How to Save Scum IRL

In video games, there's a practice called Save Scumming. To Save Scum, what you do is save your game just before you try something, and if it doesn't go well for you, you can reload your save and try again. Basically, it's the trick Doctor Strange used to "defeat" Dormamu in the 2016 Doctor Strange film. He "saved the game," faced Dormamu, lost, died, "reloaded the save," and tried again. By doing this, a player can try something over and over again until some combination of luck and skill lands in their favor, and they succeed.

Naturally, we can't do this in real life. We can't "save the game," "reload saves," or create time loops that allow us to try things an infinite number of times. But we can still try them. We can try something repeatedly, consecutively, learning more from each attempt. In short, we can practice. If you want to learn to play a song on the piano, for example, you can practice finding the notes and playing the phrases of the song over and over again, learning more and gaining more skill with each attempt, until you can play the song all the way through with no mistakes. This will take a lot of practice, and that will take a lot of time, but if we have the time, we can put in the practice, and we can gain the skill we need to succeed.

It's not quite Save Scumming, since any successful Save Scumming attempt can be the one that matters, but practicing can be a sort of pseudo Save Scumming that can work, even in real life with no magic. And with enough practice, we can gain almost any skill we want. In a way, practicing is kinda broken. Just not quite as broken as actually Save Scumming.