THE YAWGMOTH DEMON: GET STRONG NOW, HAVE NO PLAN FOR FAILURE

I honestly get giddy when I get to write a nerd post like this, because I can’t hide my roots, nor should I.  Though I don’t play these days (aside from an occasional game with my kid when they’ll tolerate me), I played a LOT of Magic the Gathering in the late 90s, and those of you who have no knowledge of that game are going to hate this post.  When I first started playing, I didn’t have any cards of my own, so I had to borrow from my older brother.  In turn, I had no idea what was IN the deck of cards I was playing with: it was just whatever my brother had slapped together and gave to me.  This made games pretty exciting, because each time I drew a card I legit had no idea what it COULD possibly be.  I was discovering my brother’s library of cards AS I played.

 

That becomes important to this story.  While playing against a neighborhood friend, I was putting on a typical underwhelming performance employing a variety of the low level/inexpensive cards my brother let me use.  I quit playing Magic in 7th grade because I figured out it was basically a game of “whoever spends the most money on cards wins”, and it was like a heroin habit draining whatever funds I had to “get my fix”.  I share that with you so that you understand how underpowered this deck was when the majority of the cards in I were worth about 30 cents.  But then, on one draw, I saw it: the Yawgmoth Demon.

 

Trust me: this was 90s cool

If you have NO background in this game, that photo means nothing.  If you have a background in this game, it probably ALSO means nothing, because these days that card is vastly overpowered by so much modern stuff.  But for little late 90s me, playing against my friend, at that moment in time, it was the most powerful thing I’d ever seen in the game. 

 

In the bottom right hand corner, you see the numbers “6/6”.  For a quick lesson in MtG: the first number is power, the second is toughness, the latter like “hit points” in a traditional RPG. Basically, when this demon hits another creature, it does 6 HP worth of damage, and it can also take 6 points of damage.  Up until this point, the strongest creature I had encountered in my deck was 2/2. 

 

This was unfathomably strong.  I could not wrap my brain around it.  How could this even exist?!  That flying and first strike thing was cool too, but I was locked into the 6/6. 

If you read the rest of the card, you’ll see something else: you have to sacrifice an artifact each turn, or else the Demon becomes “tapped”, which means it’s unable to fight AND it does 2 damage to you.  How very Faustian: an actual deal with a demon.  You have a contract that you have to abide by to get it to play right.

Pretty much like this

Here’s the thing.  I had NO artifacts at that time.

 

Here’s the other thing: since it was my brother’s random deck, I had no idea if I’d EVER have an artifact.

 

Here’s the other other thing: I did not care IN THE SLIGHTEST.  I played the Yawgmoth Demon right away.

This before this was this...and same outcome

 

And over the course of the game, it killed me.  I never drew a single artifact, and each turn, it kept dealing 2 damage to me until I died.

And as soon as I could scrap together enough cash, I went out and bought 4 of those cards: the max you could have in any deck.

  

Folks: I LOVE how late 90s me thought that day, at that moment, for that game.  THAT was the mentality I needed for SO much of my life.  I saw an opportunity for strength and I leap after it FIRST thing without question with NO plan whatsoever for failure.  There was no strategy, no trepidation, no hemming and hawing, no “wait and see”: I could NOT play that card fast enough.  I was gonna get strong now and figure out the rest later.

Solid plan

 

And yeah, it’d be easy to say that me losing that game that day was proof of how POOR a mentality that is, how it has no self-preservation behind it, how the outcome is being gradually killed by your own strength, etc etc, but we exist BEYOND just one game.  There was a follow-on: I went out and bought 4 more of those demons.  But even moreso: I also made sure I had a deck with some goddamn artifacts in it so I could USE those demons.  I LEARNED from the failure.  And the lesson wasn’t “this card sucks, I’ll never play it again”.  It was “This card is AWESOME: how can I make it work?”

 

And the big part of THAT is being able to not take defeat and failure so personally.  Failure is THE time to learn, so long as we drop our ego, admit our mistakes, and grow from it.  It’s totally fine to admit when you’ve been stupid.  In fact, “I’m stupid” is the common operating picture I try to approach ALL problem solving from.  Whenever I come up with a “brilliant idea”, I go back to the baseline of “I’m stupid” and then go “If I’m stupid and I came up with this, and no one ELSE has come up with it, and everyone else is smarter than me, why is this a BAD idea even though I think it’s a good one?”  In turn, if I take a program that has worked for everyone else and it doesn’t work for me, I immediately go back to “I’m stupid” and try to figure out what I’ve done wrong before I go “I’m perfect, it must be the program that’s wrong”. 

Yup: here we are

 

THAT is the real “failure plan”.  It’s not “what do I do when I fail”, but “what do I do to LEARN from the failure?”  The people that want to know how to fail a squat absolutely blow my mind: trust me, when the time comes to fail, your body will figure it out.  The people that want to know how to respond to failure in a program BEFORE it happens blow my mind.  What do you do if you don’t get all 20 reps of Super Squats?  I don’t know the answer, because we don’t know WHY you didn’t get all 20 reps UNTIL the moment happens.  The way forward from failure due to a pre-mature rack of the bar is going to be different from one that happened from true failure, vs one that happened because the bar slipped off the bar, vs one that happened because we blacked out at the top of the rep, etc etc.  We can’t prematurely plan for failure: we have to EXPERIENCE the failure first such that we can actually learn from the process.   And we don’t get to experience failure UNLESS we take risks.  And sometimes, risks pay off and we actually get the reward, so how cool is that?  But other times, the pay off of the risks IS the failure, and that’s cool too, so long as we learn from that failure.  Everything is a learning opportunity: we just have to allow ourselves TO learn.

 

I’ve played a thousand games since that day.  I even won a few of them.  I’ve gotten more powerful cards.  But, to this day, the Yawgmoth Demon STILL gives me chills.  It’s still what I think of whenever I think “strength”.  I still channel its spirit.  Because along with being a big strong scary demon, it’s a testament to the mentality of getting strong now and figuring out the rest later.