The #1 Business Skill I Learned From....Video Games?

Now, most people would probably say that video games are a waste of time, but I feel video games taught me one of the most important lessons I've learned as an entrepreneur. And it's something I think has really helped me grow my business. And that's we're going to talk about in this video. In today's social media culture, everyone wants everything to happen so quickly. I see it in my guitar teaching business, I see it in my business coaching business. You know, we all want these results in instantly and very, very quickly. And it can be extremely frustrating at times because you're putting in a lot of work, you're putting in a lot of time and effort, but you're not seeing the results that you want to see or as quickly as you were hoping you would see them. And this actually reminds me a lot of video games, particularly what we call RPG games, role playing games. All right, so those are the types of games that I really enjoy playing ever since I was a little kid. And the goal of those games is, you know, you are playing a character, all right? And this character starts out at this very, very basic skill level. Okay. They're basically level one. And you have to go through this journey and you kind of have to, you know, fight enemies, you have challenges you have to do, you have to upgrade your equipment, you have to get better skills. So you got to skill yourself up. Or sometimes you have to find a special resource or material to complete a specific mission or upgrade your equipment. And this is very much like business. I remember playing a game when I was a kid. This is like old school. It's called runescape. All right? And in runescape you used to have to go with a pickaxe and you'd have to go find these little deposits of different minerals. And sometimes you'd sit there for hours just mining minerals. Sometimes you'd need like a hundred of something. And you would just sit there over and over and over and over again with your little pickaxe doing this. And we're talking like, I don't know, maybe like eight bit graphics. So it's like old school. But as a kid I learned to be patient. And what does this all have to do with business and being an entrepreneur? Because I feel business really is just one big video game. And we're all starting off at level one. We're all noobs. I mean, I, I take my YouTube journey, for example. So when I started this brand, Lauren Bateman Guitar. Okay, When I started my guitar brand here on YouTube, I was a nobody. And I Didn't even have cameras. I didn't have a nice microphone at the time. I just had a phone and I recorded on my phone, which at the time didn't even record in. In hd. So if you go and look at some of my older videos, they're grainy. They're. They're just. They're just bad from a quality, a video quality perspective. But the content was good because I had experience in, in what I was teaching. But, you know, it took a while for me to upgrade my skills. And essentially by. By recording more content and getting more of myself out there on YouTube, I was able to skill up. I was able to learn about video editing. I was able to learn about filming and lighting and cameras and different camera lenses. Ten years ago, I knew nothing about a camera lens, okay? But over time, I was able to skill myself up, create better quality video. I learned how to use lapel mics. I learned how to use editing software. Then I learned how to delegate some of those things out so that I wasn't doing all of the work all the time. So as I went through my YouTube process, I skilled up. I got better equipment, all right? I kept grinding the way I would in video games, because with YouTube, you know, you're going to put out 10, 20, 30 videos, and you're not going to get much in return for it. And it's like, why on earth would you put so much time and effort into putting these content, these videos out for nothing in return, okay? And it's because, you know, in the long term, it's going to pay off. So in role playing games, sometimes you'll go up against a very, very difficult B.O. in business. It could be a very, very difficult challenge, okay? YouTube is, is a great challenge in business. And sometimes what you'll have to do is you will have to level up your player. You will level up your skill set in order to be able to go up against this boss and actually be able to handle yourself. Because if you tackle the beast too early, you're probably gonna die, right? Your character's gonna die, your team's gonna die, and you'll be like, wow, I am not ready for this battle yet. So what do you do? You put the time you. All right, you put in those 10, 20, 30. By the time you get to 40 or 50 videos, you've got a foundation and you're like, YouTube is starting to pay attention, okay? Because those first videos, nobody's going to pay attention to you, okay? Maybe your mom's going to watch it. Maybe your Best friends are going to watch it if you post it on Facebook. But your first videos get. Might get 5 views, 10 views, and then slowly it goes to 20 views, 30 views, 40, 50. And then all of a sudden you're in 100 views, which, in the grand scheme of things, might not see them a lot, but that is a good foundation. And the key is, it's in that consistent effort of getting that first 50, 60, 70 videos out that we skill up, that we level ourselves up as entrepreneurs. And the thing is, in the grind is where we find ourselves as an entrepreneur and as a person, too. It's that consistent effort of putting out 100 videos, 50 videos, 60 videos, whatever you want to say. But getting to that catalog of videos helps you skill up. It helps you level up, it helps you make better content, it helps you deliver your message faster and much clearer. And when we do that, we start gaining an audience. And like I said, you know, those. Those two views become 10 views, become 100, become a thousand. All right? And now you start getting people to sign up for your mailing list, okay? And your mailing list grows from five people to 50 people to 250 people, and you go from 100 subscribers to a thousand to 10,000 to 100,000. And this all happens in that grind, all right? You are taking that little pickaxe every time you put a video out. It's like that video game. It's that little pickaxe. And I'm slowly picking at these resources. I'm slowly picking at trying to find my audience in this grind of content. And when you start on YouTube at level one, you're not getting that attention, but you keep putting this videos out. And now all of a sudden, YouTube's like, oh, we're going to pay attention to this person. And then all of a sudden, you're ranking against the people who have the experience, who have the higher levels here on YouTube. Because when you're first starting, YouTube knows nothing about you. You're a noob, all right? You're a level one player in this arena of YouTube, and you're going up against people who've been at this for maybe a decade. You know, so they're like level 50. And you're coming in at level one thinking you're going to put a video out and get millions of views. It's just not going to happen. But if you keep at it, eventually, eventually what's going to happen is you're going to start ranking your videos on YouTube in search. People are going to start typing in and they're going to find your videos. Because YouTube's going to say, okay, you've earned the next level. Okay, okay, you've gone from level one to level two to level five, level ten. Whatever you want to do, or however you want to say it, you are going to level up and YouTube is going to start paying attention to you. Because now your channel has a little bit of authority, it has a little bit of credibility, all right? You get some skin in the game. But this doesn't happen overnight. And if you're a video game nerd like me, you know, this might be an easy concept to understand. And if not, I just highly recommend that you play YouTube or you play business like a video game, okay? It's in that grind, it's in the repetition where we make progress, where success happens. We might not see a lot of results for that repetition. Like I said first, 10, 20, 30, 40 videos. You might not see a lot of momentum. Like, man, this really stinks. I'm not getting anywhere. But then you put out 50, 67, you get to 100 videos and you're like, okay, this is getting somewhere. I can see that snowball. I always tell people YouTube is like a snowball. So you put out this first video and it's like this little snowflake, alright, and it has nothing to it, but then it starts rolling down the hill and every time you add another video becomes another snowflake and then it's two snowflakes. And then all of a sudden you get like a little snowball rolling down the hill. And eventually I always think of like, you know, old school cartoons where you have like the big snowball rolling down the mountain. By the time it gets to the end, it's this huge snowball, you know, that ends up running over the cartoon character. And that's what I think YouTube is. It's like you're, you're just working on getting that snowball going and it takes time and that's the grind. But once the momentum goes, it starts picking up and all of a sudden you go from a hundred thousand subscribers to 250 to 500,000. So if you're getting started with YouTube, I would highly recommend that you fall in love with the grind and you start grinding out the long form content. Shorts are great too, but really, really focus on the long form content because that's where you' going to see the most bang for your buck. And if you want to learn about some of the biggest mistakes that I made here on YouTube and how you can avoid those mistakes. Or hopefully avoid them. Go watch this video right over there.