Firstly, know that I am not great at Starcraft. BUT I have made a lot of improvement in what is really a pretty short amount of time, and as anyone who read Tim Ferriss will tell you, this is the quality you're striving to achieve when making progress. This ability of mine derives from a simple procedure I follow when I learn a new skill.
I remove all the extra shit.
For example, caring whether you win or lose on ladder is extra. The ladder plays differently than tourneys do, and your rank on ladder is NOT the end-all be-all stone tablet of how good you are at the game. Stop caring about it, if you find yourself caring about it, go do something else because you are definitely not getting better at that moment. Like poker, you leave the table when emotions are running your game.
That being said, once you are emotionally separate from the results of any particular match: TRACK! TRACK! TRACK YOURSELF! Make a spreadsheet of the builds you are doing, the builds your opponents are doing against you, and whether you win or lose. Track the problems you are having with macro OR micro, and pick one thing that you are having trouble with SPECIFICALLY, write it down, and work only that for the next week.
You will find that 80% of the time, you are not macro-ing as hard as the opponents that are beating you. You could throw total garbage units into a perfectly built army, and if you three times as many of them plus a new army on the way you will win every time. When you are starting, STARCRAFT IS A NUMBERS GAME. Go watch Moneyball, and then Moneyball your playing. Hire only effective players, that are cheap to improve (that's a metaphor... just in case you didn't catch that.)
Also, when you are beginning: LIMIT YOURSELF TO A SINGLE BUILD. If you think this isn't enough to get good at the game, I implore you to go watch Goody. He is the all-encompassing master of simplifying the game for terran, and ANYONE can learn a great deal watching him. Like, how learning one solid build, mastering it, and even applying it into situations people will tell you it doesn't apply in, can get you into grandmaster league on this continent and make you and incredibly successful tournament player.
This choice is up to you, but if you are a protoss player I recommend two/three gate robo, and if you are terran I recommend you watch Husky's cast about the 3 barracks timed push.
Final note, if you apply the lessons in this post, that means that when you are done setting up these habits you have
- Narrowed down to a single build that you are working on.
- Stopped caring about the results of the games individually so you can improve on a planned, routine practice.
- Become macro-oriented like every successful pro of all time.
- Tracked your strategy in comparison to other strategies on ladder to analyze OBJECTIVELY what works and doesn't work and WHEN.
So, keep doing what you are doing, but change JUST ONE THING and track the results of that change. You will watch, even during the course of one month, your ladder rank skyrocket (even though you don't care) and your win-rate grow... slowly but surely. Like the tortoise, not the hare (that was a reference to a fable... if you didn't catch that.)
