You Need To Understand Your Playstyle To Succeed



There are patterns of success and methodologies that you can reverse-engineer to adopt to achieve X or Y type of success (such as earning $100K/year with sales or building a business, be it online or offline) — for those kind, there are Playbooks (think of these as Standard Operating Procedures)…

but in this article, I want to talk about yes, following those Playbooks but adapting them with your Playstyle.

I give you an example.

Say you want to get a franchise license, be it McDonald’s, Starbucks, Subway, Kentucky Fried Chicken – whatever. You will not only pay the licensing fee to setup and monthly, but you’d be given a list of SOPs, which you cannot deviate from, such as specific procedures and operations.

Those I can agree – if a client wants a Big Mac Meal, yes, take the order AND offer the upsize program (ie do you want to upsize / add fries with that) – this is must. Let’s call these the Hard Processes that cannot be ignored.

However, Playstyle is more about Soft Power.

Where your personality, character, value, and things like kindness, quirks, humor and personal charisma comes to play. Let me give you an example –

There was once I brought two of my kids to McDonalds (I now have 3 kiddos, but before the 3rd one came along, I was with 2 right haha), and we ordered ice cream after a playground outing. David ordered his usual McFlurry, and Olivia ordered her usual ice cream cone.

And guess what happened?

Yep, Olivia’s dropped her ice cream cone just 5 steps away from the counter we bought ice cream from. We went back to the cashier to buy another ice cream for her and the cashier asked how come she came back so fast for more ice cream (since we bought it less than 2 minutes). After we explained, the cashier said “aw, poor thing, here’s one from us, no charge”.

And with that splendid quick and simple empathy, I was hooked – my heart and brain went “this person is kind, this brand is kind to my daughter”.

Perhaps it is part of the Playbook SOP, but I dont think empathy can be SOPified – this cashier was truly kind and empathetic, which worked well for the situation.

The point of this article is to highlight yes, there are some rules of the game, but also to remind you and myself to be

  1. Ourselves in our all quirks, humanity
  2. Kind to others and ourselves

Just these simple gestures can go really far.

Of course, make it sustainable. Dont “try” to adopt other personalities that you enjoy but too tiring for you to maintain. It’s a little hard to put into words and text, but I’ll try.

Imagine if you’re a normal human being, and you come across someone who seems loud, very enthusiastic, very “on” for the lack of a better word, and you want to be like them. You try to do the same, and you realize that doing that for 1 hour makes you tired for 12 hours…then you need to consider maybe either doing that less but spread out say 5 minutes here and there rather than 1 hour straight out.

Or simply adapt some of that into your everyday regular being, which is great.

You’d want something sustainable, fun that can scale and repeat without killing yourself. Conversely, it should layer upon layer your energy and interest, rather than sapping it dry.

Add that to a proven system Playbook, your chances of success and maintaining success rate will increase by a lot, with a lot of work and fine tuning of course.



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