In high school, my friend Wilson was always able to achieve enormous scores playing Tetris on his calculator. Nobody could even possibly come close in comparison. There were quite a few of my classmates trying for months, but none could even seem to come close.

The basic goal of Tetris is to arrange Tetrads (4 squares arranged in 6 possible shapes) so that rows are filled up without gaps. Then the row disappears and you receive points for them.

Or at least that’s the common knowledge about Tetris. Wilson and everyone who is serious about these blocks knows that there are ways to substantially rack up the number of points you can receive. And if you can create such significant changes in a game by altering a few moves, why can’t you do that in business? After all, life is a game.

In Tetris when you remove a row you get a small number of points, when you remove multiple rows at once you get a larger number of points. And when you get a Tetris (four rows at once) you get the most possible points for your level. Wilson knows this, and whenever he gets a long piece, there is always a place waiting for it. Compare these to deals or business transactions. Sure your business can get by selling only one part of the equation, but if you could provide all the parts needed you certainly would become more valuable.

The next point is levels, you can start off at level 1 and get peanuts for lining up the bricks with 10 lines before the speed increases, or you can start at level 9 and get about ten times the amount for your work with a stable speed for 90 completed lines.

How fast are you prepared to be? Can you handle a hundred orders in a day? Can your company’s infrastructure handle the stress resulting from them? You might not know when the situation will arise that requires you to be available for the big order. So do you want to flop or be Johnny on the spot?

As I was playing once Wilson was watching me as the number of gaps started to gradually increase. I asked him what I should do or if he could save it. He told me that he would probably just restart the game.

Instead of sitting around taking a beating, he would just start over.

Wilson was able to recognize that I was in serious trouble, and instead of messing around with a thousand different small pieces, it would be better to start over and try again. Of course throwing out all the work to simply start over might not always seem like a good idea, but the knowledge that you learned from the previous experience should help guide your next version of the project.

Every time I play the game I think about how the end goal is the same. You can’t beat the game, the bricks just keep coming faster and faster. But you can strive to do your better than you have ever done before. To me, I can certainly see a link between Tetris and Entrepreneurship. How about you?