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Friday, September 12, 2014

Video games trained me for office work

Different men follow different paths in life. Some of us will become mechanics, others will join the army, people will work in restaurants, and a lot of men will end up doing desk work in front of a computer for 8 hours every day.

Enter the corporate world. Whether you become an accountant, analyst, sales executive, customer service representative, help desk worker…. Etc, your day will be very similar.
Show up early in the morning, grind through repetitive tasks for a few hours, take a lunch break, grind though more repetitive tasks then go home.

By repetitive, I do mean repetitive. The first two jobs I had, my job responsibilities never changed. I did the same thing every day.

As an analyst, I had to answer phone calls for customer service every day and process invoices every day to send out payments to day care centers. Each month, I processed and sent out more than 200 invoices.

My second job, also as an analyst, I spent 8 hours each day inspecting different cases checking if they had enough flood insurance.

Often times, I felt more like a robot than a man. Just shut the brain off and repeat a pattern.
I came to a sad but amusing conclusion one day while reviewing a home equity line of credit document.

Out of all the skills I learned while growing up, I learned the most important skill and ability to function in the corporate world by …….

Playing Final Fantasy 7

Actually, it wasn’t just Final Fantasy 7. It was Pokemon, Breath of Fire 3, Kingdom Hearts and pretty much any RPG video game.

All these games (first playthrough) required lots of grinding.

I guess I spent hundreds or thousands of hours smashing imps, tonberries, nobodies, zombies, and pidgeys just to gain experience find gold and advance the plot of the game.

I remember on Pokemon Red, the clock maxes out at 255 hours. 256 is a magic number in 8 bit video games because of the hexadecimal system.


Office work, repetitive office work, requires a lot of time and patience. You just have to sit there and do your work.

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