My work life became an instant messaging chat. It all started Back in 2004 I’ve been dwelling in chatrooms of IRC, and that’s long before Facebook was a thing. A lot of people are surprised to understand that I am an introvert, and internet allowed me to feel connected without being taxed by social pressure.
Despite being very outgoing, I have my own fatigue in social setting, yet I do have a necessity to connnect and chat helped me facilitate that need. Chat helped me become a blind typer, one of the skills that defines my job today. I can type really fast, and chatting is probably a preferred method of communication. And today I am “chatting for a living”.
I am running a distributed team, and that’s making communication a critical component of work. Most of the communication is happening on Instant messaging, like Slack and iMessage. When you are coordinating a 20 something people over chat apps, it clearly is beneficial for you to know blind typing.
I can’t fathom myself not being a blind typer, as it also helped me produce countless blog posts, proposals and other means of communications with hundreds of people. Communication is a pivotal skill in running a business, and today a successful business owner will have to be able to make decision on the fly and operate large teams from a centralized communication application. You can’t scale communication, but you must make it as fast and efficient as possible.
Being a manger put me in a spectator mode, as my attention span is limited in what it can tackle individually, as it is mostly focused on the big picture. I am less of a doer, more of a nanny and a monitor of the work of other people. My life is a text based life, that’s probably why Twitter is my preferred social network.

Connecting the past and the future

Back in 2004, when I’ve started chatting, I didn’t realize that I was honing in on one of the skills that absolutely dominate my professional life today. It also came in handy when I was playing World of Warcraft during college. It’s weird how I count numerous skills that I’ve developed while I was playing WoW, also as ones that are extremely critical in the modern workforce.
One of the interview questions that I asked people these days, is wether they’ve played video games professionally. When I find a fellow professional gamer, I am developing a bias for his job application, as I know that this person has developed necessery skills that fit the company culture that I am building.
Mentality that gamers develop is to beat the game. Game is a system, and systems are there to be beaten. I remember countless hours spent on the rules behind the system, how to take advantage over them, so I can reap the benefits of the game. Wether it was a Player Versus Environment, or was it Player Versus Player, the technology of the system was widely discussed.
What would make you the most over powering player in the game? That is the question that majority of successful gamers would ask themselves, and they would put in the work to get there.
When you transition Gaming mindset into business life, you are getting a group of people that are cosnstantly asking themselves the question: How Do We Win? They are trying to find the easiest solution to making your business profitable. Everything is gamified, thus it’s fun to do!