at other hard things. This has literally nothing to do with 'talent' or 'being special', it's literally just having felt it before in my opinion. I'm not a genius and I doubt I'm ever the best coder in a room full of people, but it's something about winning before that compounds.

I grew up in a small city in Tennessee with like 300 Asian people total. There wasn't exactly a pipeline of people around me going into big tech. A thing that irks me with a lot of people is that they blame their environment far too easily. Yes, I know this is a very blanket statement and there are a lot of nuances that go into an environment shaping who you are as a person, but you have so much control over your life that blaming external factors will literally never benefit you. Even if your environment is the shittest position you could've imagined, I believe almost if not everyone can invoke change into their lives.

For me, I think it would be pretty easy to think I was just going to get a decent job, live paycheck by paycheck, retire by 65, but I want so much more than that. Looping back to the topic, I think being able to place so high in Valorant/Fortnite taught me that you can compete as long as it's something you can practice for.

So when I started grinding for internships, it felt familiar. It wasn't an easy process, but it was definitely familiar

so did it actually matter

The competitive mindset, the ability to grind something boring as fuck until you get good at it, the pattern recognition from having done hard things before, I think it all carried over.

To reiterate, I'm at Google right now and heading to a VC-backed startup after. I grew up in a small city in the South but am now trying to become a part of the NYC tech scene. I keep thinking about the chain of events; gaming is where I met the most valuable people and where I learned how to improve the most.

Idk why I wrote this post, but Fortnite and Valorant are partially responsible for my current career trajectory.