You couldn’t blame Jack Stack for being nervous.
The year was 1983 and he (along with 12 other employees) had just teamed up and bought out a near-bankrupt engine manufacturer – called SRC – from the parent company International Harvester.
Jack and his new management team stumped up $100,000 between them to secure an outrageous $9 million loan to buy the company.
A debt ratio of 89-to-1!
The bank officer who rubber stamped the loan was fired within hours of approving it.
But Jack (and his 12 partners) needn’t have been nervous.
Why?
Because by 1993 (just 10 years later), their $100,000 investment in the near bankrupt company had morphed into a company that was worth $23 million.
How’d they do it?
Well one of the secrets to their success was “game playing”.
I don’t mean children’s games.
I mean competitive games.
For example:
Jack Stack taught all employees how to read the financial statements of the company, open the books and put numerical goals alongside individual performance on grease boards around the factory.
This created in-house accountability and healthy employee competition.
Nobody wanted to lose face.
Everybody in the workforce wanted to be “seen” as pulling their weight, making a significant contribution to the bottom line of the company.
Obviously it worked.
And it worked extremely well.
You can use competitive games to inspire yourself to perform at higher levels than you would otherwise.
For example:
Get together with some fellow hypnotists either online or in your own city and set some fun challenges like having to hypnotize a set number of people in a given week in as many different environments as you can.
The point is:
However you decide to do it, try and incorporate fun (yet competitive) games into areas of your life that you want to excel at.