Lessons I have Learned from Games Part 2

by Wendy Byford
In Part 1 of this series, I talked about learning to Let Go. That was my first experience of learning from a game. This lesson applies to all parts of my life, not just business. Take my bedroom carpet, for example. When we moved into our current home, this carpet was a beautiful shade of off-white. Now, five years later, it is an intriguing shade of spotted banana.

You see, somewhere along the way I decided to pull up the carpet we had installed in the bedrooms and replace it with the same hardwood flooring we have in the rest of the house.

Having made that decision, it made no sense to me to have the carpet cleaned, because, after all, it was going to be replaced. So I waited for the right time to pull the funds from other projects, staunchly refusing to give in as the months ticked on. I knew that as soon as I had the carpet cleaned, the Universe would hand me the funds. So what you may ask? Well, it was the principle of the thing. Waste not and all those other lessons learned from parents who had been through the Great Depression. Now I am having my carpet cleaned; and I am diligently looking for other areas where my principles are getting in the way.

Last week, I told you I would talk about Farm Town, the second game I play. Farm Town is a game accessed through Facebook. You start with a small plot of land and a few coins, and you build your farm into a mega-combine employing others to harvest for you while you run along behind them plowing and reseeding. It is an ingenious game that starts by taking a few minutes here and there and rapidly grows to an hour or so a day. Oops, did I say that out loud?

The first lesson I learned in Farm Town wasn’t so much a first time lesson as it was a confirmation of something I knew but needed to internalize everywhere, not just at my desk. Cash flow is King. You see, at the end of the day, if you don’t have enough coins to buy seed, you can’t plant. And if you can’t plant, you will have nothing to harvest and therefore nothing to sell for more coins. So my strategy was simple – plow and reseed before buying anything – even fences for the animals. Yes, you guessed it; this game has a lot of moving parts. Spare cash went into buying more land to expand the farm and make more coins from growing more crops. This, of course, meant that every reseeding took more and more coins. But I stuck to my strategy and today I have a 300,000 coin farm house and a fully planted mega-farm. Loral Langemeier would be proud.

So what does this have to do with real life? Everything. Money that could go into new flooring, for example, sits in a reserve set aside for our rental real estate. Good thing because the air conditioning just went out in one of the units. Impulse purchases are a thing of the past. Excess funds have to be reinvested to earn more coins. And one day the Universe will bring me the deal I envision, enabling me to replace the carpet in the bedroom; but only after the plowing and reseeding are done.

So how does cash flow work for you? Next lesson, Farm Town and competition.