Level your Weapons (git gud at life)
When the typical player starts their first run in Elden Ring, they get distracted by the shiny weapons with their fancy movesets.
Many of them have stat requirements, focused around one or more of the damage ability scores: Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, Faith, and Arcane.
This leads an early-game character to level up those stats simply to make effective use of a particular weapon.
The temptation is to carry on levelling those stats. That's usually a mistake, a trap, an inefficient use of scarce runes.
It turns out that until a weapon is itself upgraded, the impact of a higher damage stat is negligible, whereas increasing a non-damage stat (hello vigour!) brings outsized returns.
What's the life lesson here? I think it's probably about systems, and improving the systems you use.
It takes more willpower and effort to stick to a poorly-framed system than to one that is, well, upgraded.
In many cases, a well-designed system improvement will seem like the obvious right thing to do, completely natural. No willpower required.
And yet, those of us playing NG IRL often try to increase our willpower instead of examining the reasons why our current level of will isn't getting traction and progressing us toward the outcomes we want.
Improve the system before investing hard-won runes in applying more pressure.
Steven Covey talks about Sharpening the Saw, which possible fits better in the post about managing your own stamina, but it's got Saw in the name which made me think of it for this one.