Games fascinate me. Their mechanics sucked me in early. I can still vividly feel being crushed when we lost the Arlington soccer city championship. I cried inconsolably because it was a low point in my career getting beat by our new rivals, the recently transformed Panthers. They came all the way from last place to win the title! And I was nine years old. **😆
Yes, the mech design & incentives of The Beautiful Game hooked me fast. Before pro soccer in the U.S. was easy to find, I’d try waking up at 4am to watch Italian Serie A matches because I was in awe. Soccer is an art form & every detail matters. It’s a game of patience, strategy, fitness, courage, & creativity. It’s so hard to score, which makes it really hard to win. It’s easy to play too. You just need a ball & an open space, which makes it extremely inclusive.
I love lots of games beyond sports, but I chose to dedicate most of my early years to soccer. I played over 10,000 hours until I was about 20, & I did not reach my potential. Around 14 or 15, my production, or PPF, curve started flattening out. There were lots of factors. While I was super motivated to get better, & practiced a lot on my own, I think one was key: I didn’t continue learning how to practice in the optimal way for my unique developmental stages. I kept climbing & reaching new levels on my way to playing NCAA division I soccer, but I could have achieved a lot more with better practice & incentives.
<aside> 🎯 I want to solve for more & better practice with games. Why? Because we are what we practice. It applies to everything. The goal is to get better at something, or to learn a new skill, but it all starts with practice & motivation. Mastery is only possible after learning to find joy in the mundane, repetitive motions while deliberately & obsessively working on something until it’s second nature. We can apply the process equally to very small things & to the largest goals in life.
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This aligns with another of my core beliefs: games can continue changing the world for the better. I once helped build a startup, (from pre-seed to series A) called iSoccer. We built a social game that kids play to get better at soccer. At the time, Jane McGonigal was one of my favorite muses. I remember being so excited while reading her book, *Reality Is Broken,* because she validated that we were trying to solve our space’s problem in a compelling way: with games that motivated & inspired people to improve.
I stopped working on iSoccer in 2014; however, I recently discovered I’m still just as passionate about changing the world for the better with games. What kinds of games? Virtual games are great for entertainment & for learning lots of skills, like problem solving, but not those. We’re going to focus on games that you play in real life (IRL). Like Jane, & many others, I think games IRL can be designed & focused to achieve big, societal improvement opportunities (she calls them alternate reality games). This is definitely a hard hill to climb & one that I could work on for the rest of my life! 🤠 Longer term, the rise of emerging tech, (e.g. AI & AR/VR) makes competitive skill games 100x more interesting & compelling to me as well.
<aside> 🔮 If we can figure out how to motivate people to practice in more & better ways with games, we can apply the method across skill areas.
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We want to start by testing games for improving storytelling skills that are great for selling ideas. If you can sell ideas, you can sell behavior change, & if you can change people’s behavior, you can change the world. We’ll start testing hypotheses in this L&D space tied to techniques for convincing people to believe in your ideas. Persuading, debating, challenging, storytelling…all important skills that make a big impact across industries & functions. They’re also all skills that the best sales people use to win customers.
<aside> 👉 The secret to selling is great storytelling.
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In honor of The Beautiful Game, we’re going to build beautiful games that people play to get better while having more fun, starting with a game for improving sales skills. Who’s with me? Let’s go! 🚀 Come join beta testing at beautifulgames.co 🤓