Number 14 in the World

I was eleven years old and ranked fourteenth in the world at Madden. Not a regional bracket. Not a leaderboard somebody invented in a forum. Fourteenth, globally, against every person playing the game seriously at the time.

Nobody asks how somebody gets there, because the answer is boring. I got there by watching my own losses back. I learned formations. I learned what a person does on third down when they are panicking. I learned that most people run the same four plays and get predictable the second they fall behind. That is not a video game skill. That is reading a human being under pressure, and I was doing it at eleven because I could not stand losing.

I want to be honest about what this was and was not. It was not useful. Nobody pays you for being fourteenth in the world at a football game, and I lost hours to it that I am never getting back. My parents watched a kid disappear into a television, and to their credit they let me find out what was on the other side of it.

Here is what it actually was. It was the first time I picked one thing, went all the way into it, and came out better at it than almost everybody alive. That is a specific feeling and I never lost the taste for it. Every company I have started since is me chasing that same number on a bigger board with real stakes. The game did not matter. Finding out I could get to the top of one did.