Most people just think of becoming a professional gamer as being good enough at their respective games to be able to play competitively. But what does it really take to become a pro?
There are three main aspects that you need to master before you can call yourself a full-fledged pro: keeping your health first, endurance, and mental fortitude. Mentally prepare yourself for competition and invest time in training on your own without any distractions while pushing your mind to its limits with rigorous training while at the same time do not overstep the border resulting in hurting yourself.
1. Keep your health first
Like in every sport you need to maintain your health and then and only then you can focus on your career as a player. You should keep a healthy, balanced diet, keep exercising since your career will be based on sitting and most importantly your mental health since gaming sometimes requires long hours of being alone in front of the computer screen.
2. Endurance
Your focus span, your eyes’ ability to look at a monitor for many hours, and your hands to be precise while controlling in the game are the most crucial points. You should work to extend the ability to be at your top-level performance for as long as your health and body let you. You shouldn’t try anyways to extend this time artificially that might harm your well-being and health.
3. Mentally prepare yourself for competition
Competition might be mentally destroying if you are not preparing yourself to be pushed to the edge of your endurance. You should not just focus on being a top-notch player but you have to prepare yourself mentally for hard work, constant stress, and failures that are only small steps away from success. Like any other sportsman you have to do everything in order to keep both mental and physical form healthy so you can be able to compete. Also, at some point, you will gain fans that will count on you and that will give you a whole new dose of stress, so you have to be prepared for that as well.
4. Invest time and money in training
You need to have designated training hours with breaks and of course without any distractions. You should not be distracted by the phone, social media, or anything else that could lead to loss of focus and a decrease in your performance. You need to train yourself to avoid these kinds of distractions if you want to achieve the highest form of success in the competitive gaming scene. You should invest in the best equipment you can have in your budget. Apart, of course, the machine you are playing on, you need an ergonomic seat and proper headphones that will not harm your ears with time.
5. Keep practicing
Some people think that professional players “just play games”, but this is not true. They play all the time. It is possible for them to play according to their schedule and they know everything about their respective game. You need to schedule your life under your career.
6. Get used to losing
You need to get used to disappointments and failures if you want to reach the top of competitive gaming. You will lose, and you will lose a lot, but if you want to be a success in e-sports, you have to learn from your mistakes and get better instead of getting angry and do nothing about it.
7. Know when it is time to slow down
Sometimes you feel like your skill means nothing in match after match and it looks more like playing in an online casino than in the game of skill you think you train in. That is your signal to take a break, stop training for a while, and relax. After a while, you might start again with a fresh approach.
8. Be immune to toxic criticism
There will be tons of fans after you when you reach the top but there might be as many critical people who will try to drag you down. You need to learn how to separate toxic people from those who try to give you advice.
Conclusion
For many players becoming a pro gamer is a lifetime dream, but most of them drop this career somewhere in the process after they realize how hard it is. If you want to be a pro, you need to know that your aim is not just playing the game, but becoming one of the best players in the world. You need to make sacrifices and invest a lot of time and money in order to achieve that, but all the hard work will pay off when you see your name under the list of best gamers in the world. And this is what we call reaching one’s full potential. Before you step on the path to professional gaming, you should consider all the benefits you may gain and all the things you will need to sacrifice in the process and decide on your own if it is really worth it.