Careers in esports are gradually finding their way to be established in the gaming industry as full fledged paths to pursue. From coaching to team management, to marketing and shoutcasting, these are avenues young adults are entering to help make the esports business be a flourishing kind.
To help give an initiative to starting up an esports business and with insight from his upcoming book “Think Faster, Talk Smarter”, Matt Abrahams is today’s host. He is also a lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business with decades of experience in effective communication.
Part of what I talk about with them when it comes to video gaming is what is it that you really like about this? What is it that you find valuable? —- Matt Abrahams, Lecturer, Stanford Grad. Sch.
Matt is an old school gamer, with attachments to his Atari 2600 which he still plays to this day along with his kids, with one of them who has expressed interest in pursuing gaming professionally in the near future. His approach to esports with his kids is to find out what practices they may have learned over the years of playing games, and the responses he gets are on the collaboration, intensity and focus.
Narrowing it down to power kids wield with this subject, Matt seeks to find and help them access opportunities that can help them to be realistic with their options on pursuing a career in esports. The key is to equip them with skills that can help communicate to their parents around this subject in a way that they can understand.
A lot of what I teach and those who do what I do teach is frameworks, ways of thinking and levels of comfort, and identifying what's important to you and authenticity. —- Matt Abrahams, Author, “Think Faster, Talk Smarter”
The diversity of interests is what makes pursuing programs or courses fascinating to Matt as discovers this from experience while teaching entrepreneurship. Students pursued entrepreneurship because of diverse reasons: either they are doing them to collaborate more, or expand on the revised values of the courses, which could be moving away from a financial value standpoint to a social change standpoint.
Many of the courses now have that integrated in their curricula, and students’ approach to this as tailored by lecturers is to not just equip them for job markets, but also have skills that can be of contextual relevance in say a decade to come. Modalities encountering change through social media and generative AI as examples have had people be somewhat confused on the approaches to use so they are able to adapt. Following through with frameworks in effective communication for example, you would realize the need to have time-bound and time-based practices that should help with you being flexible and adaptive quickly and in real time so your perspective is not totally warped from time to time.
You have to do reconnaissance, reflection, and research about who your audience is, what's important to them, what's salient, what's relevant. So it's less about what you want to say, it's more about what they need to hear. — Matt Abrahams, Author, “Think Faster, Talk Smarter.”
Matt highlights some common mistakes made by entrepreneurs with their communication, and it starts with their dire want to project their message to the masses instead of carefully considering what the audience needs to hear. So they miss out on pieces of relative information which then renders their product not meeting whatever disruptive service or significant use it may come with. There is also the aspect of giving way too much information way too quickly.
Audiences may want to know more about the product as they express their interests, so it is best they are baby-stepped with the information all the way into whatever ends that they choose to get into. Clustering it will only bring confusion, and that is what you want to avoid as an entrepreneur. Knowing your audience will help you to structure content reasonable for consumption, and then following it up with timely pieces of information that may be needed as and when it is required. The criticality of listening should also be strongly considered. This is how you will know how to address your audience.
Esports has helped create jobs for lots of people. Interested in knowing about the business side of esports? Listen to the Gamers Change Lives Podcast! We get experienced guests from all around the world featuring.
Written By Jeffrey Osei-Agyeman
