This game is better than Chess

Sup, hope you had a good week.

I haven’t played any games in years, but this week I tried out this one called Polytopia. It was mentioned in Elon’s biography like 20+ times and he said it helped him become a better CEO so I wanted to try it out.

And it’s super fun! It took me maybe 20-30 minutes to learn how it works, but it’s like an advanced version of chess (and I love chess). You are on a 64×64 board somewhere, your opponent is on the board somewhere, but you don’t see them until you run into them. Every turn, you gather resources, and you can either invest it into building out a bigger, stronger city, or you can invest it into education. It’s funny to see how if you go to war immediately, both civilizations stop growing because naturally you run out of money to invest into education or building out your city, you just spend all your money on the military, kinda like how real countries do

I definitely think you can learn a lot about how to allocate resources effectively and somehow apply that in real life (at least that’s what I tell myself.) I mean, Elon Musk called it “Polytopia Life Lessons” lol.

📖 What I’m Reading
I’m reading (listening) through The E-Myth Revisited, which I’ve read a while back before. It’s about the “entrepreneur-myth” and it has been surprisingly helpful in understanding how to run my YouTube channel better. It gives the example of how McDonalds is the #1 “small business” in the world to learn from. They basically have 30,000 franchisors (small businesses) with an average revenue of $3 million dollars (20% profit), but most small businesses, like your average coffee shop, fail to even be profitable. The difference is that with most small businesses, the owner is doing everything, making the coffee, managing the finances, opening up and cleaning the store, etc.
The secret to McDonald’s success is that they built fool-proof systems so that anyone can run it profitably, and that’s how every small business should operate. As for how it applies to me, one example is that I realized I was spending a lot of time editing videos & other tasks, but really I should have been building systems so that anyone can do them.

🍿 Update of the week:

Last week I told you I was reading Elon Musk’s new biography. Well the book actually inspired me a lot and so I just made a video summarizing the 8 key principles I’m incorporating into my life. Check it out! (You can just listen to it when you go on a walk) 🙂