Shanli Liu compares grinding in video games to real success: if you knock on doors, send emails, and create content as relentlessly as you farm diamonds in a zombie spawn area, you build the skills and reputation to handle bigger challenges, just like leveling up an avatar to defeat a boss.
If young guys played real life the same way they played video games, they'd make more money. I remember when I was playing Fable way back in the day, and I would literally stay in the zombie corner because it would continue to spawn zombies, and I would stay there and I would keep collecting all these diamonds and experience points so that I could make my avatar as big and as strong as humanly possible. And I sat there for hours just beating, so monotonously beating, the same zombie over and over again. But yet we're not willing to do that in the real world where you have to knock on more doors, send more emails, make more content. But the game's the same. You have to be willing to sit there and slay the same thing over and over again until your avatar gets strong enough to beat the bigger boss.
