Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Lessons - What It Really Takes to Win | Carlos Rodriguez - 17x European Champion

Transcript

Lessons - What It Really Takes to Win | Carlos Rodriguez - 17x European Champion · Success Story with Scott Clary

• 0:00
  In this lessons episode, explore how elite eSports performance develops through strategic game
• 0:04
  selection, discipline training, and constant adaptation. Discover why picking the right title
• 0:09
  shapes long-term opportunity, understand how mental endurance and personal development elevate
• 0:14
  competitive skill, and uncover how failure, risk-taking, and self-trust drive sustained success
• 0:19
  in a fast evolving industry.
• 0:28
  What does that mean for eSports? How do you become the best? Because if you're talking about
• 0:34
  all the different games that you could play, do you just focus on the one that's growing the
• 0:40
  fastest? It has the biggest community and play that again and again. It's a very good question,
• 0:44
  right? So I will say I got lucky on my first move in World of Warcraft because World of Warcraft
• 0:49
  just happened to be one of the largest games back then, but then in the fourth year competing in that
• 0:56
  game, 2009 actually, I decided to quit World of Warcraft and I decided to quit for different reasons
• 1:04
  than the game being smaller. I didn't even think about that. I quit because I felt like I wasn't
• 1:11
  the owner of my lack. I wasn't like the game had certain things that would make it so the class
• 1:19
  I played in the game would just become less and less up to me to win with, you know? So I was like,
• 1:29
  yeah, I don't want to be like I'm like, yeah, I don't my control completely. So I decided to quit,
• 1:34
  and I quit on my peak. I think I played, I won in Europe and then I played the World Championship
• 1:42
  and I think in the like third or fourth, I can't remember exactly. And the first with my class,
• 1:48
  there's like different classes in the video game. I was playing Warrior and I was the best warrior
• 1:52
  in the world, right? And so yeah, then I said to quit because of that reason and then I then
• 1:58
  asked myself, okay, I want a career of this. So I think I have a gift to play video games. I think
• 2:05
  that my hand coordination is pretty good. I think that I can think on this spot really well as well
• 2:11
  and also I have no fear. I mean, I am inherently a very confident person which is very useful in game
• 2:17
  to assert dominance whenever you're playing, you know, and facing someone. So what game should I
• 2:22
  play next? What games fits my skill set and what game is played by a lot of people because the more
• 2:29
  people that play the game and watch the game, the more price pool I will have access to, right? And
• 2:33
  that's when I consciously decided to go for League of Legends, which is even a soft today. One of
• 2:38
  the largest games on the planet, if not the largest, I'm pretty sure is the largest PC game on the
• 2:41
  planet. And that's when I built the next portion of my career for five years straight. Played that
• 2:47
  game, became one of the best in the world that it played a lot of tournaments, build a brand,
• 2:52
  created content, live streamed and made myself, you know, a known, you know, professional player with
• 2:59
  a lot of fans. And yeah, that was a conscious effort. And I'm very glad that I did that. Even though
• 3:05
  like League of Legends marketing was not my favorite game, I just thought that I could be very good at
• 3:09
  it and I thought that I could have a career that I could live with, you know.
• 3:14
  Um, when you're when you are trying to become the best at a game, what does your actual routine look
• 3:19
  like? What's your day to day? So that the, you know, in, in, in traditional sports,
• 3:25
  you can't, you shouldn't practice more than your body physically allows you to because then it
• 3:31
  becomes counter, counterproductive, right? When your muscles are too tired, then you get into bad habits
• 3:36
  and, you know, yeah, you get into bad habits when you're too tired. But with video games,
• 3:44
  I always say, if your mind can take it, you should be training. And you're not going to get
• 3:51
  exhausted on your arms. You're not going to, unless you really have a fucked up way to pick up
• 3:56
  the mouse or the controller, you're not going to develop carpal tunnel, you know, like,
• 4:00
  yeah, like it's not going to physically tax you. If you just do the ABC of what to do when you play
• 4:08
  games, like stretch every now and then turn up from your chair and like, you know, stretch and whatever,
• 4:14
  right? But, uh, but mentally it's very taxing because every game you play, you have to think about
• 4:20
  a thousand things, a thousand things while you're controlling your character, while you're thinking
• 4:25
  about what your team is doing, what moves should the team do next? What is my opponent thinking of
• 4:30
  doing? It's just very taxing, you know, and you have to take it seriously so that you can develop
• 4:34
  good habits. So I think that an average successful career has a player training eight to ten hours a
• 4:40
  day. And there's players that can take more. There's players that can take less. There's more creative
• 4:47
  players that benefit more from playing only six, seven hours, whereas there's more players that
• 4:53
  benefit a lot from repetition that, you know, having 11, 12 hours a day help them more. So it's
• 4:59
  ranges, you know, but for the most part, I think that the rule of thumb is if you can take it,
• 5:06
  you should be practicing. And the way in which you practice, there's two ways in which you practice
• 5:11
  in esports. One is alongside your team. So if it's a team game, you practice alongside your team,
• 5:18
  and you practice against other teams, or your sister team, and then you practice team play,
• 5:22
  you practice call outs, you practice together, you know, you learn how to play together the game,
• 5:26
  you practice picks and bounds, you practice the way in which you guys play the game together,
• 5:29
  and you practice what your team is known for, what is your playstyle, right, which takes
• 5:37
  hundreds, if not thousands of hours, okay. And then you practice by yourself in the sense of
• 5:45
  your practice, your mechanics. Imagine this as if you're in your NBA player, and you're just
• 5:50
  shooting by yourself, right, just shooting at the basket for hours. And the way in which you do
• 5:56
  that is is every game has their is something called solo queue, and you just queue up, and then
• 6:01
  you automatically get placed with other players in the world in your team and other players in the
• 6:07
  opposite team, random people that are of your level, more or less. And that's how you practice,
• 6:12
  you learn your mechanics, you develop your own, and yeah, and those two combined make up for
• 6:17
  the totality of your practice. Some players like to go to hit the gym, a lot of them actually
• 6:24
  like to also read books and just develop their minds, and I have come to realize that it does
• 6:31
  help depending on the player. Yeah, no, I was going to ask like if there's any, any like physical
• 6:36
  or mental exercises that you do that translate into, but for you in particular was mostly just
• 6:43
  practicing the actual game that you're playing. I mean, it was a practicing game. I was
• 6:46
  hitting the gym as well, and I was reading books. I like to read books a lot, and I like meditating
• 6:50
  as well. I picked up reading books and meditation when I was 17, and finally enough, it was when
• 6:56
  everything just boomed, you know, like, yeah, and I have never lost the habit anymore. I don't
• 7:03
  meditate every day, but I use it as a tool, you know, and and same goes for reading books. When I
• 7:09
  feel like I'm a bit stuck or I'm a bit overly stressed about something, a micro and job is,
• 7:15
  it can get incredibly stressful, even more so than as a player. But I've learned the little tactics
• 7:21
  to get rid of that stress and to find solutions to complex problems that require a lot of creativity
• 7:28
  and ambition and balls, honestly, like sometimes I just have to, sometimes I just have to
• 7:34
  take a leap of faith and, you know, using my gut feel as the faith, you know, and I feel like
• 7:41
  reading books and meditating and spending time with myself helped me greatly. Yeah, no, I just
• 7:47
  find it so fascinating because you know, when you look at when you look at traditional sports
• 7:52
  and you find the people that are the best, well, you know, they put in the hours and they put
• 7:56
  in the work, but then they find the best, they usually will find the best coach and that will
• 8:00
  sort of guide them and because traditional sports, there's been people that have done it before,
• 8:04
  right? There's there's training methods that have done it before. If you're, if you're the number one
• 8:09
  eSports player, no one's ever really done it before. There's no coach that has done this as a
• 8:14
  professional for 10 years, you know, before you were even born that knows how to, knows how to train,
• 8:20
  knows how to navigate and how to deal with contracts. So like technically you're, you're more or less
• 8:24
  on your own. Did you find somebody or was it, was it you sort of paving the way because then when I
• 8:28
  look at you and your story, it seems like you paved the way for how to coach, how to train, how to
• 8:33
  negotiate, how to how to build a brand, how to sort of operate at a high level when you're actually
• 8:39
  as a player, it was just you basically and probably a handful of other people that were coming up
• 8:44
  at the same time as you. Yeah, this is actually a good point. Like it is true that I never had,
• 8:51
  I didn't, I never had a mentor as a player. I just never had a mentor's player. That's simple
• 9:00
  because I was, I mean, I was not literally the first player, but I was the first player, you know,
• 9:06
  in one sense of it was what I was one of the first players, you know, and I could just look at my
• 9:12
  environment and say, okay, that works. Okay, that doesn't work. Okay, that guy got fucked. Okay,
• 9:16
  you know, I was just taking my learnings the hard way, you know, and yeah, you're right. I mean,
• 9:22
  I had to build my own path and in a way, that's why I think, and I'm very grateful for this,
• 9:29
  the industry, like my reputation and credibility within the industry is really high.
• 9:36
  It makes me happy that people look back and see me as, yeah, a legacy player that now is
• 9:47
  touching a completely different side of the business, you know, and ultimately, man,
• 9:56
  I feel like it's just, it's fun when you have to build a path that's never existed before because
• 10:03
  you like, you learn to take fuck up some failures as just another day in the office, you know,
• 10:10
  like right now, like the culture of G2, it's incredible. Like, I feel like people just know inherently
• 10:18
  that the only thing that will be held accountable to is to try out things.
• 10:23
  That's the one metric that everybody's held accountable to. Just try out things that haven't
• 10:28
  been done before or try out things that you think you can do better. And that's the only KPI
• 10:35
  pretty much, you know, if you fail at it, that's okay. But if you get nothing new done, if you're
• 10:40
  taking no, no, no risks, then it's when, you know, when I start looking at you, maybe not a good
• 10:45
  culture fit. And I think that comes from my times as a player, like so many decisions were straight
• 10:50
  up wrong, even in social media, just having a big mouth. It sometimes was great, something was
• 10:56
  shitty, you know, and I built a brand, my brand is completely transparent. This raw guy that is
• 11:03
  just bantering with everyone, having a good time and sometimes misses the mark. That's pretty much
• 11:08
  me, you know, and I love it. You know, I really love it because you can't, you can't, you can't,
• 11:16
  what's the word I'm looking for? You can't serve the wave unless you're at the exact
• 11:21
  a proper place in the wave. If you're too high, if you're too low, you're going to miss it.
• 11:25
  You're going to miss it. And sometimes you will miss the mark, you will miss the wave,
• 11:31
  and sometimes you will miss the mark. It's going to get you a lot of hatred, and you have to be
• 11:35
  okay with that, you know? So I feel like going through all those failures, including shitty contracts
• 11:41
  signed, including bad decisions around changing players, including whatever it is. The fact that I
• 11:48
  can't look at a Bible and just say, okay, I was right, okay, this is wrong. And just look at just
• 11:53
  the results of my actions is very reassuring. And like almost liberation, you know, it's like a freedom,
• 11:59
  you know? You can trust yourself. I think that's the most powerful thing you can ever do. You
• 12:04
  trust yourself. You know that if you had to do it all again, you had to figure it all out again.
• 12:09
  You just trust that you do it because you figured it out once. And now you start to understand that
• 12:13
  if you can figure out and navigate all the good, the bad, and the shit that happened to you,
• 12:18
  and you do it successfully once, you can do it multiple times. And you probably, you know,
• 12:23
  your career in your life is going to look different in another 20 years from now, whatever that is.
• 12:28
  And then you'll figure that piece out. And I think that's probably the most powerful thing you
• 12:32
  can do. And you can only you can only ever come to that conclusion if you failed a lot.
• 12:36
  Because then if you haven't failed, you don't know how to deal with the failure. You don't know how
• 12:40
  to trust how you'd react when when stuff doesn't go the way you want it to go. So I think
• 12:44
  it's all just the small things in the day to day, right? Like small things, small things, whatever
• 12:49
  small may be, you know, it's like when something is out of the comfort zone, it's like the reason
• 12:54
  you just don't want to do it is because, okay, what if I do it and then I don't do it properly?
• 12:58
  Or what if I try to do it? And it's just not the expectation I had. It just doesn't matter.
• 13:02
  You know, just just just go. You know, just do it. Yeah, what's the worst scenario? You know,
• 13:06
  you lose the evening, like what is the worst scenario? You lose 100 euros.
• 13:09
  Like what's the worst scenario? You know, just try it. You know, if you really have fill in
• 13:13
  it, well, why not? You know, if anything, you get a 100-year-old lesson. I always said, you know?
• 13:18
  Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so
• 13:22
  you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the
• 13:26
  links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.