Glitch the Game of Life
If life was a video game, wouldn’t she want to get to level 100 as quickly as possible?
If you ever played Skyrim, you knew the ultimate goal was to get the best armor in the game as quickly as possible: the Dragon Armor. How did you achieve this?
You needed to have level 100 smithing. And in order to get there as quickly as humanly possible, you had to use some exploits—sometimes even glitch out of the map. You know how in video games you can see the matrix pattern that separates the out-of-bounds area from the playable area? This was only for the bold—the player who explored the outskirts and tried to push the limits of the game.
So you’d climb the walls of Whiterun, jump in a very particular way, and land in between a very specific rock that would slide you under the map—under the matrix. From there, you could go directly to the source of the shop owners’ chests and steal from them without being noticed. You gather all their materials, all their valuables, and then return to your save point. Then you go directly back to the shop owners and sell them their own goods. You do this on repeat and stack your gold as quickly as possible.
With your gold, you then spam iron daggers at the blacksmith, crafting them over and over and selling them back to him, leveling up your smithing to 100. Now that it’s maxed, you’re ready to unlock that sweet Dragon Armor.
Bitcoin Is the New Out-of-Bounds Glitch
I like this metaphor in relationship to Bitcoin, because it feels like you’re glitching out of the matrix—stealing from the chests in Whiterun when you receive fiat currency from your 9-5 job, and then going right back to them and selling them their goods for a 10x profit by buying Bitcoin.
To have the balls to buy Bitcoin, you have to explore the outskirts, take the dangerous paths, and slip out of the matrix. But you’re ultimately gonna wind up at the god-tier with Dragon Armor on before the rest of the players.
Mario Bros. Was Trying to Teach You
Another simple metaphor is Super Mario Bros.—everybody knows Super Mario Bros., but maybe not Skyrim. I’m talking about the very first one.
Remember level two? That underground zone where the spooky song turns on and there’s those spiky crabs, green pipes with piranha plants, and those elevators? I’m surprised how many people who played that game didn’t know about the elevator glitch…
To advance from level two to world seven or nine or something ridiculous, and basically beat the game in two minutes—it was actually super simple. But it required a risk.
I even remember when I found it. I was just a little seven-year-old boy, tinkering, trying to break the game. You’d jump on the elevator and ride it all the way to the top, out of the bounds area on the ceiling of your Game Boy screen, and then run endlessly to the right. Eventually, you’d fall into a warp zone where you could skip all the way to the end of the game.
Eighth Grade Was a Digital Hustle
Even in eighth grade, when the iPod Touch came out, nobody knew how to jailbreak their iPods. I had like 20 iPods in my backpack at one point. Everybody paid me five bucks so I could jailbreak their iPods and get them games like Tony Hawk Pro Skater.
And everybody who played Tony Hawk knew the most important attributes to max out were Speed and Air. Why? Because when those two were maxed out, you could find the secret tape faster, jump further, and advance at a way faster rate than if you were wasting points on Rail Balance or Hang Time.
The Moral of the Story
The moral of the story is this: the intrepid, the bold, the daring—the ones willing to experiment—are always the ones who innovate and advance faster in this video game we call life.