What's Your Passive Skill?
Insight into how our habits inform our lives...from video games!
If life were like a video game, what would be your passive skills? What about your active skills?
For those who don't play video games or don't understand the difference, active skills are skills or abilities that require energy to execute. In a game, this could be a powerful special move, but in life this could be an skill that requires effort or energy in a given situation. Passive skills on the other hand, are skills that do not require energy,but provide benefits in the background and can enhance a character’s overall performance. Passive skills can make basic actions as well as certain active skills more powerful depending on the situation; for example “heightened patience” a skill which could help you stay calm in stressful situations or “underdog mentality” which might mean that you’re more likely to push through and succeed in difficult situations where others doubt your abilities.
Recently, I've been spending a lot of time watching anime recaps. The one that I've been watching recently is about the Chinese manga “My Passive Skills Make Me Invincible” (我靠无敌被动打出成吨伤害 in Chinese). For various reasons, the main character wakes up inside of the video game where everything is a perfect overlap of his original life and the game, except for the fact that he has is able to make his active skills into passive skills and it allows his to dominate everyone else in this new world (in normal Isekai fashion).
I'm not explaining all of this to get you to read the manga, although if you have the time you definitely should check it out, I'm explaining this because as I was listening to an interview between Steve Barrett and Adam Grant, Adam brought up the same concept of passive skills. In the interview Adam brings up the “theory of learned industriousness”, and this theory explains that “if you reward effort or hard work or seeking out discomfort then over time being in uncomfortable situations starts to take on secondary reward properties, in other words you get a little bit of pavlovian conditioning or if you push yourself a little bit past where you're comfortable, that feels good, and you're used to that leading to something positive and that can become a sort of self-reinforcing cycle.”
Though we may not always assign cool names to them in real life, all of us are equipped which different passive skills and active skills. In our daily lives, at work, school, etc. we also sharpen our active and passive skills whenever we do something at the edge of our abilities.
The more we push our limits by using our active skills, the more passive skills we learn, and the stronger those passive skills become!
If you’re someone who spends a lot of time speaking to diverse groups of people, maybe your ability to connect with others becomes stronger each time, or your confidence in unfamiliar situations increases. This skill isn’t limited to your job or industry, you can use it anywhere in any setting.
Our passive skills are what make the difference between whether or not we succeed. Our passive skills determine the type of people that we are and what we are able to do when we don't have the energy to actively do the things we want to do anymore. Passive skills are determined and built up based on our routines, and the people who we want to become.
The problem is that we aren’t always aware of what our passive skills are, and as a result we’re not always capitalizing on them, even though they’re always in effect. Even though we can add new skills, we can increase the effectiveness of our current skills, and we can even combine our skills to produce unexpected results, before we can do all those things effectively, we need to understand: what passive skills do we have? What passive skills do we want to set in our arsenal? Which passive skills aren't serving us? This awareness allows us to better understand what we need to keep, what we need to change, and what we need to strengthen or utilize in order to become the best person of ourselves.
Today, I want to challenge you to reflect on your own character sheet. Take a few minutes and make a list of your passive skills. If you’re not sure what they are, try asking some people who you trust (close friends, your manager, people who you regularly game with online) what you do well that seems to require less effort for you than it does for others. Once you’ve got this list, pay attention to these things for the next few days! What passive skills are already in your arsenal, quietly boosting your performance every day? Even this small awareness can open up new opportunities for you to gain more experience and level up in your life.
Passive skills are underrated, so it's worth trying to figure out: which ones do you have?
This post reminds me of one of main game mechanics in Disco Elysium! Your character has different skills like Empathy and Composure, that can be actively used in certain situations but are also passively “checked” throughout in-game conversations or observations. I think a key one for me in leadership settings is my design lens. When talking about work projects or planning a trip with friends, I passively process what I hear into the different parts that need to be put together and define the phases from start to success.