Your Career Is A Game With 3 Levels

Every industry, career, job, way of making money and anything we do is like a game.

You learn how to play the game, and you have better chances of winning.

If you love the game, you are guaranteed to win in the long term.

When I started my career, I had no idea what I was doing or where I was going. But now, I am able to zoom out and see that any form of community, including a corporation, is like a game. And if you can’t figure out how to play the game, you will probably never feel that you succeed, or at least not quickly enough.

Just like in video games, your career 'game' is played in levels too. Levels are not promotions - promotions are just a side consequence of what you gain throughout the game.

And if you are able to zoom out big enough, you’ll be able to follow my thought process in this note.

Today, I want to break down the 3 levels of any career, so you can:

• Make progress towards your career goals by understanding the underlying game you play.

• Stop being so hard on yourself or taking your career, job, or duties too seriously, and instead find some excitement — we only have one life, they say.

• Reinvent your character (yourself) who plays the game, so you can experience excitement and fulfillment over the long term.

• Leverage your character’s skills to build meaningful momentum (and income).

The biggest asset you can have is your mind. And the most important factor in growing your asset (your mind) is to raise your consciousness.

'No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.' – Albert Einstein

To elevate your consciousness, you need to refine your thinking (mind). 

To improve your thinking, you must be open to seeing things in new ways. 

To see things in new ways, you need to identify problems, confront them, learn new things, and acquire the knowledge necessary to go beyond who you were before. 

As your thinking improves, who you are must also evolve.

When you're just starting out, you can aim for opportunities that are slightly beyond your current reach.

When you are just starting out, you are mainly alone in that journey. 

As you improve, you can take advantage of all the opportunities that are now below your level, while still reaching for those that are a bit higher. 

That’s the basic structure of anything you undertake. That’s the game structure in anything you do.

When you begin a new game, there are 5 phases you’ll go through:

• You don't know how to play yet.

• You learn the basics about the game.

• You keep practicing the easy part (level 1) until it's no longer fun and becomes boring

• You discover more ways to think, skills, and leverage that help you move ahead

• You gradually take on harder challenges until you choose to stop playing or you finish the game

Most people stop at level 1. 

They don’t push themselves to grow, and even if they do, they fail to recognize the skills or leverage they’ve accumulated. As a result, they never use it to their advantage to move ahead. They fail to progress, reach the next levels, and achieve what they want, so they get stuck at the same level, trapped in a loop of boredom. That’s mediocrity.

Even the most repetitive job can be made more enjoyable if you decide to turn it into a more challenging game. 

When I was a kid, I used to go to school alone, taking the same path every single day. The road was the same, the buildings were the same, everything was the same. Yet, every single day, I made the ‘game of going to school’ more enjoyable by playing a different game: I allowed myself to walk only on certain pavement bricks or use only a certain foot in specific ways. It’s a classic thing kids do, but as adults, we forget about playing; we forget about turning anything into a game and sparkle some positive energy and challenge to grow ourselves and meet new areas of consciousness.

Your career follows the same five phases from the start. 

And I view any career as a game with 3 levels, which can range from being a doctor or an engineer to being a stay-at-home parent — or really, anything.

At each level, you gain more skills, consciousness and leverage which you can then use to advance.

But here are two mistakes I’ve observed people making in their ‘career games': 1) they confine themselves to a level of mediocrity and blame their surroundings for their failure or lack of progress and fulfilment, when in fact they forget to 'play' and acquire new 'ammunition' to unlock new levels; and 2) they attempt to play the game solo, often in a selfish way, overlooking that games have historically played a significant role in the formation and strengthening of communities and groups.

Now let’s dive in in these 3 levels of any career game.

Level 1 - WTF am I doing?!

Every single person in this world who has ever been employed started at level 1. 

Nobody is born with experience, skills, and leverage. The same applies to everything we do - every single parent was at level 1 the day they brought their child home from the hospital after birth.

And most of us have no idea what we are doing at this level.

We are far from knowing anything about what it means to be employed, about the written or unwritten rules of our employer or job and career.

At level 1 you have no network, no mentors; you keep reinventing the wheel and work hard for everything you do because you don’t possess the knowledge, skills, and consciousness to help yourself in those situations.

The best thing you can do at level 1 is to figure out how to get out of level 1 as fast as you can. 

In my opinion, the best way to get out of level 1 quickly is to keep it simple but be absolutely impeccable at your job. Understand your job requirements and duties and deliver on them in an impeccable way. But do it simply. Don’t overcomplicate things.

Don’t make level 1 a challenge that is too high for your skills because that will make you anxious and keep you in a spiral of emotions. Also, you will easily become overwhelmed if you aim to jump this level too fast.

Eight years ago, I was hired by my current employer as an Cloud Deployment Engineer - my number one duty was to handle repetitive application deployment and infrastructure operations on behalf of more senior engineers. A lot of that translated into following instructed steps and running deployment procedures. These operations were usually scheduled at a given time, agreed with customers, and very often implied sharp communication when you start, run each step, and finish the deployment.

So, what I did was to fully understand my duties and what was expected of me, keep it simple but do it at a high quality. 

I was always on time with whatever deployment I was assigned to, I never missed a communication note, and I followed the steps as instructed.

The other possibility would have been to sidetrack, come up with my own ways of doing things, challenge how things were done from day 0, complicate or make the entire task more complex, and overall make it hard to work with me.

Level 1 should always be about keeping it simple. Day in and day out. 

Nothing complicated about it. 

Keep it simple in the way you deliver as well as in how you communicate and engage with those around you.

Level 2 - Building Opportunities and Momentum on Your Own

Once you've done your job in a simple but impeccable way for a long enough period, I guarantee you that you'll start having a 'following community'.

You will rapidly gain trust and traction through the simplicity and impeccable way you're delivering things. 

People will see you are reliable, easy to work with, and that you have provided them with value through what you've delivered, so they will naturally look to work with you on a more regular basis.

In my case, that translated into the same people relying on me as a 'preferred go-to' engineer for certain operations and deployments.

And with that bit of momentum you're creating, it's time to spice up and challenge your game to move levels by doing these 2 things:

• Diversify what you deliver

• Build your support network

Diversify What You Deliver:

The first step to levelling up your game is by expanding your responsibilities and enriching your skill set, knowledge and consciousness level. 

You will need to shift from delivering simple but impeccable tasks to more diversified and abstract tasks of higher value. 

You can do this by examining what you do and coming up with more efficient and unique ways of doing it to provide even more value. Take charge and lead this transformation, which will result in more ammunition in your pockets (aka you will grow your skills, knowledge and consciousness level).

Bring more value through the change or transformation of simple 'tasks' into something more efficient.

Go back and look at your tasks you’ve completed in the past months. Identify those top 3-5 tasks your organization is doing where, even if the task is simple and you’ve done it impeccably, might require improvement to become more efficient. Simple does not equal efficient. Efficient means either saving or bringing in more $$$.

The bigger the scale of the impact, the bigger the value you’ll produce.

Diversify what you take on and produce to increase your chances of seeing things in new ways, identifying diverse problems, confronting them, learning new things, and acquiring the knowledge necessary to go beyond who you were before and evolve. This will help to increase your level of consciousness.

At this stage, you create (ask included) the opportunities and pursue them on your own. 

Opportunities won’t come to you until you have built enough leverage.

Build Your Support Network:

Eventually, you'll notice there are other people around you who show they want to grow and gain momentum and skills too.

Look out for who's growing, who's showing up and trying to figure it out like you.

These are your new job “game” teammates.

Reach out, get to know them and build connections with them and figure out how to support each other more. These are the doers, the people who, like you, want to expand their minds at their job, gain more consciousness by exploring more complex and diverse ways of doing and delivering things; those are the ones who are able to 'see' the job as a game as well.

(It requires a certain level of consciousness to view your job with a game mindset; too many of us are clenched for too long.)

Find a few people at your level and build a community of doers. Support each other in ideas and transformations. 

This is the game of leverage.

You combine your strengths, skills, knowledge, and consciousness with those around you and move the mountain together. 

This is the level where you need to be generous too - you build people around you if you are a giver, not a taker.

Successful business people team up to try new business ideas. 

Popular writers write stories together to sell more books. 

Skilled game makers join forces to create fun video games. 

Famous painters and sculptors put on shows together to attract more people.

That’s how it works.

Those that want to play alone will fail long term.

This is also the time to fully commit and strive to be the top gun in your field. And in this way, you build your leverage.

And that’s how you reach level 3.

Level 3 - Use Your Leverage to Advance More Quickly

Once you become known for something, you gain leverage, which is powerful.

This places you to exchange your expertise with others.

With leverage in a specific category, people will seek you out for your expertise. 

This increased leverage generates more opportunities. Leverage compounds.

Leverage attracts opportunities and knowledge, removing the need for you to search, ask and create them alone.

Level 3 is where you have truly built your brand, becoming recognized for your value.

Once at level 3, you will reach one of these three stages at a certain point:

• You feel like continuing to play to expanding your growth further

• You decide to stop playing, accepting that you’ve grown enough in this game

• You reach the end of this game (there’s no more growth to be offered) and pivot to a new game for further growth

Depending on how much you wish to grow your career, the key is to revisit and expand upon your 2 power up mechanisms from Level 2:

• Diversify what you deliver

• Build your support network

Diversifying what you deliver challenges your game and keeps you on the edge, encouraging growth and exploring new areas of consciousness.

Without challenging your game through diversification, if you avoid pushing boundaries and stick to what you know, you miss out on the novelty that makes life and work fulfilling. Without stimulation, your mind becomes bored.

Building your support network adds more horsepower to your game, allowing you to progress faster. 

It takes a village to raise a child.

However, a common mistake is expecting to receive from others without giving; you must be a giver to your network to build significant leverage.

Also, too often, we take things way too seriously (or at least I definitely did) and make our lives harder than they need to be. 

So, I want to wrap up this note and leave you with two ideas. 

First, embrace a 'Player's Mindset' in your career game to make it more enjoyable. 

See if you can transform your job from a series of obligations into your own game full of learning, growth, and fun. Life is tough anyway. 

Second, much like multiplayer games offer more joy and learning opportunities through interaction with others, seek out or build a community in your professional field. 

Approach it in a more fun way, and I’m sure your job will become much enjoyable. But that depends on you and what you chose to do.

That’s it for this note,

Luciana

I was inspired by a recent newsletter from Justin Welsh, which stated that social media is a game with 3 levels. Same principle and structure applies very much to our corporate career game as well. In this blog post I've applied Justin's social media game structure to the corporate career game. Credit to him for coming up with the 3-levels of the game that I used as inspiration for this note.