Why a Gamer Mindset Can Change Your Life and Business

The Startup Ideas Podcast — Nicolas Cole and Dickie Bush

Nicolas Cole was one of the best World of Warcraft players in North America as a teenager. Dickie Bush played professional Call of Duty and logged thousands of hours on RuneScape. Neither of them knew this about the other when they first connected. But when they discovered it, the overlap made immediate sense: the same mental wiring that made them obsessive gamers turned out to be the engine behind their success as entrepreneurs and co-founders of Ship 30 for 30, a cohort-based course that teaches people how to start writing online.

The core insight, as Cole puts it, is that "video games increased my threshold for pain." He means this literally: the ability to sit in front of a computer and do something boring for 78 hours because you want one item upgrade is the same skill that makes entrepreneurship work. Bush agrees, adding that he learned more about business, economies, and working with teams from RuneScape than he did in college. Running an online business, he says, is "pretty much like playing a video game except you don't stack digital gold, you can stack real gold and do cool things with it in the real world." The underlying mechanism is the same: you're watching a number on a screen go up, whether it's gold in StarCraft or USD in your Chase accou