While playing almost any RPG, you’ll quickly learn that the best way to survive random encounters is to stick to the above rule. The reason? Most games do not penalize the enemies for having low HP. So, if you spread your attacks around, you’ll still be getting hit 4 times, no matter how low the enemies’ HP are. However, if you focus your attacks on one enemy at a time, you will lower the amount of attacks by one each time an enemy falls.

Now, you might be thinking, “What the heck does that have to do with anything at all?” Well, unlike most other things you learn from video games, the above rule can also be applied to many in things in everyday life. If you focus your attention on one problem, issue, job, etc. at a time, the overall load will be substantially lighter as each enemy falls.

In my life, I’ve seen that this rule is really useful; and when combined with planning and priority setting, it can really organize your goals. I’ve used this rule in learning web scripting. I made the plan to finish learning JavaScript by October, and XML by the end of the year. I threw all my strongest attacks at JavaScript, and, as planned, took it down at the end of October. I recently began turning my attention to XML, and it’s going smoothly so far.

My goals for the future are to complete my XML training, then by 2008 switch over to PHP, and sometime in the middle months finish my initial learning by tackling Ajax. In making these plans, setting priorities, and focusing on one subject at the time, I’ve lowered the amount of stress and general difficulty of learning each subject.

If you’re using, haven’t used, or used in the past the above rule, stick to it, it can really help when used right.