How to Treat Your Business Like a Game [E70]

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back to Clear Signal. Last episode, we talked about using your business as a teacher. And today I want to talk a little bit about using business as a game. I did a guest spot a couple of months ago now on a podcast that is by gamers and for gamers, meaning people who are video game enthusiasts. And I am none of those things. And one of the things sometimes I like to do is put myself in an environment where I have to explain concepts to people who have no idea what I'm talking about, and I have to become adaptive on the fly. Yeah, I think it's a good exercise for everyone to do. Too many people stay in rooms where they feel comfortable, and that's not where we grow. So something that I said on one of the first episodes of 2026 is that clarity is not the destination. Clarity is just the key to the next chapter. Something you're going to hear a lot in my world. And it is a pillar of the work I do. Because a lot of coaches out here are selling clarity in a time where everyone's lost. People are changing their business model. Society as a whole is changing. Entrepreneurship is never a sure thing. Humans always want the plan. Some people more so than others. And clarity is this nebulous buzzword, popular term that can make people feel like, okay, if I give this person money, I'm going to get this. I'm going to know the plan. I'm going to know where to go. And that's why selling tactics and frameworks and solutions confidently is what gets people money. And clarity is important. And clarity is what I give people, real clarity. Clarity that comes from the inside. Clarity that is embodied. Clarity that cannot be denied. Clarity that is a little bit dangerous. And I'll tell you why it's dangerous. It's dangerous because once you see it, no other option is an option. I don't care if the option is not the easiest path. I don't care if the option is not what you thought you wanted. I don't care if the option means that they're sunk in costs with where you've gone up until now. I mean, all right, I can't unsee this now. My system has reorganized around this vector and we're going forth. That is what is called orientation, which is part of the five-step framework that I do. By the way, I have nothing against frameworks because the human brain likes to think in systems. What I have is against frameworks that are useless, such that the word framework has means nothing. Kind of like clarity means nothing. Kind of like alignment has no longer means anything, which is why I have taken it out of my brand, if you didn't know that. I mentioned my other podcast, so I'll just say that I went off on a diatribe the other day. I'll say it in a much nicer way. I went to an event the other day, it was a networking event, and the person who invited me made a big deal about how great the speaker was. And I said, okay, well, I'm doing high-ticket advisory. Referrals are going to be a big part of what I do, so I should maybe become more formalized with this notion of referral. And none of my other businesses involved referrals. And his 14-step framework, which I left at step 11, one of them was, and each step had a TM trademark behind it. One of them was ask receive. It was ask arrow receive TM. And I was like, okay, now we don't even know what the fuck a framework is anymore. This is just shit. So I'm not against formulaic things. I'm just saying that let's let's use framework the way it should be used. And the stuff I'm creating is gonna be like nothing anyone is ever talked about in the way that I talk about it. That's category of one. Speaking of category of one, I published my article on Substack of Category One, it's listed in the show notes. If you're not a Substack person, no worries, but if you are, and or you want to subscribe to my thoughts in email, that is there for you. So going back to the podcast episode I did, it was for gamers by gamers. And I gave the analogy because I was like, how do I describe what I do? I guessed it on that podcast around the time that I was talking about Clarity is not the destination, it's just the key to the next chapter. It's very close to the time that I recorded that episode. And I use that because they are all gonna understand this concept of levels, video game levels. And so I said, you know, think about a video game. You're not trying to focus on the whole thing, you're trying to get to the next level, the next level, the next level. And I'm a fossil relative to the most of the people listening to that gentleman's podcast. So my reference point was Mario Brothers or Xanadu, or I don't even remember. These are games that were played probably 40 years ago, 35 to 40 years ago. So obviously you do not represent video games now, but the notion is the same. I remember you were trying to, you know, there's always some challenge at the end of each level to get you to the next level, to get you to the next level. And that's the way I like to view business. And so the last episode, I talked about business as a teacher, and I briefly shared some examples from my past businesses, which I'll share more in the future. And one of the things that someone would say is, okay, well, you did all these businesses. That's a lot of businesses in a short amount of time, 15, 16 years. I mean, sure, there was some overlap. None of them were, not all of them were meant to be long-term. The import-export, I was riding the gold wave, the gold rush of the Amazon FBA, no different than people have changed their entire business model to be I teach Claude courses. You think they're gonna be doing that in two years? No. They're riding the gold rush, they're getting uh cash-heavy business so they can utilize it for something else. And that was my initial thought with Amazon FBA. I learned that the overhead, the minimum overhead from an shipping from a minimum operations overhead, sheer pain in the assness factor, and upfront cash outlay was not worth it, but I had to learn the hard way. I had to crash and burn, if you will, in that. And there's a story I will tell in the future where there was a come to Jesus moment where I realized that I had no control over what would go wrong. There is a difference between I have no control here, so I'm gonna navigate. And there's a difference between that and you have put yourself in a situation where you have absolutely no control over if everything goes wrong, everything falls into the ocean, and you lose everything, and there's nothing you can do to stop it. And that's when you say, I place myself in a video game where I can't win, or I don't even have, there's no seek or doorways for me. I game over, right? The the the guy gets killed at the end to keep with the analogy. So I was explaining it to this guy, and I used this analogy of fog of war. Now, five minutes before the interview, because I do everything kind of last minute, I looked up on Chat GPT, give me some video game terminology. And so I utilized this terminology of fog of war so that I could be say something that would be somewhat recognizable to his audience and bring it back to something they would understand. And fog of war is this notion of you send soldiers, you know, virtual soldiers into the fog, and then they can seek out information for you, and then they bring back the information, and then you're less in the fog. The the analogy is the same. It's this notion of you're in the fog. That seems like a cheat to me. I think generally in life, you don't have that ability. You can't send out these secret virtual messengers to get information and come back to you. You kind of have to navigate in the fog without that. But the analogy is the same as navigating through the fog, finding clarity through that process, using that process as a teacher, and then getting to the next level of the video game. Not dying on level one. If you don't die on level one, you can make it to level two. And in the process, maybe you're gonna have fun, maybe in the process you can use it as a teacher, maybe in the process you can use it as a way to have fun, learn about yourself, treat yourself as a game, treat life as a game, treat business as a game, treat the whole experience as a game, treat your various chapters of your life as levels. And I have so much more to say about this, but I will save it. One of the things I'm trying to do is make each episode succinct, not in terms of length, but in terms of one idea per episode, which is not my natural style. By the way, if you like this style where I jump on, I don't edit, and I just have a thought, and uh it's usually gonna be 15 minutes or less, not always. I have a place where these are gonna be in the summer when I'm taking a step back from the podcast. We'll have a few episodes in the summer that'll be mostly guests and collaborations. But if you like my off-the-cuff teachings, I have a place where I'm gonna be sharing those and I'll let you know about that soon, maybe before or after Labor Day. Memorial Day. This is the second time I've said that. That's information right there. Okay, well, I'm listening. That's what I'm saying. Are you listening? That's another thing people don't do. But game. Video game, video game of life. So a long time ago last summer, I had an episode that was inspired by a quote from James Clear, and it was, I believe the title is What the Three Line Can Treat Us About Teach Us About Trial and Error. And there was a part two episode that I never dropped, because as I get further away from the older episodes, you know, the cadence is so different, the sound quality is so different, it just doesn't fit. And what that episode was about is I talked about all my different businesses, and I'll bring those concepts back in the future in a different form. But I had basically shared that, you know, if you were to look at a bio of me, I don't share my import-export business. I don't share my health coaching business. You're gonna see the health product I launched that was six figures, first to market, a real business in quotes, and the consulting consultancy I had for over a decade, 15 years, still at some level I do. The other ones were building blocks to that, or part of that journey, or aren't relevant from a I did X and Y, but they are relevant from an experience perspective. And I share that because when I launched my probiotic, prebiotic line on Amazon. Amazon is the wild, wild west. Amazon in 2015 was a nightmare. Amazon is sharks and sharks and sharks. Think chum in the water. And people think of Amazon as amazing. They're like, oh, I ordered my toothpaste and it arrived yesterday, or it arrived in like four hours. And yeah, Amazon is an operations arm. Amazon's background is logistics. Amazon is fabulous at this, and this is a decade after I was really selling on Amazon, at least with the FBA fulfillment by Amazon. If you don't know what it is, it was a thing in the online business world. And it was a wild, wild west back then in stories and things we'll talk about later here elsewhere. But the bottom line is it was a shit show. And the bottom line is that there was no rhyme or reason, and the bottom line is you could get away with everything and anything, and they've changed their rules now. But it was a wild, wild west, and I was competing with people who had no ethics, who are 22 years old living in their mom's basement, who literally would do anything for money, whose entire ethos was marketing bros, and it was a shark-infested waters. And the supplement industry and the health industry, in the health product industry, which is why I've stepped away from it for in addition to a number of reasons, is very, very, very gamed on Amazon in terms of reviews. Reviews are bought. Um, Amazon will bump people to the top who spend X number of dollars on ads, and it's a self-fulfilling prophecy because the more you lie, the more money you make, the more money you make, the more you can put back into ads, you can get premium placements, etc. The bottom line is it's a cutthroat, cutthroat, cutthroat, cutthroat industry. Sharks at every angle. There's no way I would have been able to navigate that if I didn't understand the Amazon platform. And the reason that I understood the Amazon platform is because I'd sold before selling non-perishable, non-expirable goods that were not in that category. I was in the health and beauty category, but I was not in the supplement category. And just as a little aside, I'm always thinking 10 steps ahead. That's why I call myself a clarity architect. So when I sold physical goods, I got approved into health and beauty. So that when I needed to sell regulated products in health and beauty, I already had an in. I already had track record because everyone is trying to sell in health and beauty because that's where the profit was with skincare back then. It was supplements. I don't know what it is now. Now it's a disaster, you know. Now with the influencers and Amazon shopping and social media, I have no idea. I have absolutely no idea what that place looks like. I am merciful, I'm thankfully completely ignorant about that world. I have such post-traumatic stress from that entire thing that, you know, other than pressing an Amazon Prime button for my renewal of the few things I buy, I literally don't go on that platform because that was uh a chapter of my life that is uh was a lot. A lot of sleepless nights, a lot of waking up to, you know, waking up saying, uh what's gonna, what is what shit show am I waking up to now? What email am I waking up to now from Amazon? What dumpster fire am I waking up to that I have to navigate today? It was unproductive and crazy. Um, and so my point is that that was learning video game level one before I went to live video game level two. And it's not something that's gonna get any applause and it's not something that anyone's gonna understand, but that's the real deal. And because of the amount of money I was spending for inventory for my product line, I could not afford to not make money from day one. I could not afford to fuck around and find out on that dime because those weren't products that were gonna expire. So I had to be selling immediately. And there was a minimum amount of time it took to produce that product because the cranberry was from Canada, cranberry has a you know crops and all this, like it was a whole thing. And so I had to game the system a bit, not in a negative way, but in like I had to find the crevices, I had to find the cracks. You only find the crevices and the cracks when you know the system. So that was an idea of this level one, level two. And so that is treating this as a macro conversation instead of a micro conversation. What is the video game of business? What is the video game of life? What is the video game of you? And that's what I mean by using business as a teacher. This is not a podcast you're gonna hear anywhere else. Because they want to sell you a sexy tactic based on nothing. And they want to sell you what success looks like. And I'll tell you that what I'm saying doesn't look successful, but it is in its own way. And what's important is I deem it that way. Because a lot of times we are the product of the stories we tell ourselves. And if you allow other people to tell you the story of your journey, that is a very different story than what you would tell yourself if you use the perspective I'm giving you here. And that's something I want you to think about. Because the more that I work with people, the more I realize they're not thinking that way. I think it could be useful for you to start thinking that way. As you're navigating forward, thinking about business as a video game, thinking about gaming the system, not in a negative way, but like life as a game. If you look at neuroplasticity and you look at neuroscience and you look at habit change, there is something known as breaking the chain. Breaking the chain is let's say you want to go to the gym every day, let's say you wanted to take a particular superfood every day, let's say you wanted to get up by 6 a.m. every day, let's say you wanted to do morning pages every day. Now I'm not a coach, and this is not my area of expertise, but I can tell you that this whole notion of marking it on a calendar that's visible to your brain because your brain doesn't want to break the chain. That's what accountability is based off of. So you can game it. You can game your brain to be like, oh, I'm winning the game. I'm gonna be game. Can I do this for 30 days in a row? Makes it a lot more fun and a lot more interesting that I have to do this. So gamification is built into apps, gamification is built into Facebook, gamification is built into everything, gamification is built into challenges, who can fundraise more, right? So bringing gamification back to your business, and by this I did not mean game theory, by the way. That's a that's a summer episode. But, you know, bringing back this notion of levels, bringing back this notion of play, bringing back this notion of what am I learning on this chapter that I'm gonna take to the next chapter? And maybe, you know, every lair is not a hit out the park, but maybe you survive to make it to level two. Right? So the takeaways for you are all the things I said when I do these kind of episodes. I don't do it packaged in a bow because what I do is I come on with one thought, I go in a direction, and I wrap it up for you. And that is going to be the format and the style of the thing I'll be presenting to you when I do. I keep wanting to say Memorial Day, I keep saying Labor Day. Now, twice in a row that's happened, so maybe my intuition is telling me something that is different. Category of one article from Substack linked below. I really like that episode. I don't know when it's gonna air, but if it airs and when it airs, I'll link that episode below in the show notes. It may be a long time from now. And I hope you enjoyed yesterday's episode, I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I will see you after Memorial Day for an official kickoff for season three. And the takeaways are how can you see your business as a teacher? And how can you see your business as a game? I'll see you next time.