I beat a really hard video game recently. The game is called Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. You play a ninja/swordsman in a fantasized Japanese feudal world, fighting to save the lord-child you are sworn to protect from an invader.

The game is a series of areas peppered with minions and lesser bosses, each area culminating in a large boss fight. These large bosses are really hard. You can be at full-health, make one tiny mistake, and find yourself dead instantly. This requires you to start the fight all over again, and possibly fight through the boss's area to get to their fight. The game is unforgiving, to say the least.

Most of these boss fights took me 30-50 attempts to complete. Each of these attempts would be anywhere from 30-300 seconds. A couple of them I think took me closer to 100 tries. I would try and die repeatedly for an hour or two, come back the next day, do the same thing.

I am a little ashamed to say this, but the despair I felt while repeatedly failing to defeat these bosses was extreme. I was so demoralized on several occasions that I wouldn't touch the game for months at a time. No joke, I broke down and didn't play it at all for three months. Multiple times. I quit for a few weeks or a month multiple times as well. The game only took me 70 hours to beat (only 70 hours I say, hah!), but it took me a year and 2 months to put in those 70 hours.

Each boss fight felt absolutely fucking impossible at first. Many of them felt absolutely fucking impossible after 30 tries. Each boss has a different set of moves than every other boss, with unique timing, and each has unique tells and cues to tell you which moves are coming and when. You (the player character) have a variety of moves with which to block/counterattack with. Every fight is different, and many I didn't get even a tenuous grasp on until I'd died 30 times (this should tell you how good I am at fighting games. Not good.)

Over the course of the game, I came to realize that each fight was a battle to teach your subconscious. To have your subconscious recognize when a move is coming by the unique tells, and know what you need to do in response to that move, and finally, how to execute your responses (your controller movements/button-presses) with the correct timing. Each of these things is nearly entirely a subconscious response, the same way catching a ball is a subconscious response.

It was also a battle to not give up. To keep going until your subconscious makes that breakthrough. This was difficult for me. The failure mode in Sekiro is absolute. You die. You do not beat the boss. You were inferior. You were incapable. You were not up to the challenge. "Not good enough".

I never really learned how to be patient & stick with something even when it is very hard to "get it". How to try and try and try again even when you are brutally beaten down each time. This game has done more to teach me that principle than any experience I've had in my life (I'm not sure what this says about my life and how I learn, but it can't be good). This is important because I think a lot of very fulfilling and rewarding things in life can only come through beating your head against the wall until the wall breaks. Until the sub-problems are solvable by your subconscious. Hard is good. Easy is not worth doing.

Extra Credit. Same principle, different things:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9KE2R92pSg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91FQKciKfHI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kenf8E1RuoA

Epilogue: It felt so good to finally beat the entire game.