In games
In games, standing on the sidelines watching a teammate fight a monster gives you zero experience points.
No matter how long you watch, no matter how closely you pay attention, if you never swing your weapon, the system gives you nothing. No experience, no loot drops, no skill proficiency.
Watching a pro fight a boss can teach you positioning and strategy, and that has value. But what you gain is knowledge, not experience. Knowing where to position yourself and actually being able to do it are worlds apart.
Guides are the same. A guide tells you the boss uses a screen-wide attack in phase two and you need to hide behind a pillar. You memorize it. But when you’re actually fighting, you panic, react too slowly, and die anyway. Understanding something and being able to do it are two different things.
The only thing that truly makes you stronger is getting in there and fighting yourself.
It’s fine to fight badly. It’s fine to die. Even if you only land one hit before going down, that one hit gives you more experience than standing on the sidelines watching a hundred fights.
In reality
In real life, we spend an enormous amount of time watching others fight monsters.
We watch the kid in a shounen manga train relentlessly until he becomes the strongest. We watch a movie protagonist rise from rock bottom and turn their life around. That rush of emotion afterward feels so real, as if we got stronger too. But when you close the screen, you’re still you. The hero’s experience points don’t transfer to your character.
The most ironic part is that we’ve started watching others play even in games. Streaming and gaming videos now eat up more time than many people spend actually playing. Watching someone else play is obviously easier: no thinking required, no failure to endure, pure entertainment. But your own character is still level 1.
Why is watching others fight so appealing? Because there’s no risk, no effort required, and no pain to endure.
Fighting your own battles means failure, frustration, and discovering you’re not as good as you thought. Watching someone else fight has zero risk, and you still get to enjoy the thrill when they succeed.
Other people have already condensed the journey for you. The setbacks are cut, the boring parts are fast-forwarded, and only the highlights remain. You consume someone’s entire year of work in ten minutes. Over time, it becomes addictive because it’s the easiest source of that “growth feeling.”
What’s more dangerous is that after watching enough, you develop an illusion: I know how it’s done, so I basically know how to do it. But knowing and being able to do it are two different things. Watch a hundred swimming tutorials and you’ll still sink when you jump in the water.
Watching a hundred of someone else’s matches is worth less than playing one yourself. Even if you play terribly, those are your experience points.
To level up, you have to fight your own monsters.
Watching others fight gives you no experience.
Player notes
I’m a heavy addict when it comes to watching others fight monsters.
The worst offender is self-improvement books. I’ve read a huge number of them. Every time I see a new one, I think, “This time it’ll change everything.” While reading, I’m fired up, highlighting everything, feeling like I’ve had some deep realization. And then? I finish and immediately go searching for the next book.
At some point I thought: if these books actually worked, one would be enough. Why do new ones keep coming out? The same goes for educational YouTube. The same lesson repackaged as a new video, the same ideas repeated hundreds of times.
Most people are like me. What we want isn’t real change. It’s the feeling of “I seem to be making progress.” We’re not learning. We’re consuming the sensation of learning. Reading is so much easier than doing. Reading doesn’t force you to face your shortcomings. Doing does. So I kept reading and never doing.
YouTube is the same. I’ve wanted to start a YouTube channel for nearly ten years. During those ten years, I watched countless “how to start YouTube” tutorials. How to pick gear, how to write scripts, how to make thumbnails. After each video, I felt like I’d learned so much, like I was one step closer to starting. But really, I was just substituting “researching how to fight” for “actually fighting.”
Research is a premium version of watching others fight. It feels like preparation, but it’s really just a more respectable form of procrastination.
Recently, there’s an even more subtle version: letting AI write my notes, make summaries, and even brainstorm ideas for me. It looks super efficient, but I retain nothing. The less effort something takes to get, the less you remember. Notes you wrestle through yourself, you still remember a month later. An AI-generated summary, you forget by the next day. Letting AI do the work means skipping the thinking process, leaving nothing stored in your brain. It looks like doing, but it’s still just watching.
So now I try to fight my own monsters as much as I can. I write my own notes, shoot my own videos, write my own blog posts. AI can only be a tool, never a replacement for my own thinking. It’s definitely slower, but that’s what it means to actually fight. Muscle memory only comes from doing it yourself. Fighting badly is fine. At least the experience points are mine.
Leveling tips
□ Check how much time you spend each day “watching others fight”: scrolling videos, reading tutorials, reading articles, browsing social media. You don’t need to quit, but recognize that this time won’t level you up
□ Set a time limit on “researching how to do something.” Once you’ve researched enough, take action. Don’t substitute preparation for execution
□ Next time you finish a book or tutorial video, immediately do one thing related to the content, even if it only takes ten minutes. Convert knowledge into experience points
□ Do something yourself, no matter how rough. Write a post, record a clip, build a small thing. It’s fine if it’s bad. Those are still your experience points
