I go to school for electrical engineering and am on course to graduate this May. A topic often covered and talked about in engineering is efficiency. The efficiency of your engine, dispersing heat and processors are all important to understand for their applications. For example, your general - and I mean general, not just internal combustion - engine can only be about 20% efficient because of the inefficiency built into the system from things like friction. Don't be dissuaded from using an engine, however, because we are transferring one form of unusable energy into another, more usable one. In DOTA, efficiency is also extremely important; allocating damage, farming, purchasing items, movement, et al contribute to the efficiency of a player.
The more efficient a player is, the more impact he will have on the game. This is because he is optimizing his outcomes from each decision. The easiest way for me to visualize this is to think about using town portal scrolls (TPs). When used correctly, TPs allow a player to move about the map more efficiently because it takes about 3 seconds to port from top lane to bottom lane instead spending a long time walking and risking being caught out of position. Still, TPs are only so efficient like the engine because they cost gold to use. Thus a player converts gold into less travel time and a lower risk movement.
The contrapositive is also true: the less impact a player has on a game, the less efficient that player is. The carry or 1 position players for each team illustrate this the best. Generally, the carry which is more efficient and able to accrue a bigger advantage over the other carry will take their team to victory. Another way to think about this is to visualize two Anti-Mages: one with level 4 blink and the other without blink. The AM with level 4 blink will be more efficient at all aspects of the game - except, perhaps, mana usage - than the AM without because of the advantage blink offers.
Often players get hung up on efficiency, causing them to become inefficient. Don't let this be you. When considering the cost of a decision, it is often the case that there is an asymmetry of information; it is literally impossible to know all possible differences between and outcomes of two courses of action. Don't let this hinder you. Many players will get hung up on item choices, missing stacks, missing pulls, taking unnecessary creep damage, not spending their gold before they die and the list goes on. All these contribute to small game inefficiencies but psyching yourself out will contribute to large ones because not all inefficiencies make meaningful impacts on games. There is a caveat: the higher the skill game, the more those matter and can snowball into a game loss because players are better at leveraging small advantages created by these inefficiencies. With that said, psyching yourself out is not allocating your brains processing power efficiently and can lead to tilting: the definition of poor and inefficient decision making.
The next time you find yourself looking for an aspect of your game to improve, consider efficiency. Look for ways to minimize wasted gold and movement then move on to things like allocating damage in team fights or stacking stuns on an elusive target. By improving your efficiency, you will help your team and, hopefully, translate more games into wins.
