I have a healthy relationship with my own competence. By which I mean: I am convinced, at any given moment, that I am approximately 30% better at most things than I actually am. This applies to driving, cooking, my understanding of how taxes work, and — most relevantly for our purposes today — Rocket League.
Rocket League, if you are unfamiliar, is a game in which cars play football. Or soccer, depending on which side of the Atlantic you're on and how much energy you have for that conversation. The cars can jump. The cars can boost. The cars can fly, technically. The ball is enormous. The goals are enormous. The skill ceiling is so high it is functionally invisible from where most of us are playing.
I discovered this ceiling the hard way, over the course of approximately fifty hours, during which I was absolutely certain I was improving while the game's matchmaking system quietly and persistently confirmed that I was not.
The Game
Rocket League was developed by Psyonix and released in 2015, going free-to-play in 2020. It has an active competitive scene with professional players who can perform manoeuvres — aerials, ceiling shots, double-tap redirects — that look physically impossible and are, in a conventional car, entirely so. The skill gap between a beginner and a professional is one of the widest in any competitive game. It is also one of the most instructive, because you can watch it in real time and understand, at least in principle, what the better player is doing differently.
The rank system runs from Bronze to Supersonic Legend. Most players sit in the middle. Almost everyone, at every rank, believes they deserve to be slightly higher.
The Dunning-Kruger Problem
There is a famous psychological phenomenon called the Dunning-Kruger effect, described in a landmark 1999 paper by Kruger and Dunning in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The core finding: people with limited competence in a domain systematically overestimate their ability, partly because the skills needed to recognise good performance are the same skills needed to produce it. You don't know what you don't know. You can't see the ceiling because you don't have the altitude.
Rocket League is a remarkably clean demonstration of this. At Bronze rank, everyone has an opinion about why their team lost and it is rarely "I misread the play and rotated incorrectly." At Diamond rank, the post-game analysis is considerably more honest, because Diamond players have enough skill to identify exactly where they made mistakes. The better you get, the more clearly you can see how much further there is to go.
This is not depressing. Or rather, it is, initially — but it stops being depressing when you understand what it means. The fact that you can now see your mistakes is the skill. Metacognition — the ability to think about your own thinking and performance — is itself a competency that develops with expertise. The Bronze player who thinks they're great is not arrogant. They're just early.
When you lose in a competitive game, where does your brain immediately go?
Research note: Dunning and Kruger's 1999 paper (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, "Unskilled and Unaware of It") found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on logic and grammar tests estimated themselves to be in the 62nd percentile. Subsequent research has refined and somewhat complicated the original findings, but the core phenomenon — that limited expertise impairs accurate self-assessment — is robust and well-replicated.
The Flip Side Nobody Talks About
Here is the part of the Dunning-Kruger research that gets significantly less coverage in LinkedIn posts: the high performers. Kruger and Dunning also found that people with genuine expertise in a domain tend to underestimate their relative ability. They assume tasks that are easy for them are easy for everyone. They discount their own competence because they're so aware of the gap between where they are and where they could be.
I have met people who are genuinely exceptional at their jobs who are quietly convinced they're frauds. I have met people who are averagely competent and absolutely certain they're exceptional. The research would not be surprised by either observation.
Rocket League surfaces this beautifully because the rank number is unambiguous. You cannot convince yourself you are Diamond when the game has placed you in Silver. The feedback is immediate, impersonal, and repeatable. Most real-world competence domains don't have this. Your manager's assessment of you, your perception of your own social intelligence, your conviction about how good a driver you are — none of these have a matchmaking rank attached. They are, as a result, considerably more susceptible to the Dunning-Kruger gradient in either direction.
What Rocket League Taught Me About Feedback
The thing that actually improved my rank — slowly, and in the end not that much, because I am a person with a job and a dog and a finite amount of time to spend flying a car at a ball — was not practising the flashy skills. It was learning to watch my own replays.
Rocket League has a replay feature. You can watch exactly what you did after every game. And watching myself play was, for the first several sessions, a genuinely humbling experience. I was not doing what I thought I was doing. The read I was sure I'd made correctly? I hadn't. The rotation I was confident about? Completely wrong. The game I was certain I'd lost because of my teammate? I had been the problem in at least three of the five goals.
External, objective feedback. Applied to your own performance. Without ego getting in the way. That is the skill, and it transfers directly to every other domain you care about improving in. Rocket League just makes it available and slightly addictive.
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