“Sick flurry rush!”
“Wow, thanks!” Leo cheerfully replied, “No one has ever complimented my gaming skills. That’s very validating.” His vocabulary remained surprisingly advanced for someone who was ruthlessly attacking an opponent in Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. He jabbed his enemy repeatedly with a sword outfitted with a Silver Lynel Horn.
Don’t know what a Silver Lynel Horn is? Neither did I.
“This is like watching an actual movie! This is amazing!” I borderline-yelled from the sidelines as he continued to brutalize his opponent. Upstairs, LeVon was watching football. Downstairs, I was watching the ultimate virtual gladiator.
I was never good at fighting in Zelda. I avoided it like the plague. Instead, I spent countless hours roaming aimlessly throughout Hyrule, gathering an obscene number of lightbloom seeds, chuchu jellies, and armor outfits. Gotta have a good outfit.
I was the queen of side quests.
So, when I reached a point in the game where few objectives remained beyond pursuing Ganondorf, the big, bad final boss, I set the game down. I let Link, my not-so-brave but highly curious warrior, gather virtual dust.
Meanwhile, Leo took a completely different approach.
I began playing Zelda long before Leo got into it. When he started exploring the game, he expressed frustration at how little he had accomplished relative to my progress. I’m not good at this. This is hard. I’m terrible at fighting. He lobbed self-defeating comments across the living room couch.
Then, Leo did something he does very well: he studied. Scrolling through gaming forums and interrogating his friends, he gathered a deep well of knowledge. Slowly but surely, he advanced his gameplay, without sharing much about his progress.
“How’s your Zelda game going, Mom?” he asked me the other day.
“Eh, I’ve kinda given up. All I really have left to do is fight Ganondorf. I’m terrible at fighting, so I’ve kinda lost interest. Besides, it doesn’t really matter if I finish the game or not.”
“Oh, you haven’t defeated Ganondorf yet? I’ve done that, like, five times.”
My jaw dropped to the floor.
“You’ve gotta show me. Want to defeat him for me?!”
I curled up on the couch with a bag of popcorn, my eyes glued to the big screen TV. As I shoveled popcorn into my face, I watched Leo calmly execute every fight move and battle strategy that I had avoided for months.
As Leo closed out the final battle scene, he handed the controller back to me.
“It’s your game, Mom. You should finish it.”
He was right. Across hundreds of hours, I had acquired a vast array of materials to support the game. My side quests were fruitful, not epic. But, Leo wielded all the materials of my game journey in a completely new way. In the span of twenty minutes, he had accomplished something I had avoided for months.
“Absolutely not. It’s way more fun watching you.”
Recently, I scoped an ambitious project. The client wanted answers and deliverables in a six-week timeline for a body of work that typically takes 12 weeks to complete. I knew their timeline was aggressive. I knew it would be a challenge. I knew it was risky. But, I also knew it was our only shot. I laid down guardrails, crafted the scope, and sold the project.
When I onboarded the delivery team, I fessed up to my approach. I acknowledged that this would be a jet-fueled project for a high-visibility, important account. I committed to help in any way I could. Scouring through years of prior project examples, I gathered every tool, every template, every accelerator they might need. I filled their equipment bag with every possible item from all my side quests. Then I took a deep breath and let them loose.
Within the first two weeks of the project, they produced a volume of work that typically takes twice as long to create. They wielded prior project examples like a Silver Lynel Horn, with powers unknown to me. They reshaped the raw materials I had gathered into something that blew the clients away.
When my team received heaps of praise from the client, I stood back in admiration. I broadcasted their accomplishment from the rooftops. The team attempted to deflect the praise onto me. If it hadn’t been for all the tools I gave them, they said, they wouldn’t have been able to do it.
But, if it hadn’t been for my aggressive project timeline, they wouldn’t have needed the tools at all.
As Leo and I watched the final scene narrations unfold, we were presented with two options: start a new game or continue exploring, reverting back to the moment before the last battle.
We chose the side quest.