Unlearning what other RPGs taught me

The reason I came to Ironsworn as a system was its focus on the narrative and its vague and undefined combat. I’ve been playing D&D, Dragonbane, Scarlet Heroes and the like for many years, as well as World of Warcraft and Skyrim and the importance of combat, combat moves and achieving bigger numbers has been deeply engrained in the way I think about gaming. My characters were always more to me than just numbers, but their abilities and class offered great starting points for building their personalities and the way they interacted with their worlds. But when playing, it soon started to feel like the systems weren’t doing them credit. I started to bloat my gaming systems with more and more hacks and homebrews to add aspects that I wanted quantified by rules and skills and it went to the point where I have to consult several binders and spend hours balancing everything and losing track. It feels like I am trying to represent an entire life in numbers.

Now, Ironsworn and Starforged are exactly what I want, because they don’t do that, but leave things vague and abstract in order to allow a lot of creative license on how to play and advance my character.

But i still struggle with my min-maxing mentality and sometimes it even feels like I am not really playing, because I’m not researching the next skill to level or the next spell to learn for best damage output. I spend a lot of time thinking about my games and stories and developing my character, but it’s a lot harder without numbers and rules. At the same time it’s also very liberating and I love the way my characters get more life - not despite the character sheet, but to complement the small amount of information on there.

So this is a long ramble about my thoughts and I am wondering if anyone else is thinking about this and feeling similarly. How do you deal with your gaming mentality in a system like Ironsworn? Are you researching and chasing random tables and oracle prompts instead of skills and spells now? Do you keep reading spell books or combat talents from other systems and use them as cool flavor with little to no numbers to back them up? Are the assets enough to satisfy your min-maxing mentality? Or how did you manage to unlearn this thought pattern?