This blog post is AI-Assisted Content: Written by humans with a helping hand.

One of my kids recently dragged me back into fighting games. Some from my childhood (Street Fighter) and others completely new to me, like Guilty Gear. Every button press can mean the difference between glory and getting absolutely destroyed. It’s been a blast.

At InterWorks, we often talk about “perfecting your craft.” It’s one of the core, cultural values that goes deep into the people here and makes working together a joy. Whether you’re gaming, coding, writing or building dashboards, that drive to master something is universal. So, let’s use the lens of competitive gaming to look at some surprising lessons about excellence, even when AI can seemingly do everything better than us.

The Grind, the Flow and the Human Edge

Mash and pray. This is where most people start when picking up a fighting game, a genre filled with complicated button combinations to memorize and execute. It can feel overwhelming. But then you learn one basic combo. Then two. You practice and learn, figuring out defense and counters. You may even go so deep that you start using terms like “frame advantage” that would be meaningless to people outside of fighting games.

Some call it a grind, others mindless repetition, but it’s really deliberate practice to grow your skills. It all leads into these magical moments where everything clicks, that flow state where your actions feel effortless. Sound familiar? It’s the same state whether you’re learning Python, mastering an instrument or building your first Tableau dashboard. Flow is magical.

We see that magic in beautiful moments of human brilliance. It’s why we follow sports and play games, seeing what seems impossible become possible with the right moment and years of preparation. Take EVO Moment 38 from last year, even if you’ve never played Street Fighter, in the short 25 second video you’ll see true human joy erupt from doing the impossible. In it, a player known as Hayao uses a character thought of as unplayable, using a move thought of as useless, to execute a beautiful comeback in what looked like certain death. The move was so perfectly executed it became legendary.

The Joy of Being Human – Beyond “The End”

Perfection isn’t the point. We’ve seen in many other types of games, computers will consistently beat us. Chess has long been solved by computers, and yet it’s more popular than ever with humans. DeepMind’s AlphaGo conquered the world’s best Go players. OpenAI Five dominated Dota 2. And yet, computers haven’t replaced us — they’ve shown us new ways to be human.

My son’s also into video game speedrunning — completing games as fast as humanly possible by exploiting glitches, finding optimal routes and executing pixel-perfect moves. It’s dedication and finger dexterity at its finest.

Often, these routes are discovered using computers in what’s called TAS (Tool-Assisted Speedruns). Software performs these runs frame by frame, achieving impossible precision. A TAS bot executes movements no human ever could, crushing human records. While AI and TAS show ultimate perfection, our joy isn’t just in the outcome. It’s in:

• The process and struggle
• Those incremental improvements
• Creative problem-solving
• Sharing the experience with others

AI hasn’t ended human competition — it’s expanded it. AlphaGo revealed strategies that human Go players now study. TAS videos inspire speedrunners to ask “what if a human could do that?” They push boundaries we didn’t know existed.

Look at what happened with Tetris recently. For decades, we thought the game went on forever. Then 13-year-old Willis Gibson hit the first “kill screen” — a point where the game’s code literally couldn’t continue.

Did that stop Tetris players? No way. It became a new frontier. Players now explore how to reach that kill screen earlier and more consistently, developing techniques to break the game in ways we never imagined. The “end” just opened a new chapter.

Skills That Transfer – A Universal Language

So, what does mean for our work? Most of us don’t get paid to compete and never will. However, I believe beyond the intrinsic value of developing your skills and belief in yourself, learning to perfect a craft offers you something of great value: meta skills on how to go deep and become great. Learning timing in Street Fighter might seem useless for your day job, but these meta-skills of perfecting your craft are gold:

Problem Decomposition: No one learns a fighting game by thinking, “I will now master everything.” You break it down. You learn one character’s basic moves, then one simple combo, then how to counter one specific opponent. This skill —breaking a massive, intimidating goal into small, manageable chunks — is the foundation of every successful project, from software development to writing a book.

Failure as Data, Not Defeat: Every lost match in competitive gaming is a replay you can study. You learn to see failure as information rather than judgment. This mindset shift — from “I failed” to “I found something that doesn’t work” — is the difference between people who plateau and those who continuously improve.

Deliberate Practice and Isolation: Gamers don’t just play matches, they go into “training mode.” They practice the same difficult combo 100 times in a row, isolating a single variable until it becomes muscle memory. This is the essence of deliberate practice: Identifying a weakness and focusing on it relentlessly, a technique that applies directly to mastering a musical instrument, a coding language or a public speaking engagement.

Rapid Feedback Loops & Iteration: In a game, feedback is instant. You try a strategy, and you either win or lose the exchange. You immediately learn, adjust and try again. This builds an intuitive comfort with rapid iteration — trying something, seeing the result and immediately applying the lesson. This is the core principle behind agile development, A/B testing, and any modern creative process.

Emotional Regulation (The “Mental Game”): Competitive gamers talk endlessly about the “mental game” and avoiding “tilt,” where frustration from a mistake cascade into more mistakes. The ability to stay calm under pressure, reset after a failure and maintain focus is a critical life skill, essential for everything from high-stakes negotiations to simply having a productive, stress-free day.

The Long Game vs. Short Game Balance: You’re simultaneously thinking about winning this round, this match and improving for next month’s tournament. This multi-timeline thinking — balancing immediate needs with long-term growth — is exactly what separates strategic thinkers from tactical executors.

Community Learning and Analysis: The modern player learns in public. They watch top players stream, they consume video guides breaking down complex topics, and they ask for feedback on their own gameplay videos. This habit of seeking out experts, analyzing the work of others and engaging with a community to accelerate your own growth is exactly how top performers in any field stay ahead of the curve and what makes communities around tools like Tableau (The Data Fam!) so special and important.

The discipline I’m relearning in fighting games — focusing on fundamentals, practicing iteratively, analyzing mistakes — makes me better at work. That “perfecting your craft” mindset transfers everywhere.

Embrace the Journey

Whether you’re gaming, coding, designing or anything else, remember that perfecting your craft is deeply human and rewarding. Don’t let AI or some “perfect” ideal diminish your pursuit. See these tools as guides and inspiration instead.

Embrace the grind. Celebrate small victories. Learn from defeats. Push your boundaries. It’s what drives us to optimize that dashboard one more time, refactor that code until it’s elegant, or find the perfect insight in a messy dataset. That drive, that spark when facing a challenge — that’s the joy of being human.