Back in the 80’s I spent a lot of time in poorly ventilated, dark and greasy arcades. I pumped all of my allowance into Donkey Kong, Moon Buggy, pinball machines and Pac-man. I didn’t realize it then, but playing Pac-man had taught me more about how to succeed in life than I ever learnt from years of studying neuroscience.

Here are 3 things most important things we can all learn from our little pixel pal

Fail often and fail quickly

Pac-man isn’t a complicated game; left, right, up, down and yet the first time you play you aren’t going to beat the high score. Working out why we fail is by far the fastest way to learn. Biology has really perfected the process of “fail a lot and then discover what does work”, from evolution right through to the fundamental mechanism of how our brain learns and forms memories.

Think about how children learn to walk. They constantly fall over, they can’t coordinate moving their arms and legs, they fail and they get upset about it. But they try again almost immediately. If you have a difficult task in front of you, it’s easy to spend endless days planning, investigating and researching until you know everything there is to know before you start.

This of course, is rubbish. You will never have all the information ahead of time about anything you want to try in life. The best and fastest way to get the right information is just to start doing it. Write that silly blog post, prepare a boring seminar and make a poorly thought out plan. When you have it written down in front of you or once you’ve started your task, it’ll become obvious what doesn’t work and you can fix it. The right answer or strategy never jumps fully formed out of your head.

The most important thing to remember is it’s OK to get it wrong before you get it right.

Substance over style

Pac-man’s graphics are simplistic and the game play even more so, and yet it is addictive and fun. If you don’t care for Pac-man, we can say the same things about games like Solitaire, Tetris and Bejeweled. So why should I feel more of a connection to a yellow pie shaped circle than most of the slick graphically superior shoot-em-up’s out there? The connection in my case comes from being invested in my yellow friend’s fate for 3 key reasons.

The game is (1) easy to get into (2) hard to master and (3) at no point does it feel like it’s trying to be hard for the sake of being hard. It’s 3 principles you can carry over into everyday life. Whether you’re giving a presentation, writing a blog or trying to motivate your friends to do something, you can use the principles behind three points I’ve just mentioned:

1)    Start simple. There’ll be time later to go into the details about your ideas, right now you just want to present a hook that’s interesting and won’t take long to understand. Why does this work? Our brain (the frontal cortex in particular) is amazing in that we can process abstract concepts, like language. We can assign meaning to a string of wiggly lines on a screen, call them words and understand the meaning behind them. Pac-man may just be a crude blob of pixels on a screen, but when I look at the screen, I see a life or death struggle.

By starting simple you force others to use their imaginations to fill in the details. If the brain is working harder to understand something, then it processes the information as if was more important than information that is easily grasped.

2)    Give depth. Flesh out your ideas so you can show you have a plan or structure to what your trying to say. If all your ideas and writing are stuck at (1) simple, people will get bored and won’t even remember you exist by lunchtime tomorrow. Having a plan isn’t the end though – involve people in the process of exploring your ideas and see where they lead. Connection isn’t one way, you need to be receptive to those you’re talking to.

3)    Invite don’t force. You’re trying to communicate with people, not manipulate them. If the people listening to you talk or reading your articles feel even for a second that you’re trying to trick them into doing something they don’t want to do, then you’ve lost them forever. If the ghosts chasing Pac-man became too fast – up to the point where it wouldn’t ever be possible to win, then why should I bother playing again? Don’t ever make people feel like they don’t have any other option – they won’t do what you want; they’ll just resent you for trying to tell them what to do.

Generating an emotional response or connection can stimulate excitement and consequently new memory formation in the brain. Human brains are structured to make us social animals. In any task you want to under take ask yourself how can I make this compelling to others? If you want someone to read your blog post or listen to your ideas in a meeting at work, think about how you can present your case to be compelling. What would you want to hear if someone was trying to get your attention? And for that you don’t need fancy graphics, just substance.

Game Over: You’ve got to know when to change

As much fun as the game was I’m not playing it today. It can get repetitive and boring wandering around the maze, doing the same things over and over. So why should your goal in life be to get out of the same bed, travel the same road to work, navigate the same maze of office cubicles every day?

At least Pac-man offers a GAME OVER message to let you know it’s OK to stop now, to give you a break, to give you time to think about perusing something other than ghosts. Unfortunately if you’re doing work that doesn’t stimulate you, there isn’t a game over sign to wake you up. It’s an endless loop – in the back of your mind you’re expecting today to be different but without you actually doing anything different to make it so.

Think about it the same way I do when I’m doing a scientific experiment – if you don’t change the way you do it, why should you expect different results?

Got a routine? Break it. Talk to someone at work who you’ve not spoken to before. Eat lunch somewhere else, with someone else. Be active instead of reactive, seek out a new project. It doesn’t matter where you change things up, just remember: You’re not limited to up and down, left or right like our yellow friend.

Your brain didn’t evolve to automatically respond to the most realistic graphics or flashiest presentation. Flashy graphics and presentations can get our attention, but unless there is more to it than that, it can’t hold our attention. If it did, I’d still be busy picking up shiny rocks out of the river like our Stone Age ancestors rather than writing on this site.

Technology has come a long way since Pac-man, but what he taught me is timeless.

I like to think of my yellow friend as an 8-Bit philosopher.

Fact: You could easily fit all of the binary data that makes up Pac-man’s code into my RSS feed. He’s not actually wandering around in there, but why don’t you subscribe via RSS or Email anyway?

Original Image dougww remixed by Patrick

January 26th, 2009