L'esprit de l'escalier

Everything I learned about life from playing Tetris

1. Simple things can be more complicated than you’d expect.
2. It pays to be neat. Everything goes in its place. If you’re playing it right, there’s a place for everything—and everybody—no matter what shape.
3. You always have to watch what’s coming down.
4. There’s always something new on the way. Sometimes it looks like the same things you’ve already seen, but the combinations are always new.
5. What you did right gets forgotten immediately, but what you screwed up you have to live with.
6. Making a big pile isn’t what you want to do, unless, of course, what you want when you get done is to have made a big pile.
7. Be ready for all the possibilities.
8. 8. Too much of anything is rarely a good thing.
9. If you practice, you’ll get better.
10. You don’t always get what you want, but you have to deal with whatever you get.
11. Planning ahead is a real good idea.
12. If you make a mistake, sometimes fast fingers and clever thinking can work you out of it, but it’s best to do it right in the first place.
13. Cursing doesn’t help.
14. Life gets a lot easier if you keep an eye out for what’s coming next.
15. If you slack off and get behind, it’s awfully hard to work your way out of it.
16. Small differences are important. You’d better know know your p’s from your q’s, and your Ls from your Js.
17. If you can wait long enough, everything comes around.
18. The score isn’t really what’s important.
19. You started out with a playing field that you didn’t make, but in the end, what you have is whatever you made of what you got.
20. Eventually every game ends, and there’s no use crying about it.

- Geoffrey A. Landis