Power moves, baby

There was an old PVP comic I quite liked, where the caffeine-addicted Brent decides to give up coffee, but when the magazine is in crisis and the chips are down, he has to put it all on the line to save the day. He grits his teeth, takes one massive dose of caffeine... and ends up in hospital.

What's great about it is that it drives straight to the heart of the myth of the power move. Sure, it seems ridiculous that you could save up your caffeine intake and use it all at once, but there are lots of less ridiculous-seeming examples. It's fairly common in games and action movies to have charge-up attacks, where you, I don't know... power up your fists by getting really angry? Other times there's some harmless-looking person who turns out to have some secret talent they were just waiting for the right moment to use.

Maybe that's fine as a literary technique or a game mechanic, but the problems come when people start acting like that in real life. I'm going to learn music in secret so that the first time I play everyone will be amazed at how good I am. I'm going to develop my startup in secret so that when I go public, everyone's going to be blown away by how great it is. I'm going to avoid implementing my ideas, because I know that when I finally do something about them they're going to be a million times better for having charged up in my head.

The power move relies on a fundamentally backwards idea of where achievement comes from. In real life, you get better at something by doing it more, not by doing it less. And you have more chances to succeed the more often you do it. If you end up as a famous musician, it's pretty likely that you spent years and years making and releasing music, slowly building your skills and audience and then achieving a breakaway hit. Far less likely that after years of thinking about it, you finally record something and it turns out to be amazing on your first try. Though I admit that would be impressive.

In a sense, that impressiveness is really the problem. The power move is a fantasy. It would look so cool if you could charge up all your potential and release it in one massive burst of achievement. None of this boring incrementalism, none of this long journey through mediocrity before you get good. You just stand up and are amazing on the first try. How intoxicating! Like all fantasy, it persists because we wish it were true, not because it is true.

Of course, maybe, just maybe, you're that one in a million, and that's a hard thing to give up. But once you do it's quite liberating. No more hiding from the possibility that you give it your best, and your best turns out to be mediocre. It will be. But your best gets better with every mediocre attempt, and you'll soon surpass everyone else who's still waiting for their power move to charge.