Stop Being a Non-Player Character
"...there are multiple paths to follow. You can take back doors and skip levels and move quicker than you think. Progress isn’t linear. You don’t have to follow the default path laid before you."
“London will be attacked and I shall be very prominent in the defence. I shall be in command of the defences of London and I shall save London and England from disaster. Dreams of the future are blurred. But the main objective is clear, I repeat, London will be in danger and in the high position I shall occupy, it will fall to me to save the capital and save the empire.”
You won't be surprised to find out that it was Churchill that said those words. What might surprise you is that he said them in 1891 as a 16-year-old schoolboy at Harrow.
Churchill, right from the beginning, had a sense of his own destiny. He believed that he was fated to do great things. Forgetting the number of times he could have died in the five wars he fought across four continents, he had enough close brushes with death for many lifetimes. He was born two months premature. He had three car crashes and two plane crashes. He fell off a 30-foot bridge. He stayed in a house that burnt to the ground in the middle of the night. He nearly drowned in Lake Geneva. He was stabbed as a schoolboy and had four serious bouts of pneumonia - one that nearly killed him as a child.
Reading this, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Churchill's life sounds like a video game. The great British adventurer, surviving endless scrapes and coming back to tell the tales. Campaigning around the world performing insane feats of courage and bravery to defeat anyone that stood between him and the next level. Churchill was the main character.
I've explored various founders and leaders on this blog over the past few months. There hasn’t been a plan of attack - it’s been guided by curiosity - but certain themes have continually popped up. Themes like agency, a bias for action, and irrational self-belief have revealed themselves in almost all the founders we’ve looked at.
I've written about these things partly because I enjoy studying great leaders, but mainly in the hopes that identifying the traits that played a part in their success might help me develop those traits myself. While knowing about these traits is useful, it's a pretty ineffective strategy for cultivating them yourself. It’s not actionable enough. That's where today's piece comes in.
Viewing your life as a video game is a useful framing because it helps you embody all of these traits. We need to see ourselves as the protagonist. We need to have agency and take action. We need to proceed in the belief that we’re destined to do great things.
In short, we need to stop being non-player characters.
A non-player character (NPC) is a background character in a video game that wanders around to add atmosphere or give you information if you interact with them. On platforms like Twitter and Reddit, it's used to call people unimportant or boring, an insult to describe someone who doesn't think for themselves.
Churchill is the opposite of this. He's daring and brave and courageous and goes from level to level flying on the belief that he's destined for great things. He's the main character, and there's no doubting it.
If your aim is to be more like the greats that have come before us, being an NPC won’t cut it. We need to see ourselves as the main character. We need to be the one who is going to save London and England from disaster.
In Building the High-Agency Habit I wrote:
Our lives are full of defaults. Schools you should attend, careers you should pursue, things you're allowed to do. Peer pressure makes it easy to fall into following defaults… Agency is about noticing when these defaults constrain you and being willing to break them. It’s being able to think for yourself.
Thinking of your life as a video game helps you do this because there are multiple ways to progress. Not just multiple known ways, but backdoors and cheat codes that allow you to progress faster and further than you imagined possible.
Life is the same in that there are multiple paths to follow. You can take back doors and skip levels and move quicker than you think. Progress isn’t linear. You don’t have to follow the default path laid before you.
Part of this mindset is taking responsibility - realising that you can do things and influence the world and that by taking it upon yourself to fix or improve something the world will be better than if you did nothing.
One of the best parts of adopting the video game perspective of life is that you begin to see situations not as life or death but as opportunities to experiment and learn. Sure, you might fail and have to start the level again, but is that really so bad?
We all have our own objectives and we have to choose the best way to achieve them. And by thinking of your life as a video game, by treating it as an experiment and seeking out backdoors, you’ll progress faster, learn more, and enjoy the journey.