I recently spoke with Vincent Tang, the incoming District 101 Club Growth Director, and asked him what gaming taught him that he can apply to Toastmasters. He replied, “It teaches you to learn one skill at a time. The growth is gradual, and with each level, you gain expertise.” I have thought about that response many times since, not because it was surprising, but because it was so quietly true, the way certain things are true, like how you notice the smell of rain only after it has stopped raining.
I grew up watching people play games the way others watched cricket or movies. There was always someone hunched over in a dimly lit room, fingers moving relentlessly, eyes focused on the screen in deep concentration. I did not understand it then. I thought it was an escape, but it seems escape and preparation are not so different from each other. Both require you to leave your present state and envision yourself somewhere else.
Japanese author Haruki Murakami once wrote about running — it is not the destination that shapes you but the quiet accumulation of mornings, each one asking you to show up again. Gaming works the same way. You do not become better at the game in a single sitting. You fail a level, you fail it again, and somewhere in the failing, you learn the pattern of the game, the logic beneath its surface. The game does not apologize for your failure. It simply resets and presents you with the same problem in a fresh way.
This is what most of our education forgot to teach us. Not the subject matter, but the feeling of returning to difficulty without shame. A game never tells you that you should already know this. It assumes you don’t, and it walks you forward anyway.
I have a friend who spent three years playing strategy games in the evenings after work. He was not, by any conventional measure, doing something productive. He was moving pixels across a screen, building invisible empires that collapsed by morning. But when I watched him navigate a particularly difficult negotiation at the office, I recognized the same quality of mind — patient, analytical, willing to sacrifice the short-term move for the long-term position. He had been practicing all along. He simply hadn’t known to call it that.
There is a kind of loneliness in gaming that people rarely speak about. You are alone with a problem. There is no one to consult, no authority to defer to. The game does not care about your intentions; it only measures what you actually do. This is, in some ways, a more honest accounting than most human systems offer. We are often rewarded in life for the appearance of competence, for the confident voice, for the polished presentation. The game cuts through all of that. You either solve the puzzle or you don’t. You either time the jump or you fall.
Anjum Hasan, a popular Indian author, once wrote of the way ordinary lives accumulate meaning sideways — not through grand declarations but through the slow sediment of small moments. Gaming, in its best form, is exactly this. It is not the final boss that changes you. It is the hundred minor defeats before it. It is the afternoon you discovered that attacking from the left was always going to fail, so you tried the right, and that failed too, and eventually you understood that the solution required stillness, not aggression. That lesson migrates. It follows you out of the room.
What Vincent was describing, without perhaps fully naming it, is a philosophy of incremental mastery. In Toastmasters, you do not become a skilled speaker overnight. You stand before a room and stumble through two minutes. You sit down and someone tells you what they observed. The next time you stand, you carry that observation with you. It is the same loop — input, failure, feedback, return. Video gaming taught him to trust that loop. It taught him that frustration is not a sign that you are in the wrong place. It is a sign that you are exactly where the learning lives.
And then there is Abhijeet Joshi, DTM, Past District 101 Director, who articulates this with the directness of someone who has already done the arithmetic of discipline. “I believe in the rule of 10,000 hours to achieve mastery,” he told me, “and that is the reason I deliver speeches nine to ten times a week.” There is something almost game-like in that statement — the voluntary submission to repetition, the understanding that hours are not wasted when they are pointed at a single, honest target. Abhijeet is not waiting for inspiration or for the perfect conditions. He is clocking in. He is pressing start again. The 10,000 hours rule, first popularized by Malcolm Gladwell drawing on the research of Anders Ericsson, is in many ways the grammar that gaming invented long before anyone gave it a name. Every gamer who has replayed a difficult sequence forty times in a single evening already understands what Abhijeet knows — that mastery is not a gift. It is an accumulation. It is the willingness to do the thing again before the memory of the last failure has fully faded.
There are people who play games for years and take nothing from them, just as there are people who read great novels and emerge unchanged. The medium is never the whole story. But for those who play with a certain quality of attention — not just to win, but to understand the system, to ask why this rule exists and what happens when you press against it — something accumulates. A tolerance for complexity. A willingness to be a beginner. A capacity to hold a problem in your mind through the long night of not yet knowing the answer.
I think about the characters in the games I have watched people play. They are almost always ordinary figures thrust into extraordinary circumstances. They do not begin as heroes. They begin as someone who picks up the first tool and stumbles toward the first enemy. They learn by doing. They grow by failing in specific, informative ways. And at the end of the game, if there is an end, they are not the same person who pressed start. They have been remade by the journey, quietly and irrevocably, the way all of us are remade by the things we choose to do again and again until we are good at them.
Vincent’s gradual expertise, Abhijeet’s nine speeches a week — these are not different philosophies. They are the same philosophy disguised in different clothes. One learned it through a screen, through the logic of levels and lives and the patient architecture of a well-designed game. The other learned it through the dry mouth, the racing heart, and the slow, hard-won steadiness that only repetition can build. But both arrived at the same understanding that you do not grow by waiting to be ready. You grow by going again.
Growth, I have come to believe, rarely announces itself. It does not arrive with fanfare or with certainty. It arrives in the space between one attempt and the next, in the slight adjustment of the hand, in the moment you choose to try again. Gaming understands this. At its heart, the game is simply a structured invitation to keep going — to believe that the next level is possible, that the skill you have not yet found is already waiting inside you, accessible if you are patient enough, and brave enough, to keep playing.
Written by Pramathesh Borkotoky, Blog Chair