Taking my seat in the ‘Editor’s Only’ session this summer at a Newspaper Workshop in college station, I have to admit that I was scared. Echoes of “am I cut out for this?” were ringing through my head as the speaker started his introduction with “Get out a piece of paper.”

I did, and he had us write down a whole bunch of random questions like “What is something you rebelled against?” “What motivates the people around you?” and lastly “What is the last thing you gave up on, and why?”

It took me a moment to think. What had I given up on last? While everybody around me wrote down “Straight As”, “My diet”, or “Learning an instrument”, I simply put down: “Dark Souls”.
Later as we shared our answers, I got a few chuckles and shouts of “How could you!” but then I got to thinking.

Why did I give up on Dark Souls? The easy answer is because it’s frustrating. In the words of Game Spot’s Kevin VanOrd, “It takes the concepts of deadly environments and unflinching difficulty and cranks up the challenge, the fear, [and] the frustration.”

And it does. The unforgiving hack ‘n slash has inspired a variety of jokes, and has become synonymous with inevitable failure. But that doesn’t stop people from playing it over and over again.

As the workshop went on I started to get a better sense of how people work; what motivates us, why we’re motivated, and how we can motivate ourselves, and I realized- Giving up on Dark Souls was more than just giving up on a video game. It was a flaw of mine that could ultimately grow to not only hinder me as a leader, but as a person.

Quitting something because it’s frustrating isn’t a good enough reason. If I was going to be the best editor I could be, I would need to learn to pick myself off and try again; not just exit out and shut down.

There are two types of people in the world: the kinds that beat the game, and the kind that just stop playing. Hopefully, I’ll be the former.