Min Maxing. Your Dungeons and Dragon analogy for the day. I'm a massive geek, and if you didn't get the memo, geeks rule the world now.
Beyond the fat sweaty balding men in basements rolling dice, role playing is about developing a unique character with strengths and weaknesses, usually physical or mental. Min Maxing is the art of maximising your allocation of skill points earned into your best strengths (Maxing) and not adding to your weaker skills (Min-imising). For example a warrior might maximise his strength, but will not allocate anything to wisdom or intellect (and spend time hitting things... rather than thinking about them.)
Back in reality things aren't quite so black and white, but Min Maxing can still be a useful strategy for getting the most out of life.
It's a tedious grind spending time working on things that you neither have the talent or skill for. The opposite is also true, it's extremely rewarding, fun and valuable to work with our strengths and talents. In fact, second for second, dollar for dollar I will bet that the quality and time saved on the result of working with our strengths puts the time we do spend working with our weaknesses to shame.
Sometimes we might spend too much time working on weaknesses, it's common to sometimes spend too much time on this instead of using our strengths. I personally struggled with mathematical studies and sciences, however I excelled at humanities where analysis of abstract concepts and discursive learning were my strengths. Once I finished high school, I made the obvious decision to study accounting at university. Yes. I know. Real smart. Hindsight is 20/20. I finished my degree, however I chose to leave the accounting world behind. It's been a difficult but liberating step, and the upside is now I get to spend time maximising the use of my strengths.
Min Maxing - not just for geeks.
Flickr image courtesy of Extra Ketchup