career Archives - Page 2 of 6

Why E-Sports might just help your career

Posted on May 2, 2018May 19, 2018 by Steve Sammartino

“Hey kids, get out inside out of that fresh air, stop exercising and start playing some video games why don’t you!” – Said no parent ever, maybe they should?

On my weekly radio spot this week I spoke about video games, or E-sports as it’s known. I proposed that gaming is a valid use of kids spare time, and could even help them in later life and their careers. My mum, with good intentions hated my going to the ‘dodgy’ video arcade, and later despised the time I spent gaming on my TRS-80 (yes my dude was a block, but I have a good imagination). But, it did lead me to a lifetime of interest in technology, and now that’s become a career. Occasionally we need to open our minds enough so that we can reframe an outdated perception. And maybe even back it up with some facts, so here’s a few about the E-Sports industry worth considering:

Economics: Video game sales (think hardware and software) is more than twice the size of the movie industry world wide. it will near $130 billion in 2018. The Pro E-Sports industry is estimated to be $1.5 billion this year with over $100 million in prize money, and has over 385 million annual viewers. Yes – people watching people play video games – both on line and live. In fact, the biggest ever crowd at a video game tournament was 52,000 people in a stadium in Germany.

Careers: There is currently 13,000+ professional E-Sports players. While the average annual pay packet is relatively small at $4500 a year, the top player earnings are right up there with with more traditional sports. Kuro Takhasomi took home a handy $3.5m last year and more than 200 players earned more the $100,000 for playing ‘games’.

Skills: Like any sport, there’s a natural hierarchy and not all hopefuls will make it to the elite level. Though, there is something different about E-Sports – they prepare us for the emerging world in ways few traditional sports can. Studies show they are good for rapid problem solving, brain speed, memory, algorithm awareness and management and even fine motor skills. They’ve been used to train soldiers, pilots, surgeons and it’s fair to assume their use in pre-career simulations, will continue and even extend through the use of VR and AR.

In any case, it does seem that the correlation between gamers and a desire to learn the underpinning technology is high. Surely this gives gamers an advantage in future proof technological career paths.

Social: When I mention to people I regard E-Sports as a ‘real sport’ it is often met with scepticism, and even ridicule. At which time I often remind people how ridiculous grown ups chasing dead animals filled with air to kick them through big white sticks is. All games are silly by definition, and they often take generations on the fringe before they enter mainstream culture. But after a couple of generations of computer games, I feel we are on the precipice of that shift right now. The spectator side of the industry is real, and will have wider career and industry opportunities than many people imagine.

So is it a sport? Well that depends on how you view things. Here’s one definition of Sport: “An activity involving physical exertion or skill in which an individual or team compete against one another or for others entertainment.” It fits as far as I can tell. And if you’re worried it will make society more obese than it already is, don’t fret too much. It’s only a matter of time before these games involve players in haptic suits running around on fields shooting up people somewhere on the other side of the globe.

Click here to here me discuss Gaming on 3Aw with Tom Elliot. And be sure to tune in at 4.30pm every Monday for your Future Fix.

Go play, Steve.

Why giving leads to getting

Posted on June 8, 2017 by Steve Sammartino

Many years ago I heard a quote from the late great Jim Rohn who said that if you help enough people solve their money problems, then all yours would disappear. At first I thought it was motivational bunk.

But while reading the terrific book Homo Deus by Harari recently I came across something called The Ultimatum Game. It is a famous experiment in behavioural economics which disproves the theory that we are all rational beings when it comes to money and economics.

In this experiment, usually conducted with two people, one of the them is given $100, which they must decide to divide between themselves and the other participant in any way they want. The person may keep everything, split the money, give most away, or keep more for themselves. The other player can do one of two things: accept the suggested division, or reject it outright. If they reject the division, nobody gets anything.

Classical economic theory would suggest that people are rational calculating machines. They assume that most people will keep $99 and give the other person $1. And that, the person would accept the offer of $1 because it is still better than getting nothing. They claim that a rational person would always accept a free dollar. Except that we don’t – and it isn’t irrational.

For the record most people split it 50/50. Some 40/60 or 30/70.

People may think that we reject tiny offers because it is ‘unfair’, they look like ‘suckers’, but it has more to do with the fact that our social structures just don’t operate that way. We humans work on a warm social logic. We know that sometimes we have more and sometimes we have less. We split the labour amongst our tribe and try to collaborate so we all have more through trade and trust. Once we do this the laws of reciprocity set in. We know we are all in it together, and we benefit more through sharing, than we do through gauging. We know this intuitively through thousands of years of evolution. Greedy people and pure suckers, well, their DNA never made it through the many famines.

A practice what I preach. Come join me in Melbourne June 20th, for a Free night where I share ideas I’ve learned in my career, from my new book, The Lessons School Forgot. Drinks on me, and I’ll answering any questions you have about your future.

It’ll be a great night. Hope to see you there.

Stay rad, Steve.

Why we should worry less about the robots, and more about ourselves

Posted on April 16, 2017May 31, 2017 by Steve Sammartino

As if concocted by some kind of Industrial Séance, the past 100 years has turned people in the developed world into a cohort of economic outpatients. We’ve abdicated our entire financial responsibility to institutions who must now provide us with a stable job, a career for life, increasing wages, and skills that are relevant in perpetuity without the requirement of an upgrade. A strange desire given that this has never happened before.

A close look at history any time before the 1950’s, and we can see we’ve never had any of those things as a certainty of life, quite the opposite in fact. The level of stability, of economic growth and the increase in living standards we’ve experience in the past 70 years is unparalleled in recorded history. For all we know it could be a fortuitous anomaly, a once off that we’ve been lucky enough to experience first hand. But we’re not thankful, instead those who’ve been the major beneficiaries are demanding in advance that the good life not be taken away. That the life we live is some kind of right, a standard we are now entitled to, without any heavy lifting required on our behalf. While very few indeed are asking the resources needed so they can get to work on personal transformation.

Automation & robots

This kind of upheaval isn’t new either. Every period of humanity which found itself in the middle of a technological shift, had those who were disenfranchised and displaced. Some even had entire their civilizations destroyed based on technological lag. Given our current global and economic interdependence this is an unlikely outcome, but yes, the technological shift is big, the biggest in many generations, and yes, it’s happening much quicker than all the others have. The challenge with technological shifts, is that there isn’t any lessons on how to deal with them. It’s not in the text book. We instead must rely on those old school skills of ingenuity and adaptability.

But this time, there is one important difference. For the first time we have a choice on whether or not we adapt. Every other time if we didn’t have the resources at our disposal, coping in the new system wasn’t just difficult, it was nigh on impossible. This time we’ve been given the dignity of choice. We can prepare, we can up-skill, and we can participate in the shift to the greatest period of entrepreneurship we’ve ever known. We can relearn the art of self reliance. We can do all these things, mostly for free.

Hence there are two approaches we can take to sure up our uncertain futures.

The common approach: We can wait for the Government to fix things, hope for a universal basic income, regulate against technology which destroys our industry’s business model, support populist and protectionist policy makers, and pretend inevitable technologies can be stopped to maintain our status quo.

The better approach: We can start today, firstly by admitting what might change in our industry, our economy and our future. Then, we can quickly start working with our communities to create an infrastructure (Physical and Informational) which provides all of us access to the tools and skills we’ll need to help shape the future economy. We can lead others and inspire them to believe they can adapt by sharing what we learn. We can meet with like minds creating income producing ideas, and expanding industries we couldn’t even imagine yesterday. We can decide that hoping everything will be Ok, isn’t a plan, and remember that we aren’t the first generation to face a challenge which might effect how we work and live. But mostly, we can sleep better at night knowing we aren’t helpless outpatients, but the architects of the future we want to live in.

New book – The Lessons School Forgot – click here for free advance chapter

Inverse goals & why you should set some

Posted on May 11, 2015 by Steve Sammartino

After about 15 years of doing work I liked in environments I didn’t like, I set myself some inverse goals. Inverse goals are the things we desire as a price of entry, as opposed to things we’ll acquire after the work is done. We might even call them unusual requirements for happiness regardless of monetary outcomes:

Not to have to shave everyday. (it really hurts my skin).
To be able to work when I feel like it, not 9-5 like the 200 year old industrial era said I should.
To wear whatever clothes I feel like, and not a uniform designed by someone else.
To be able to avoid peak hour traffic.
To be mobile and not stuck in the same location day in and day out.
To have my worked judged on its merits and not by my political performance.
To be able to actually read while working, without people judging this behaviour as flunking off.
To let the weather determine whether I work during the day or during the night.
To work in environments were I could be myself, and not a clone drone .

I literally tried to do work and be involved in businesses which would allow this kind of lifestyle. I feel like we often get things like this back to front. We aim for some kind of mythical economic success after which we’ll shape our lifestyle. But if we reverse the goals, we can have immediate success by first shaping our existence and then our economics around that. Life best lived, is life by design.

New Book – The Great Fragmentation – out now.

What I always tell door to door sales people might surprise you

Posted on May 4, 2015 by Steve Sammartino

Whenever a door knocker comes to my home to sell me something I probably don’t need, or already have – like electricity, I always tell them the same thing:

Congratulations – you’re going to be rich!

Yep, I give them praise for what they are doing (one of the most difficult jobs there is). I then go onto tell them about how the skills they are gathering will give them a massive life advantage in any developed economy. I remind them what these skills include:

Dealing with rejection. (Yes, I politely tell them I am not going to buy upfront)
Learning how to sell to a stranger.
Learning to sell products which are homogenous, boring, commodities & even unwanted.
Learning how to talk and pitch – their pitch time is at most a few seconds.
Understanding body language.
The power of persistence.
How much courage they have and their willingness to work (I’m guessing it’s job you only take out of desperation)

There’s more but you get the picture.

Most often they are pleased I’ve noticed this, and sometimes the hardworking sales person doesn’t even realise what a terrific opportunity this ‘horrible job’ turned out to be. I tell them it only gets easier from here. And if we happen to get into a conversation I give them some tips on selling, recommended some great sales trainers they can listen to; like Brian Tracy and Jim Rohn, and even some books worth reading. Lastly I explain to them that all CEO’s simply have to be Sales Rain Makers.

Even when we choose not to buy, we can still create some value for the seller.

New Book – The Great Fragmentation – out now.

What we get paid for

Posted on August 29, 2014 by Steve Sammartino

What we actually get paid for is all the work we did yesterday, and the day before that, and the year before that. In fact, what we get paid for is the work we did when no one was watching and no one was paying.

How small changes in where we work can change everything

Posted on August 23, 2014 by Steve Sammartino

I’m going to tell you quite a personal story about how changing one simple thing last year changed my earnings and work life dramatically. It starts with a story I heard from an old 1960’s business coach called Bob Proctor. I was listening to a podcast of his where he described the following situation. A gentleman was the owner of a medium sized, $10 million dollar enterprise. He was the sole owner of the business and employed a large number of staff for the time. It was during the 1980’s. Unfortunately he passed away unexpectedly and all of the staff members and senior management were worried about what his wife (who inherited the business) would do now that the founder and CEO was gone. Some thought they’d lose their jobs, some thought she’d sell the company, some even rubbed their hands together and hoped for a management buyout. What she did do, no one expected. She had never had anything to do with the business before his death, but came in for the first official meeting to tell the staff and board of directors what was going to happen. This is what she did.

She asked all of the Directors to tell her the following 3 things:

What are you doing in your division at the moment.
What is working well.
What is not working well.

She went around the room and let all of them tell those 3 simple stories. After that was done she gave them all a very simple instruction. She said. “I want you to stop doing all of the things that are not working. I don’t care if we lose revenue, or what happens as a result of this. I want you to only do the things that are working. Anyone who doesn’t follow this rule when I come back and ask the same questions in three months, will be dismissed.” She then told them she wasn’t selling the business, and the benefits of any growth will be shared accordingly.

One year after she undertook this strategy the business had grown from a $10 million enterprise to a $30 million enterprise.

It got me thinking at the time I heard this about what I was doing with work. What parts was I doing that were actually working well, and which bits were not working out so well. I came to the conclusion that the things that always worked out best for me were Writing and Speaking. I was doing a portion of that as part of my work at the time. I was working in advertising and in some startups on the side. Whenever I did a keynote speech or did a pitch I smashed it. My writing for journals and blogs was getting good credence. It was probably about 20% of my time on the average week. So I wondered what would happen if I only did those two things. Even for the startups I work with – only write and speak about them to help them grow. I wondered what kind of an income I would earn as a kind of ‘thought freelancer’ on technology, startups and business strategy. So instead of just wondering about it, I decided to do it. My new mantra would be to ‘Think, Write and Speak’ for a living.

Since this decision – which was around a year ago – I’ve published a book and started doing keynote speeches through an agent. And this is the personal bit. After about some months getting organised (pitching the book & getting an agent for speaking), I’ve earned well over what I earned for the entire previous year in just 5 months. What is super cool about this, is that I’m managing to do this in only a small portion of my week. It then forms a kind of underwriting strategy, so that I can invest more time in some killer startup ideas I’ve got, but haven’t had the capacity to get done. I say this not to impress you, but to impress upon you. I’m pretty sure all of us have a muse like this. That small portion of what we do in our company, job or startup which we excel in. A muse we have natural talent for, and naturally put more effort into. I’m pretty sure if we all focused on this, we’d get the same results that I am seeing. Remembering of course that this is not some passion fantasy, but real work we already get paid to do.

Another thing which is really telling with this story is this simple fact: I am no better at these things than I was 1 year ago or even 3 years ago. I am the same person, with the same capacity. I simply sowed my seed in more fertile soil. Which also makes me wonder why we all act like trees, waiting for the environment around us to change and help us flourish. When we can instead choose to change our environment. Unlike trees, we don’t have roots, we have legs, we can use them to go elsewhere and change where we do our work for a more fruitful return. I think the biggest determinant of our income is taking the work we do to a place where that is valued at its highest.

Maybe the thing we need to change, isn’t ourselves, but where we do our work.

NEW BOOK – THE GREAT FRAGMENTATION – ORDER HERE!