A Quick Test and a Look at Emotions

When you get that pop-up in the middle of a game saying that your opponent is having connection issues, what goes through your head?

Do you take the moment to recalibrate, calculating your next few moves?  Are you bored?  Do you enter a zenlike calm?  Are you annoyed that your opponent's poor network connectivity is wasting your time?

Or do you sit anxiously with your mouse hovering over the "Kick" button, waiting for the counter to reach zero so that you can claim those sweet, sweet ladder points for yourself?

If you get excited when you see the "Waiting for Opponent" screen in the middle of your game, it's likely that you care more about winning than improving.  Now, there's nothing wrong with wanting to win - after all, it's probably the driving force that makes you want to get better at Starcraft - but if you're getting more excited about gaining ladder points than correcting your play, you might find harder to improve as efficiently as you want.

I wrote before about changing your win conditions, which is about adopting your mentality to one where you psychologically reward yourself for succeeding at specific in-game goals rather than for obtaining a VICTORY! splash screen.  But in talking about classical win/loss conditions, you need to keep the following in mind:

You win the game if your in-game actions force the opponent to surrender.

Not if your opponent disconnects due to network issues.  Not if your opponent leaves mid-game.  And not if your opponent beats you, but decides to give you the ladder points by GGing out before you do.  It might feel good to see that green text and ++ points in your match history, but it isn't a real win and it isn't proof of improvement.

The proper response to a disconnecting opponent should be no different than any other game.  Evaluate how you performed against your win conditions, watch the replay, take notes, and approach the next game with a plan and a desire to do better.  It's hard to not get excited when you think you might get an easy "win", and at the end of the day it's okay to feel good about them so long as you continue to work towards improvement.  But you always need to keep an eye on your emotions at the end of each game.  Anger at a loss will keep you from being curious as to why you lost.  Elation at a win makes it easier to gloss over your errors.  It's possible that you'll never feel entirely neutral from  wins/losses, and again, that's fine - so long as you're able to look past your emotions in order to do the work that you need to do in order to get better.  If you can build up the willpower to do what you need to do regardless of how you feel, then you have a good shot at efficient improvement and more wins overall.