I want to start today by asking you a little question: what have Prince of Persia, Lemmings and Championship Manager all got in common? Yes, that’s right, they were all very popular games for the PC. I have never been much of a computer games player myself, however, these three games all had me completely hooked – so that’s something else they have in common. Although I don’t generally play computer games, all of them were very difficult for me to quit; and, in each case, I found that I couldn’t quite until I had them licked or they lost their appeal, for one reason or another.
First off, Price of Persia was an early game I got for my kids. We used to sit together and play it over and over again. But we had no instructions so we didn’t know all of the game controls and, in particular, we didn’t know how to save our game. That meant that every time we got killed – and that happened quite often – we had to go right back to the very start. What cured me of the addiction was when I started speaking with a friend, who told me how the controls actually worked. That made things a lot easier. But when, eventually, he told me the ‘cheat’, the game completely lost its appeal for me because the challenge had gone.
Lemmings was another game I got completely addicted to. The game appeared to be very innocuous at the start. You just had to save a percentage of these little creatures, stopping as many as you could from walking over the cliff. It made you feel good. You didn’t have to rescue many of them and you had lots of tools for doing do. But there was a surprise in store for you when you had worked your way through all 40 levels, the game got a lot harder. There were actually 4 levels: easy, difficult, expert and mayhem, as I recall, and you had 40 games on each level. When I was about half way through the mayhem level, somebody stole my car. In the car was my briefcase with all of my game codes. I lost, not only the car, but my briefcase with all my professional certificates, but the really good news was that I was finally freed from the grip of that flippin’ game.
And that brings me to Championship Manager. When I began this game, it looked like a lot of fun being able to manage your favourite club side. After your best players got crocked, you had overspent on the transfer market and just couldn’t get your team performing properly, you would get the sack. But after a lot of persistence, you figured out who to buy and who to sell and eventually you got the England Manager’s job. I never actually managed to win the world cup, but I did manage to get the bottom club in the league (Hereford United at the time) to win the Premiereship. Quite an achievement when, at the beginning I could not go a single season without getting sacked.
Now why am I mentioning these games – especially as I said, I am not a gamer. Well, what I think these games did for me was they taught me that you can succeed, regardless of what you know if you are prepared to persist, learn from your mistakes and commit to trying alternative approaches. That has pretty-much been my strategy for online success these past six years; and I owe it all to what I learned by playing those damned infuriating games because succeeding online is really not very different from playing any one of them. Becoming successful in an online business is exactly like playing Lemmings but with one big difference: you don’t accumulate points, you accumulate money, and that makes the business a whole lot more addictive in my experience.
So, did you get yourself addicted to one of the above games or perhaps something else equally difficult? Did you manage to work your way from initial failure to ultimate success? If you did, then you also have what it takes to succeed online. Persistence is one big key to success. Couple that with the ability to think out new strategies and a willingness to try them out by putting them into practice and you are on your way. Add to the mix the ability to keep doing what works and drop what doesn’t and you become, literally, unstoppable.
I liked this article.
Mostly because I’m quite a big gamer myself. And I can see where your coming from about the whole persisting at something and beating it.
You can quite obviously gain a higher success with something you do more of and push yourself to do better at.
For example the more you play football, the better you will become. And the person who has played football for 6 months will have a higher success and ability over someone who has been playing a few days.
But…what if someone is just naturally ‘good’ at something? Some people are just naturally better at things than other people and that needs to be taken into account too.
Who will succeed more in an IM environment? The person who naturally has a good product and idea, or the person who has been at it for a 6 months and still failing? But then you factor in the fact no matter how great an idea or product is, if the dont have the knowledge or skills to market it correctly, they wont succeed.
That brings us back to persisting and sticking with something. If the guy with the great idea just persists, goes through all the trial and error, and pushes themselves to learn and succeed, then the probability that they will indeed succeed raises significantly.
And if the guy who has been at it for 6 months without success continues to persist and learn, then the chances they will succeed is also raised as every failure is infact teaching them what NOT to do.
Winston Churchill once said “Never, never, never, never give up”.
Listen to him.