I made a startling discovery recently: all that video-game playing from age 8 to age 26 seems to have resulted in some permanent gains.
A few years ago, I basically swore games off. But similar to how meditation makes a person more resilient against all of life's absurdities, and how team sports instils a sense of how to cooperate and compete, it seems like the people that sought to master complex games from our generation are now able to take and build on them. The people who were mastery-oriented in playing a myriad of games seem to grasp a whole set of concepts faster and easier that are directly applicable to success today.
I had a phone call a few hours ago with one of the volunteers helping to make the GiveGetWin Tour 2015 a big success. He's already helped line up two of the dates between the coastal cities as we transit across America and I wanted to go beyond talking about Tour logistics and also make time to help him reach his goals.
His questions were a set of questions I get often: if I want to be able to work on interesting projects, with interesting people, and lots of freedom, how do I do it? How did you do it?
I could have, and eventually will, run him through the mechanics of getting to know people, how they come to trust you, how deals get struck and work gets done.
But on this call, I felt a need to emphasize some more fundamental points. His goals are good but broad: be able to make enough to support himself while traveling; he wants freedom.
My advice sums up to this:
First, figure out what you want.
Second, figure what you need to do that.
There's a lot more options and different timeframes of possibilities if you want to earn $500 per month or if you want to earn $5,000 per month. There's different possibilities if you want to make earned income where the transaction ends when you've completed the work, as opposed to the value in often-smaller transactions with established businesses that know and expect repeat purchasing.
Likewise, if you were just laid off and need income within two weeks or you're in trouble, you have very different options than if you're graduating in two years. In the latter case, you might engage in some actions that will be very smart to do but won't pay off until many months from now, or engage in a course of skill development that will take time to be worthwhile, or begin to form relationships with people that are not at all potential current buyers in the current form of their business or life.
So I encouraged this talented gentleman to really nail down what he wants, and then to figure out what he needs to do that. This is not original advice; many people have said it before me. But it is valid advice.
After that, I recommended strong expense control and getting a good credit scoring going, the former being advice I give everyone young, and the latter being advice I give everyone who is an American.
And yet, you know, this stuff isn't fun or sexy.
Sales and high-stakes negotiation seems, on the surface, to be very fun and sexy. I'll tell you, well, this is only sort-of true. Sales and negotiations might seem sexy from a far distance, but like anything else, as you get deep into the work, it just eventually becomes another set of moving pieces to navigate. There can be exciting moments and glory and you're certainly doing something important when you're working on sensitive and important things with other people -- but really, it comes down to being organized, thinking things through clearly, and do the right things at the right times.
Meanwhile, expense control and managing one's credit score often seem more trite and mundane, not fun, not sexy.
Now... perhaps I'm odd or something, but I actually find a lot of joy in managing the mechanics of things like a credit score, and I enjoy the times that I go rather deep into things like expenses and related details.
But let's say it's not naturally fun for you; fair enough; let's go a step further and say you're feeling stuck and suffering and aggravated that you even have to deal with this.
This is, by the way, a really common sentiment among the young ambitious people I know. They get aggravated at all the details that are coming at them that aren't the fun, sexy, amazing, gigantic stuff they want to work on.
And this is where I'd like to point you towards a video game that gave me a nice mental model, the game Final Fantasy Tactics for the original Sony Playstation.
Tactics is a tactical role-playing game. You start off controlling one character, and eventually wind up leading a small army.
The strength of your army is more-or-less the strength of the individual soldiers in it; you're able to choose different mixes of squadrons to employ in battles. For instance, during a raid, you'll be able to send one team onto the rooftops to neutralize the enemy castle's archers, and two teams to storm the main gate after that's done.
Here is where Tactics shines: your characters level up like a normal role-playing game, but they level up very specifically based on their "job."
"Archer" is a job, so is "Priest," so is "Knight," and so on.
As you get more experienced, you get abilities and attributes corresponding to your job. So Knights get stronger and get knightly abilities, Archers get more dextrous and get archery abilities, and so on.
Many of the better jobs in the game require prerequisites: you have to be a Squire before you can be a Knight.
Some lessons -- attributes, skills -- can only be learned in the lower-ranked jobs.
There's lessons you can only easily learn as a Squire.
I think life is like that, too.
It's no fun at all to be broke. That is completely and totally true. However, there are lessons and skills that are easy and necessary to learn when you have no money.
Railing against this is most likely a mistake, but it's a common mistake.
It's understandable, of course. If you're young and aggravated at being broke, it's hard to know what comes next. If you knew that three years hence you'd be doing very well for yourself, you'd probably calm down, learn what you can, and enjoy the process.
In fact, you'd get through the whole being broke stage faster if you do that.
But it's understandable why people don't do that.
Frankly, I like ambitious people. There's a predictable set of flaws that ambitious people frequently have, and I accept most those, even though they can at times cause friction.
So it doesn't bother me if someone young and ambitious that I know is chafing at their current position in the world and refusing to learn the Squire's Lessons from it. So be it. Controlling expenses? Bah, who wants to do that?
It would bear mentioning briefly what happens if you don't learn them, though: you've then got the awful position of needing to go through life without that skill, or needing to potentially go backwards when things are a lot more complex and highly leveraged.
I would firmly encourage you to look at your current situation as an excellent training, especially the most aggravating areas of it. John Rockefeller obviously took a lot from his time as a bookkeeper and clerk; Meyer Rothschild obviously took a lot from learnings about doing low-level money-changing in small amounts. Would Rockefeller have built Standard Oil if he'd been chafing at his time as a clerk and refusing to learn about shipping schedules, insurance, and the details of books and numbers? Would Rothschild have built the foundation of the modern international banking system if he hadn't mastered the state of changing the small coins of the fragmented European principalities?
I suppose it's probably seems preferable to be a Knight than to be a Squire, but rushing into "knighthood" only to be slain on the battlefield seems an error. Meanwhile, the diligent Squire who learns to polish and maintain armor and weapons, knows horsemanship and animal husbandry, knows about acquiring food and provisions, and treating wounds...
The castle is made of rocks? Maybe so. And Squire's Lessons seem well-worth learning.