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When I reflect on being a founder, I don’t think there was anything better for me than playing Civilization 6. You are not playing enough Civ 6.
I raised $3m in 40 days off of a broken no-code app and a half-baked deck because I didn't have enough money to live or fly home.
At that point our main value proposition was that we could be 🌠anything🌠(s/o to Russ Hanneman) because we really weren’t anything, yet.
I slowly and painfully found out that the problem with 🌠anything🌠is that there are so many directions you can go and so little discipline on what to actually work on
This is such a common startup-ism trope and something that I see repeatedly online that seems so painstakingly obvious but the reality is that this was an impossible skillset for me to practice.
That is really the gist of this piece. Without practice, repetition, or even exposure to different types of thinking I was underdeveloped in what was required to be a successful founder and there was no amount of books I could read, podcasts I could listen to, or interviews I could study that would develop this skillset.
Until I downloaded Civilization 6, a turn-based strategy video game where you are a historical world leader that has multiple paths you can take to win.
For those that don’t know, there are five ways you can win. You can win by creating a religion and converting all other civs to your religion (Religious), you can build the largest army and nuke all of the other civ’s (Domination), you can earn victory points through peacekeeping and global contributions (Diplomatic), or you can build world wonders and dominate tourism to your civ over all of the other (Cultural).
No matter what, the choice is yours. You develop your civilization on a randomly-generated board and are required to play with the resources, perks, and situations that you are put into.
I recommend Civ to every founder that I speak to about fundraising or building a company. The similarities between winning this game and successfully running a startup create a different existence in thinking that allows you to step back from a world that you are fully enthralled in to have low stakes practice in bigger picture successful thinking. How you win in Civ is largely how you win in startups:
To be successful, you have to play to your advantage, pick a strategy to commit to, monitor other civilizations, and adjust accordingly to global in-game events
Players need to constantly be monitoring their day-to-day moves where each allocation of resources needs to be your ultimate goal
As you grow, efforts compound and you’re able to utilize that momentum to unlock perks quicker or receive benefits that weren’t available sooner
The same can be said for taking a misstep allows others to surpass you in different winning conditions
You can change victory conditions any time you would like in game based on what the conditions of the board, market, or new discoveries
Additionally, you can start over at any time with new resources and information of what you learned to give yourself a better chance of victory in the future if your winning condition chances or infinitesimal or none
I downloaded this game nearly 2 years after founding 3RM and within hours of playing, I grew so frustrated that I hadn’t had the exposure to this type of thinking until this point.
Until this point, my entire career had been execution and operating. I had scaled our business to nearly 3,000 enterprises and had so much progress to validate my sense of accomplishment. But there was a very limited bigger picture. A lot of the work didn’t contribute to the large objective. I was making the days long, the weeks short, and by the time I looked up I didn't know where we were going anymore.
The biggest mistake in Civ are valuable lessons in larger picture thinking, specialization, and committing to your larger vision:
You can’t win Civ by completing all victory conditions
You can’t win Civ by saying “yes” to everything
You can’t win Civ without having a strategy that fits your advantages
Civilization gave me the opportunity to be able to practice the process of macro-level thinking. It’s an opportunity to build the skillset instead of reading. There is so much that can be experienced from this game.
You are not playing enough Civ.
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