The Playful Way to Succeed
Six lessons from the man who built Zynga, taught at Stanford, and wrote the book on winning instincts.
The Big Idea: Turning an idea into a product has never been easier. AI, robotics, and automation make building fast and cheap. Success still comes down to how you think, not what you build. Stay playful. Know your why. Test relentlessly. Never fall in love with the idea itself, only the instinct behind it.
Why It Matters: Most failed products don’t fail because the tech was hard. They fail because the founder fell in love with an idea instead of the instinct driving it. As building gets cheaper and faster, it’s more important that ever to separate your winning instincts from your losing ideas.
Try This Today: Write down your “why” in one sentence. Check today's calendar against it. Cut whatever doesn't match.
These ideas come from Life at the Speed of Play: Launch Products People Love! by Mark Pincus. Mark is the founder of Zynga, the pioneer of social mobile games, and one of the tech industry’s most prominent entrepreneurs, known for repeatedly spotting and shaping the internet’s biggest hits. Read on for six of his big ideas.
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1. Life at the speed of play.
“Life at the speed of play” is an approach, an energy, I want to encourage everyone to take toward how we turn ideas into products or businesses. It’s about approaching the idea with a playful, light, fun attitude and not making it so heavy.
With AI, robotics, and automation, it’s never been easier to turn ideas into real products. We’re barreling toward living and working at the speed of play.
2. Get grounded in your why—your North Star.
I encourage everyone to create their own book of life. It is a practice that I’ve been doing for 30 years. Every year, write down your why and hold yourself accountable to it. Take a close look at whether your actions, ideas, and pursuits align well with that why. It’s essential.
3. Isolate your winning instincts from your losing ideas.
This is the basis of the Stanford Business School class I created. We all have core human instincts that drive us, and the more skillful we become at identifying and isolating those from the idea that we happen to be building right now, the more successful we can be, because we tend to fall in love with an idea that’s not quite right. If we can kill our ideas, which are usually wrong, while trying to go after that winning instinct, which is almost always right, you’ll massively increase your chance of success.
This week's Book of the Day sponsor is No Experience Necessary by Ronnen Harary, co-founder and former CEO of Spin Master. At 23, fresh out of college and living at home, Harary built what became a global powerhouse behind PAW Patrol and Bakugan — and he argues his inexperience was the secret. Structured around eleven principles, the book reframes youth's risk tolerance, energy, and openness as superpowers that young dreamers squander at their peril. Publishers Weekly calls it "a powerful corrective to the myth that experience is a prerequisite for success."
4. Start with “proven” before new.
This is a framework I invented while building Zynga. It goes with this idea that you have winning instincts and losing ideas. If you commit to this, you can change your odds of success in creating hit products.
The idea is to start off by being master students of what is already proven in the product we’re building. Only after succeeding with what is proven do we then look for what is clearly better. Start with the things that ten out of ten of existing users will say, “Fuck yeah.” Do not start with the reach idea you think is better, because starting with ‘new’ will probably end in failure.
You will want to test the novel idea on a stable foundation. We don’t want your product to fail for the wrong reasons: because you went and did something that wasn’t in your innovation zone, you did it badly, and you didn’t create it as well as the best products already out there.
5. If everything goes right, be ready for success.
There’s a chapter in the book I call “Fuck Scale.” What I mean by that is we can boil down management. I got a Harvard MBA. I can save you two years and a lot of money and time. Basically, management is just trying to get people to do the right thing when you’re not in the room.
The first principle of that is to be in the room, don’t delegate. You want to understand the tasks you assign to workers, so gain proficiency in as many as you can before replacing yourself in that equation. Management and scale are just the mechanisms or processes you put in place to get people to do the right thing when you’re not there, and to guide them, you need to give them specific instructions and connect them to the big picture. That could be having a real commitment to a clear underlying mission. To me, it’s usually things like making people CEOs, giving them clear hills to take and getting out of their way before holding them accountable.
If you hire people and you’re going to delegate to them, you should challenge their assumptions but not their judgment. That means challenging them on what it means to do the job right, technically speaking, but giving them more leash when it comes to their opinions on what’s the right call. It’s fine to poke at all their assumptions, but if you get to a point where you don’t trust their judgment, then you should probably change them out.
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6. How ambitious are you?
Everyone will say it’s a ten out of ten until they consider the sacrifice that number implies. What if I told you that you could be successful beyond your wildest dreams, but you’d have to toil in obscurity for nine years and then have success in the tenth year, and you wouldn’t know you’d be successful until year ten? Most of us wouldn’t take that deal. We might take it if we knew we’d be successful in year ten, but most of us aren’t willing to go through ten years of wandering in the desert. But often, that’s what it takes to achieve massive success doing something nobody else believes in.
It’s okay if you’re not a ten out of ten on ambition. Some people just want to prove that they can create a successful product or business, and they want a first base hit and that’s good too, but being realistic about that upfront is going to make you more successful.
Putting this into my TBR list. Thank you!