Big Pharma: Lesson 1

   An adventure in drug making - life lessons from a game about production and sales strategies. What wisdom can be gained?

   First off, Big Pharma is a game by Twice Circled and Positech Games, available on Steam here. Don't worry, Steam doesn't have an affiliate program, so I don't get money from linking it. It just felt like the thing to do. You know, in case you wanted to try it yourself.

   So far, I've learned two things: a lesson in perfectionism, and a valuable bit of insight about money. Today I'm going to talk about the perfectionism.

The Perfect Obstacle

   Big Pharma has these 'levels' of sorts. They're really challenges, and each one has a specific requirement to fulfill to complete the stage.

   This is what my challenges menu looks like. There are more to the right, but you get the idea.

   (Click on the image for a larger view.)

   The colored lined on the left side are for completed levels: green for standard, blue for expert and purple for master. As you can see, I've mastered every level so far. Yay!

   When I started out, I only really expected to complete the standard goal, maybe the expert. On the first challenge (Bottom Line), I got cocky and decided halfway through to go for it. By the time I got to Game of Margins, it was my primary goal to master every challenge I came across.

   That's all well and fine, since that's the way games are played. My ambition wasn't the lesson (although maybe there's one to be had there). The lesson was that I kept trying to be perfect.

   In Big Pharma, perfection has many heads:

-using every square inch efficiently,
-using the least expensive processing per cure,
-balancing the discount/bonus margins for maximum profit,
-and producing the highest priced cures with no side effects.

   That's a lot of considerations for achieving perfection!

   At some point, the pressure to be perfect overwhelmed me and I started to gt sloppy. Thing is...

   That worked.

   The life lesson here was: Perfection gets in the way of actual productivity.

   There's a bunch of sayings out there about perfection:

-The world needs you now, not when you're perfect
-Practice makes perfect
-Progress, not perfection
-Perfection doesn't exist
-Etc.

   Big Pharma taught me a real world lesson about how striving for perfection tends to get in the way of reaching a goal; it's better to do what you can for less effort (though still put in appropriate thought) than to plan out the 'perfect' strategy. Because at the end of the day, the less effort you put in to any individual project the more projects overall you can produce.

   What are your thoughts? Comment below, or on my Facebook page!

~See ya next time, Internet Drifters!