What Mario Kart Taught Me About Repetition
Box Art for Super Mario Kart
It’s December 25th, 1992. It’s Christmas morning, I’m seven years old, and I just opened up a Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). There’s a level of jubilation that can only be matched by Billy Batson when he utters the word, “SHAZAM”. There is footage of me bouncing around the living room, my dad on the couch, my sisters absorbed in their own early nineties heaven of plastic toys, and my mom undoubtedly behind the camcorder - narrating in the third person with Attenboroughian patience and detail.
I unfurled the coax cable cables, matching up the red, white, and yellow ends to their ports. I freed Super Mario Kart from its cardboard box, discarding the directions into a pile of Christmas wrapping, never to be seen again. I popped the dark gray rectangular cartridge into the top of the light gray rectangular gaming system and slid up the purple switch. (1) The TV let out a *ding* that would come to define my childhood.
The SNES was the follow-up to Nintendo’s 1985 NES, and had been out for two years when Shigeru Miyamoto’s Super Mario Kart was released. Mario Kart is a Nintendo game series that brings together title characters from other games to race go-karts. While the past twenty-one years has seen fourteen Mario Kart variations, the basic premise has always remained the same.(2)
Shells and peels being dispensed in Kalimari Desert (MK64)
The joy of Mario Kart comes in mastering the most efficient route of each track while managing the strategy of deploying and avoiding weapons. This balance of art and science makes for a compelling activity that isn’t always enjoyable. Whether you are racing the CPU, a stranger with an alien avatar, or a friend on the next beanbag chair over, the pain of losing a race from a well timed greed/red/blue shell is unavoidable.(3)
No matter how good I got, I never won all the time.(4) This is a reality shared between a childhood in Mario Kart, and a career in sales. I have spent hours educating prospective clients just for them to turn around and say they found my product cheaper elsewhere (banana peel!)(5), or that their mom’s cousin’s friend’s neighbor is an insurance agent and they are “just going to go with them” (lightning bolt!)(6). Success in sales is not about winning all the time, it is generating enough chances to win so that the losses don’t hurt as much.
Generating enough chances to win means one thing - activity. It sounds simple, but anyone that has made 50+ dials a day knows, cold calling is one of the hardest things to do in sales…at first. Just like mastering the fastest route in Yoshi Valley (MK64), cold calls start out clunky, full of missed turns, and curse-inducing pitfalls.
Map of Bowser Castle 1 from Super Mario Kart
Malcolm Gladwell said that in order to achieve mastery it takes 10,000hrs of repetition.(7) I don’t necessarily disagree(8), but I believe that having awareness of transferable skills can allow for hours spent on a mastered skill set to be applied to a new skill set. Playing Mario Kart, I learned to enjoy the process of learning through losing. Once I realized that I was learning with every fumbled intro, or missed opportunity to close, I started to enjoy sales activity much more.
I began looking at my sales scripting line by line the same way I would take a new Mario Kart track turn by turn. If I nailed 6/10 lines in one call, and 8/10 lines in the next, I registered that as a win. If I successfully improvised my way through a curveball question like a turbo slide away from a red shell, I registered that as a win. Suddenly, I had awareness of the marked improvement I was making. I could appreciate the growth that would lead to more closes, before actually getting to the closes. Before I knew it, I was closing more, and an absolute beast in Bowser Castle.
Mario Kart 64’s Rainbow Road remastered for Mario Kart 8
Not unsurprisingly, as soon as I started to enjoy my work, I started to relax and do my work better. It took me years to enjoy losing in Mario Kart, and months to enjoy losing in sales. By enjoying the process of learning, I was willing to engage more in losing. This meant I made more calls, sent more emails/messages, and gave myself more opportunities to win.
I still lose all the time. Last week I was ghosted by two prospective coaching clients and my wife absolutely demolished me in the card game Phase 10.(9) This week, I’ve done more dials than I have in months, and I have the most qualifying conversations scheduled since last May.(10) I’ve downloaded the Phase 10 app and I’m currently on hour 2/10,000.
The added benefit of putting 10,000hrs into anything means that mastery becomes comforting. When I’m losing elsewhere, I can return to the activities where I trust the outcome. Whether that’s hitting the penultimate turn in Rainbow Road or picking up a phone and a fresh list of leads, I know that I will succeed, or learn by trying.
Notes:
(1) The purple color scheme of the SNES had replaced the iconic red of the NES, signaling a shift from 80’s to 90’s aesthetic.
(2) Mario Kart Double Dash had two characters per kart, allowing for you and a friend to take turns driving and dispensing weapons such as shells for toppling, bananas for slipping, and lightning bolts for shrinking your opponents. Mario Kart Wii introduced online play, allowing you to race eleven strangers from around the globe in real time. The most important improvement came in the game’s second iteration, Mario Kart 64 for the Nintendo 64. This game saw the introduction of the turbo boost. Racers could power up while steering through turns, triggering different levels of speed boosts as they came out of the turn. The added strategy of triggering turbo boosts would come to identify those of us who registered 10,000 with MK, and those who had more than one hobby growing up.
(3) Green shells were deployed in the direction your kart was facing at the time. Red shells are heat seeking missiles that target the racer directly in front of you. Blue shells fly over the pack, landing squarely on the person in first, and hitting anyone else in the blast radius. The weapons are dished out with increasing potency the further back you are in the pack, leveling out racers as long as they are in the same general vicinity of skill level. This artificial reality mimics an absolute truth - life isn’t fair.
(4) Especially in online play.
(5) Similar to wasting your time on price-shoppers, banana peels are avoidable if you’ve got the awareness and reflexes to avoid them.
(6) Customers hold the power, and while I may think I am in pole position, an unexpected bolt of information takes me from first to last in an instant.
(7) Outliers, 2008
(8) But don’t necessarily agree either.
(9) Phase 10 has elements of Uno and Rummikub that is designed to ruin marriages.
(10) My pipeline has six milestones, lead generation, qualifying conversations, discovery meetings, proposals, follow ups, close/lose, testimonial/nurture.
