After reading the Ferrett's article “What does a Street Fighter champion have in common with Kai Budde?” I thought to myself, “Hey, I'm pretty good at Street Fighter, and not bad at Magic, and I read a lot about what successful people have in common... Gee, wouldn't it be nice if somebody could give all the nice Magic people who don't win as much as they'd like a short primer on what the big winners do that they don't?”

Okay, what I really thought was, “Hey, what a perfect opportunity for me to call out some of these jackholes that post all over the forums for no discernible reason other than to piss other people off, and let them know why pigheaded negativity and malice will never get them anywhere.”

(If that sounded negative or malicious, it's my bad.)

Success has long been an area of interest for me, and I believe it should be for everyone. After all, we all have dreams, hopes, ambitions, and desires. Wouldn't it make sense to have a working knowledge of how to go about obtaining them?

But where to learn such arcane mysteries? There's always the same source you got most of your basic life and social skills... from your parents.

There's the rub. As you sit back and think about dear ol' Mom and Dad, you are probably imagining nice, mild mannered, middle-class people who may or may not still be together, who may or may not be addicted to mood-altering medication, who may or may not have settled for one another when they realized they were never going to find the prince or princess all the Disney movies promised them. You're probably thinking of people who woke up one day in some job that puts food on the table and provides the illusion of security. Meanwhile, over the years, their once sterling dreams oxidized and blackened under the chill rain of disuse and the cold weight of despair, until all that remained of a once-glorious future was the harsh and pockmarked visage of unfulfilled middle age, staring open mouthed and toothless from a neural net constricting ever tighter from the pull of the habitually mundane, as the last vestiges of hope spasm in their death throes, like a freshly road-killed raccoon as the taillights of a better future disappear into the night.

That might have been a tad theatrical, but the point is that you might have to look a bit further for this one.

Personally, I took the plunge and sojourned into that most mocked section of the bookstore: self improvement.

I started to read. (I'll slide in some recommended reading at the end, for anyone who might be interested.)

As the light of knowledge washed over me, I became erect with.... no, wrong phrasing. I found myself turgid with... no, still not going to work. I was soon engorged... hmm.

Well, I was excited. You see, it turns out that people who are great at things have things in common. They have some similar attributes, yes, but that's not the exciting part. What's so gosh-darn neat about the whole thing is that they have similar habits. And while attributes are hard to develop, habits can be implemented with no more than a decision.

Be it sports stars such as Umezawa's Jit- sorry, Michael Jordan, or Pele, or Tiger Woods; or financial giants like Bill Gates or Warren Buffet; be it celebrities or gamers or artists or politicians; success, it would seem, is predictable, reliable, and obtainable.

Since this is meant to be an article, and not a book, let's jump right in. Let me just say, for the record, that this is not me telling you what to do; but rather me relating to you what many of the world's most accomplished people feel is responsible for their success.

Here's the most important things successful people have in common:

• A burning desire to be great: I'm not talking about an “I once won a PTQ” level of success; I'm talking about Hall of Fame level. Understand, that kind of personality doesn't emerge until you look in the mirror and ask yourself, “What's the least I'm willing to settle for?” But what many people find, when they do this, is that a lot of dreams and ambitions stick their heads up at this point; things we had forgotten we had committed to, things that we had let fade and whither but refused to starve and die. It's like flipping on the lights to your future. After you recoil in horror, you can finally see where you were headed, and make a decision. “Is this good enough?” The fact is, if you don't want to be the best at something, you'll never be great at anything.
  
• Love of an activity: you have to love what you're doing enough to focus all your attention on it. You have to be thinking about it all the time. You have to eat, drink, and breath whatever it is that you want. If you don't, it won't be worth the time to become really good at it. Also, to achieve greatness at any endeavor takes consistent effort, which is almost impossible to give if you don't love whatever you're putting that effort into.
  
• A positive, winning attitude: sounds kinda cheesy, huh? But it's true. You see, one of the main attributes necessary for success is perseverance. Harrison Ford was in Hollywood for fifteen years before he got his break. Michael Cane made so little money as an actor he was homeless. Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard. Stephan King got over a thousand rejection letters before his first story was published, (not book… just his first short story.) Michael Jordan didn't make the basketball team his freshman year in high school. Is there any way these people would have made it all the way to where they are if they were negative? Of course not! Oh, and possibly the most important reason this is so essential? You have to believe in yourself before you can accomplish anything. When people hate the world around them, it's usually an indication they really despise themselves. Why would you ever let something good happen to someone you loath?

Having set down these caveats, take a look at yourself and see if you've got what it takes before we move on. Do you really want to be great? Or would it be enough to just not be mocked? There's no shame in just being a casual player. Be honest with yourself. If you're constantly making excuses not to play, improve, and compete, it's time to take responsibility and face the fact that you cannot expect to be the best as long as you're making excuses. “I don't have the money. I don't have the time. I have work, I have family, I have priorities.” We all have these concerns, but the people who become the best work around them whatever way they can. “I play MTGO at work; I quit my lame minimum wage job to go to a Pro Tour; I taught my kids to play Magic and take them with me to tournaments; I donate semen to get enough money for my Constructed deck.”

Winners do whatever it takes, as long as they aren't hurting people to get it done. (Some do it, anyway; if you're one of these, you might be a little too competitive.)

Do you really love Magic? If there's something you'd rather be doing, maybe you should look at becoming the best at that.

Do you have a positive attitude? Some people say: “You know, that positive stuff is all well and good, but it's just not me.”

At this point, we should stop for a moment and inspect what we're saying. It has become the commonly held belief that it's okay to think whatever you want, and that a person's unique personality is something no one should ask him or her to change.

What a crock.

To put things in perspective, let's a take a rather extreme example:

A married man's friends find out that he fantasizes about having sex with his teenage babysitter. Their reaction? They laugh and slap him on the back.

That same guy's buddies find out he fantasizes about vivisecting his teenage babysitter. Now they stop talking to him.

Both are inappropriate. Both hurt people. Both will probably never happen. But one happens to be socially unacceptable. (Or, at least, one happens to be far more socially unacceptable than the other.)

Say one of that guys friends stuck by him and said, “Look, Mike, you've got to rewire yourself and find other things that turn you on. You've got to change.” In that circumstance, telling someone to change their personality seems reasonable.

So why shouldn't it be reasonable when the only person it really hurts is themselves?

Let's use some of the people who post on the various forums as an example.

I'm not going to name any names, and I'm not talking about any specific individual. I'm talking about a whole section of the Magic community. The force has the dark side? Magic has it too, except in Magic it's a lot less impressive. I call it the dumb side.

These are the people who are always saying Magic is dying. They are the people who rant and rave about how much the new set is going to suck before it comes out. Then they do it again before the set after that. Perhaps they're just playing the odds. They make personal attacks on people for their play, for their writing, for their opinions. (Um...never mind that last one.)

Don't get me wrong… I'm not talking about good natured ribbing. I'm not talking about spirited debate. I'm not talking about legitimate complaints. There have, without a doubt, been some bad Magic sets, and Wizards has certainly made some poor decisions over the years.

No, I'm talking about the sort of mind-numbing, mouth-breathing, wall-eyed, rabid moronity that you'd expect from your evil stepmother's tiny inbred dog.

They bludgeon people with their prodigious ignorance, making a spectacle of themselves as they cry wolf time after time, seemingly devoid of reason or logic (and often grammar and punctuation), like a PMSing Paris Hilton hopped her up on crystal meth and stuck in front of a keyboard.

“But wait!” you may cry, “what does it matter what you think? It's just your opinion against theirs, and it's not as though you can show logically that you are right and they are wrong, after all.”

But what if I could? What if by these posters' soul-shriveling negativity and contemptible predictability I could, in fact, illustrate why the personalities that hold such opinions are inferior?

Here's what we'll do: I'm going to give a headline, and then I'm going to list the response this type of person would post.

Wizards to raise prices per pack

Archmagus69: this is a travesty! After all the money we've given them they're still not satisfied! This makes me want to sell my cards

Time Spiral previews starting next week

Archmagus69: there's no way Time Spiral can be as good as Ravnica. Anyone with half a brain will take this opportunity to get out of the game

Time Spiral card spoiled “Ancestral visions”

Archmagus69: this card is obviously fake. There's no way Wizards would ever print something like this.

Official Time Spiral preview card, “Ancestral Visions”

Archmagus69: I don't see why this is such a big deal, the card isn't even that good. I mean, you don't get the cards for four turns. Why would anybody play this?

New Purple symbol shenanigans

Archmagus69: roflol, I can't believe you guys think these are real! What's the matter with you morons? They're obviously fake!

Purple symbol Akroma on adult swim

Archmagus69: this is obviously just an elaborate hoax, and I won't believe it until the card is in my hands.

Wizards confirms existence of Purple symbol sub-set

Archmagus6: great, so now all my old cards are going to lose their value since Akroma and Shadowmage Infiltrator will be common.

Purple symbol cards to all be rare

Archmagus69: oh, GREAT! So now instead of my rare i'm going to get “consecrate,” and it won't even be tournament legal! I should just sell all my cards.

Purple symbol cards to replace common card

Archmagus69: WHAT? So Magic is turning into Pokemon now? With all these different rarities? Someone should just firebomb Wizards to let them know they can't treat us like this.

Purple symbol cards to be tournament legal

Archmagus69: OMG, now no one will be able to afford Standard! In between the shock lands and the Purple set, you might as well be playing Vintage!

Foil cards now to replace common instead of card of equal rarity

Archmagus69: Will they ever stop? Don't they understand they're destroying people's ability to compete? How will anyone ever be able to win a Sealed event when scrubs are pulling nine bomb rares out of their Sealed deck? Why doesn't everyone understand that this is the end of Magic? And why won't girls talk to me?

Sound familiar? Of course it does. It's loser talk. Notice how no matter which way things go, he's not happy? Notice that he refuses to admit when he's wrong? That he complains both about cards being illegal, and then about the same cards being legal? That all he cares about are his own interest? That he exaggerates incessantly and has no interest in how his words or actions affect other people? Notice how he plays the victim and at the same time acts as though he's entitled to whatever he feels would best serve him? And most of all, notice that no matter how good the news actually is for him, he feels it's bad? There's nothing Wizards - or anyone else for that matter - could do that would satisfy this guy. He's made a decision to be unhappy and he's sticking with it to the bitter end.

Winners don't think like this. But that's not to say that they did not at some point. Archmagus69's real problem is that he's trained himself to see the world from a negative point of view. No matter what happens, he looks for the worst-case scenario and expects it. If posters like this ever want to experience any kind of success, they must first change the filter they use to look at the world. Because it doesn't matter what happens, nothing will ever make them happy if they don't.

(Just for you smart asses out there who are about to list things you feel might make Archmagus69 happy, take a moment and ponder this: ninety percent of lottery winners are right back where they started five years after winning the lottery, and fifty percent of them declare bankruptcy within five years. For those of you wondering why someone would have such a bizarre point of view, I'll just say this: when you have a negative expectation, it's very easy to be right, since you have the capability to ensure you are unsuccessful in any activity at any time simply by not putting any effort into it. For some people, being right is as close to being happy as they care to let themselves be, so they create self-fulfilling prophesies which enable them to utter the one phrase closest to their hearts - I told you so - while simultaneously letting them shirk responsibility for events which are actually their own fault. Example: “I told everyone that the possibility of getting all these rares would destroy Sealed events, and I just lost a Sealed event. I must have been right… never mind that I don't practice Sealed and don't have any history of winning anything... ever.”)

I, personally, am more exited about Time Spiral than I have ever been about a Magic set. I think that Wizards is going out of their way to pack as much value into every booster as they can, and I appreciate it. It's true that this will benefit them, but that's how the world works. One of the most profound truths I've ever heard, which I hear repeated again and again from the most successful people I encounter, is that: “People are compensated in direct proportion to the amount of service they render to their community.”

When I first heard this, I doubted it, so I started thinking about people. You've got the guy at Foot Locker, making six bucks an hour, who helps twenty people a day pick out shoes. Then you've got a band, whose albums provide entertainment for thousands of people. Then there's someone like Richard Garfield, who develops a game millions of people play and derive enjoyment from. Then if you look at Bill Gates, you see a guy who provides an operating system a third of the planet uses on a daily basis. So yes, Wizards is going to make a lot of money off Time Spiral. But you know what? They deserve to, because they are going out of their way to do what they believe is best for the game, and at the same time, provide the consumer with as much value as possible. For all of us, we have a golden opportunity. Economically, this is the set to buy. If we were to take a moment and look back, we'd see that this set has Urza block power-level cards with an extra rare in every pack, and while retail prices are going up, you can still get boxes for around $80. I've got a financial background, and I can tell you that without some sort of inside information in a company, you're going to get a better return on Time Spiral than you would in any equity fund or standard performing stock. I'd buy ten cases of the stuff and stick it in my closet without a second thought, and I have never recommended collectibles as an investment before.

(For those of you who like numbers: Urza block packs had appreciated to more than double their retail price after five years, indicating a compounding interest rate of over 14% per year, compared to the S&P 500, which was around 10% over the last ten years, and equity mutual funds, which averaged out at around 10.5% over the same period.)

…

So, we've established that you've got what it takes. You want to be great, you love Magic, and you're a positive guy.

But how do you go about amassing the sort of awe-inspiring competence necessary to be the best?

The first step is what you're doing. Study can always help. But you know that.

The real starting point is the moment you set a goal and decide you won't quit until you achieve it. Want to win a PTQ? Win Champs? Win Nationals? Win any Premier Event qualifier? Any Premier Event? Top 8 a Grand Prix? Maybe just win your first 8-man on MTGO? Size and prestige doesn't matter; only forward momentum matters, and the commitment not to quit. When you achieve your first goal, set another one.

In fact, write down your first goal right now. I'll wait.

Hey, you're back, glad to see you! (Yeah, I know you didn't do it. It's okay, you can do it later.) Now might be a good time to evaluate the people you play with. See, we rise and fall in accord with the abilities of those we surround ourselves with. If your friends are all scrubs... you probably are, too. But hey, that's okay. No reason to ask your hetero-lifemate for your toothbrush back. Just make a point of befriending some serious competitors and playing regularly with them. If you're not that social, that's okay too. Most people love to meet other people with similar interests, and serious competitors are a lonely breed. I know the best players in the Houston area would be warmly receptive to someone walking up and saying, “Hey, I really want to get my game to a competitive level, and I know you're the best around… would you help me?” A little flattery works wonders.

Here's a good time to test your current mindset and see how much you need to change. If someone said that to you, what would your reaction be? Here's a hint: if it's negative? You need to do some work.

Once you're surrounded by great players, it's time to start asking questions about why some win more than others. Is it their decks? Their play? Their personalities? Your fundamental grasp of the principles of the game, as well as the principles of human interaction, will grow with time; but it's important to notice, to become part of the learning process, rather than just try to absorb whatever information people decide to throw at you. How much more likely are you to remember the answer to a question you asked, compared to a question someone answered before you thought of it?

I'll give you some insight to the sorts of questions we asked when I started playing. I bought my first Magic deck in December of 93, in an electronics boutique in Virginia. I, not surprisingly, had no friends. I started playing around March of 94, in Houston, Texas. I was still a social cripple, but upon meeting a strain of humanity known as “gamers,” I was able to interact with at least some people, hygienically impaired though they might be. The first time I sat down at a table with a bunch of other Magic players, I played for ten hours before my father came barreling into the building wondering what had happened to me.

We asked questions like, “What's up with those little bitty decks? How do people expect to win with those?”

And later, “Man, what makes those tiny decks so good?”

Questions like, “You think we'd get manascrewed less if we cut out a color? Five seems like a lot.”

And, “Why would you play Balance? It kills your stuff too.”

Let's not forget, “Man, can you believe that guy traded me his dragon for that stupid set of zero artifacts? I mean, they're just like land! And one of them you have to sacrifice!”

Then I went to my first big tournament. I died turn 3 to a Berserked Kird Ape. The guy that beat me was playing a tiny two-color deck with a bunch of the artifacts we liked to trade for big creatures. He didn't even really talk during the game. I was a bye to him, just filling space. Then, after I lost, I said, “Hey, um... you really kicked my butt,” (I was to young to say “ass” back then,) “can you help me understand why?” It was like he woke up out of a dream. I was suddenly human. He looked around and started telling me who people were, and gave me some basic pointers. Then he sent me off to one of his friends, who broke my deck down and explained the math behind sixty cards and two colors and the law of four and why Moxen are most definitely not land.

It would be another year before anyone started talking about card advantage.

Those questions make me look like a moron now, but that's alright. Back then, that was the way of things. Today the questions are subtle, but one thing hasn't changed: the people who are asking them are the people who win. Everyone else benefits from their exploration, but they are the ones who reap the reward, because they are the ones providing a service to their community.

Ultimately, one thing everyone has to have, without exception, before they become great at anything, is experience. Experience is the card advantage of competency in any endeavor. You can have the best cards, the shrewdest friends, the most time and money, the biggest brain, and the brightest personality; but if you don't play, you can never make the mistakes you need to make to learn to be the best.

Oh, yeah, one more thing:

Don't forget to enjoy the journey.

Braeden Clark-Tarpley

ReachBraeden@gmail.com

As promised, here's some books everyone would be well served by reading:

Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen Covey
The 177 Mental Toughness Secrets of the World Class, by Steve Siebold
Beyond Positive Thinking, by Robert Anthony
The Strangest Secret, by Earl Nightengale
How to Win Friends and Influence People, (if you're not all that good with people already. You know who you are.)
Stuff by Anthony Robbins, (yeah, I know, but the guy knows what he's talking about. Also, he ate Peter Griffin, which makes him the second coolest guy around, right behind...)
The Dark Knight Returns, by Frank Miller, (which isn't about success, but is quite possibly the coolest comic book ever written.)