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Entrepreneurs´s Journal
January / February 2005
Let the Games Begin
By Emily McHugh
On a recent business trip that
required some shrewd negotiations, my sister Helena made the astute
observation that we needed to play Monopoly in order to practice.
When we were little we used to play Monopoly with my brother Andrew,
who was ALWAYS the banker. So the two little sisters were pretty
much at his mercy. It may sound cliché, but business, like
life, is a game, to be improved with practice. I now look at games
from a very different perspective. Games are an excellent means
of mental exercise that serve as a good way to spend time when you
don’t have the energy to do much else. Games help break the
monotony of thoughts and give the brain a chance to focus unrelentingly
on one particular goal, a sort of meditation if you will.
Another game that I play quite a lot is Brickbreakers. It is a video
game programmed into my Blackberry. Therefore, I have ample time
to practice. At first I thought this was a silly game because it
was slow and boring. Nonetheless, I would always find myself playing
it just one more time to see if it could get better. I realized
that despite the simplicity of the game, I had great difficulty
mastering it, I could never get beyond level two, and if you mess
up level two, then you must go back to level one. It was that built
in demotion factor that made me determined to always try again.
I would not be demoted, and especially to level one. Another factor
to this game is that it is not clear how many levels there are,
so you always feel like striving for the next level because it promises
endless levels to achieve. The highest I have reached is level five.
This may not sound particularly impressive, but it is, because I
got there without even realizing it. But once I did, I got stuck
there, so the incentive to keep trying for level six and beyond.
What were the lessons learned that I could not grasp when I was
confined to level one?
The first lesson was to be patient and breathe normally. The tenser
I was, the more impossible it was to get anywhere. I also learned
to avoid distraction. During this game, you need to focus on the
ball that is coming towards you and the goal is to catch the ball
so that it bounces against the brick wall and breaks down the bricks
one by one. The ball speed changes throughout the game so you cannot
get used to one steady rhythm, this keeps the game very tricky.
The distractions that came up included items that would remove your
focus from the ball. Some of the distracters that are used test
vices, for example, greed, with the objective of testing whether
you will be content just focusing on the ball or not. In the beginning
I would be very thrown off by these distracters, because I did not
know where to look. Once I realized that catching the ball was the
only goal, then I gradually started ignoring the distracters and
focused only on the ball. This realization enabled me to move from
level to level.
In business, there will always be distracters that surface almost
on purpose, to throw you off course. There is always something that
can go wrong, and invariably will at some point or another. The
key is to focus keenly and steadfastly on what you are trying to
accomplish. In order to do this it is imperative to clearly identify
your goal and to simplify it into achievable steps. Establish priorities
in order what can and should be ignored and where your attention
should be. Many times we cannot get to the next level because we
are spinning in circles in level one. Once you clear away the irrelevant
and unimportant, the goal comes more sharply into focus. When you
identify what you are going after, that improves the likelihood
of achieving it.
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