Learning to Lose and Levelling Up — Basic Business Skills you can learn from any Video Game

Whenever I interview a potential employee I always enquire if they play video games, and I mean real games, on a console or a PC, not some nonsense they run on their phone. In many cases it can be a very short conversation but if they are a gamer then you have hit a motherlode when it comes to getting a better understanding of the person.

An old mentor of mine used to say if you can get the candidate at ease and really animated and discussing freely then that is what an interview is all about.

Gaming is one of those magical topics. The style of game they like, the style of game they don’t like, their favorite game and why, plus what future games they are excited to play. I’d probably hire someone simply based on their posture around gaming and games and their ability to explain their thinking.

But from a broader business perspective video gaming is even more important, it certainly has been to me in my career.

Video gaming is all about failure and success.

When you first play a game, you need to expect that you will lose, get “killed”, mangled by some innocuous creature or person that will seem pretty harmless as your confidence grows and you level up.

Failure is never easy, so having a way of failing in private, exploring your emotions around the failure and then moving on help you grow and become more resilient to failure. It does not matter that it’s “not real” (whatever that means), if it feels real, then it’s real. Your emotional reaction is real; the frustration, the anger, the sense of not being worthy, it’s all there. The important part is the resilience it builds around failure. Resilience around failure — it’s a great thing.

I have always found that the first seven levels of any game the hardest. I go into the game knowing I’m going to die, maybe hundreds of times. Some current games will show you your ghastly demise in great detail — very existential, very real and very final. But you learn something from each death and you have to learn to calm yourself in the face of failure. Sometimes you have to sleep on it, where did I go wrong? How can I avoid that particular demise in the future? Sometimes you can turn your imminent demise around and feel the thrill of survival.

This is business and video games, it can be where you can build emotional resilience to avoid the existential risks and move your business forward.

In gaming, leveling up is the process of gaining the experience to take on tougher game challenges and, again, this skill is as important in the world of business as it is in video games.

Video games will frequently alert you to the fact that taking on a particular challenge is doomed so you better run away and level up more before taking on the challenge. Often with a skull and crossbones icon over the head of the threat. It’s pretty guaranteed that you will get killed so, for sure — good advice to get out of there, for now.

You don’t get those warnings in the world of business where the general encouragement is always to “go for it”, hubris takes over and you get killed. If only the people had those little red skull and crossbones icons floating over their head as they do in video games.

A lot of entrepreneurs don’t seem to understand the benefits of leveling up. If you go into a lot of business situations without being prepared or having the experience you will get euphemistically killed, it’s that simple and all the hubris in the world will not save you. You are not at the right level to play that part of the game.

I’ve seen lots of startups that are going to take on the world, starting by doing business with the largest organizations on the planet. They want to go straight to the “boss level” and guess what, they lose. Anyone that ever played a video game knows you cannot win the boss level without a lot of leveling up.

Always ask yourself, have to leveled up enough to take on this challenge? If you don’t feel that you will win then go and do something else, level up with wins against other challenges you are more confident of winning because you can always come back to the boss level when you are ready, the boss level is always ready.