Chad Silverstein uses his kids' Fortnite habit to explain resilience: they fail, restart instantly, and try again. He argues leaders should measure how fast people recover from setbacks and build a reset mindset into hiring and learning.
Questions this video answers
June 3, 2024.
He estimated "may have been... 10,000" games.
He described there being "100 people in the game."
Chapters
I don't know how many games my kids played Fortnite, but it may have been, I don't know, 10,000. And I'm not kidding. And what's amazing is I used to watch them play, and it didn't even phase them for more than probably 5, 10 seconds or just a brief blip when they would lose and then start over. That kind of just reset, get into another game. Yet whenever I saw them trying to do something, whether it be a sport or something in school, and they failed one time, it's like everything unraveled. And so it's such a crazy thought because video games teach us a really valuable lesson that you can constantly just fail, start, back up, fail, start back up. And every time they do this, next thing I know I'm watching my kids playing this game and there's 100 people in the game and they're killing everybody. They're getting really good at it, which I always tell them it's not something to be really proud of, but there's something to learn from it, and that is that rinse and repeat that get up when you fall and just reset. Reset like what we can learn about playing video games and how you get better at it the more games you play. And you don't even think about it when you fail. You start the game over. And if you can apply that to your work, if you can apply that to learning new skills, if you can apply that to every day that you're being challenged with something that is really important to you, that you're doing to earn income or to build trust or, you know, to, you know, hire good people every time you fall, get back up and reset and just think about the video game example and see if you can apply that in your life and where you're not applying it. Because if you can, if you can do it on a video game, you can certainly do it in real life. Now, the stakes are definitely higher, for sure, but there's something to be said about being able to reset. And it's a mindset and it's a belief, and it should be in your worldview in some capacity, whatever you believe about it. And, you know, the reality is you're not always going to be great at whatever you do. So it's just a part of the growth, you know, trajectory that it's not linear and you're going to fall. How quickly can you get up? That's what I would want to measure as a leader, and that's how I would want to measure you and see that the last time you failed, how quickly and how long did it take for you to get back up on your feet, dust yourself off and keep going and try again, just like you would do in a video again. So get back up, reset, and get back at it as quickly as possible.
