If you’ve ever played an online game such as WOW, GTA, or League of Legends, the strategies you use to conquer your enemies, finish missions, and reach record scores can help you develop insightful tactics for growing your startup. Here are the 4 most important lessons from the gaming world that you can easily apply when starting your own company.
1. Choose Your Guild Wisely
This is the first decision you make when you start a new game and it is the most important one. The team you choose to play with can make or break the whole game in a split second. Take WOW for example. If you don’t have agile, experienced, and differently skilled players in your guild, you won’t be able to gain XP together and develop your characters.
The same goes for your startup. Hiring and building the right team is time consuming and it requires a thorough understanding of how the skills and personalities of its members intertwine. Luckily, if you ever lead a team in a game, you might just have what it takes – do you need that senior developer that will take 100% control and responsibility on the task but may lack motivation, or that passionate junior that will work maybe twice as hard?
2. Timing Is Everything
As a character in a game, timing can be your biggest strength or your worst liability. You need to know exactly when to act fast and when to wait patiently for the perfect time to attack and conquer.
In League of Legends, there are times when you need to act quickly to help your team and move further towards your goal. But there are also moments when you need to hide out and wait until you respawn and gain back all your power.
Nearly all the decisions you have to make during a game are time-related; whether you act on your own or wait for your team to help you; whether you act fast to finish a mission or lurk in the dark until making your move. All these timing strategies pave your way to a successful startup.
Let’s take an example of how a time-related decision may impact your start-up growth: you need to build your website and you need to choose between a custom theme and a pre-built one. You analyze the pros and cons: the custom one may be tailored to your tastes, but it takes 3 months to finish and it bites mercilessly into your budget. A pre-built WordPress website, on the other hand, is ready in no time and saves you a load of money without compromising on quality.
An option here is Be Theme. It comes with more than 200 pre-built WordPress websites that cover every niche. Each website can be installed in one click and modified easily without writing a single line of code.
Finding the ways that get you there faster and smarter will be an awesome advantage in many key moments of your startup development.
3. Limited Resources Boost Your Creativity
Every game has challenges that you need to overcome with limited resources. Usually they’re used to unlock achievements – like in GTA. There are missions that you need to finish without suffering any damage while killing at least 10 people. With minimal resources. And cops chasing you. All in record time.
The creativity and problem-solving skills you’ve used during missions will also help you propel your startup to new heights. A startup is the toughest mission of all: you have limited resources that you must use in a clever, creative way to get ahead of your competition and make it big.
Most people are overwhelmed with these restrictions, but you have already developed a mindset that helps you through the most difficult moments in ways others wouldn’t dare to imagine. This mindset will make all the difference in the world in situations that seem without solution – you already have the ability to find that solution that only requires half the budget and some online community enthusiasm.
4. Face Your Biggest Challenges Alone
Video games may be a team adventure, but keep in mind that your biggest challenges are yours and only yours to overcome.
Just think of SuperMario. Though he’s got loyal partners and helpful friends such as Yoshi, Plessie, or Professor Elvin Gadd, he goes through the toughest challenges by himself. Even when he enters the dreaded Haunted House, he leaves Yoshi behind to fight solo.
As the leader of your startup, you will also have to fight many exhausting battles on your own. No matter how great and capable your team is, at the end of the day, your company is your responsibility, both in times of success and in times of (temporary) setback.
The upside of having played video games is that when time comes to make a tough decision, the SuperMario in you can activate to get you through the challenge. So when you have to make critical decisions for your startup, simply turn up your inner hero to the fullest and your ingrained instincts will end up making the best decision for your team.
Ready for the mission of your life?
You already have the fundamental perspectives you need to run a successful startup.Gaming has shown you how to choose your guilds wisely, when to attack and when to lay low, how to finish a mission with one single tool in your hands, and what challenges need to be faced alone. Now it’s time to make your move, apply these lessons IRL, and start passing those levels of the startup game.
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This post has been sponsored by BAW Media. Thank you for supporting the sponsors that support SnapMunk.
