This is part two in the “How To Be (Internet) Famous” series. You can check out the previous installment here.

One of the most important things you need to know about how to be (Internet) famous, or market anything successfully, can be learned from gaming. I came across this fact because I used to be a gamer. It boils down to this: You can’t access the places you want to go, in life or in a videogame, without having the right piece of armor or equipment. The good news is that having that right piece of armor will help you be successful at anything, not just marketing. The bad news is that there’s a surefire way to blow any chance you have of succeeding. I’ll explain more here and tell you how to avoid that …

The end of that phase of my life came when I bought an XBox 360 and wound up just using it to watch the Dodgers.

But. I still play Magic: The Gathering when I can, and there are a lot of elements I took away from my gaming days that I tend to apply to other things, like showing people exactly what they need to do make themselves, or their product, (Internet) famous. In part two of this series, I’m going to share with you the most important thing I took away from my time as a gamer.

Just so we’re on the same page though: We’re not talking about gamification. I’ll tell you why, if you’ll allow me one moment to address that garbage: “Gamification” was a dumb fad mostly perpetuated by marketing people looking to find something else to cash in on between the social media marketing craze and the current growth hacking craze. All three crazes were, and are, (mostly) nonsense fueled by half-truths, selective omissions, and flat out bullshit.

Of the three, gamification was probably the worst though. It was more about manipulating people than it ever was about gaming in any true sense. Mostly, gamification centered around ignoring the important stuff from videogames, which the trend claimed to want to emulate, like world-building, creating an immersive experience through sound and visual elements, and telling a compelling story within a game that’s fun and rewarding to play.

Instead gamification was all about doing whatever it takes to activate certain psychological triggers in people’s brains, because doing so would mean they’d complete the task that you’d want them to. This doesn’t sound evil on paper, until you realize the rampant and unintended consequences that always followed. Ever get spammed on Facebook with a game invite? Ever waste a ton of money on Candy Crush or know someone who has? That’s the end result of gamification as framed by marketers. Our brains aren’t wired for constantly being stimulated like that, which makes us do dumb things. So as smart and evolved as we think we are because we decided to all wear pants, don’t kid yourself. We’re all susceptible to this.

This sort of gamification is a great tactic for the people behind the games and product, but nobody else. That’s not to suggest the idea of giving your audience incentives to get them to do something for you is a terrible idea, but selling people on gamification was all about focusing on the slot machines in Las Vegas and not the experience of Vegas itself.

Have plan, will win

What I’m talking about here comes from a fun genre of videogame. I’m referring specifically to an element from action adventure side-scroller games. The kind I grew up with. This genre includes games where you have a huge and expansive world in which to play, but there are certain parts of the world you may encounter at the beginning that you can only access later. Usually once you’ve picked up something cool like a gravity gun. (The gravity gun being something I borrowed when designing the character Liberty, which you can see her using in the image above or here on Page 7 of the Liberty: The Second City Saint preview comic. She’s using the gravity gun to pull up water from the Chicago River to then shoot at the gigantic robot dog that’s chasing her.)

I mention this element because we see a lot of similarities to it in life. Life is this big expansive world where there’s stuff you’d like to have or get to, but can’t until you have the right equipment. The downside to this is that you can’t actually go back and fix or repair anything you may have done that you regret. But. Once you’ve got that equipment, you can now access the areas you wanted to, and for me and you, that’s the key. Getting the right equipment to successfully promote the thing you want. For example, if you wanted to promote something on YouTube, and previously failed, you might be very frustrated. But if I told you how many completed views a video has in its first ten minutes, and in its first hour, matter more than any other views that video gets, you can go back and take another crack at it. This time, seeing better results.

When I talk to you about “The Probability Of Success”, which was brought up in part one of this series, it’s important to keep this element in mind. I also mentioned last time that there’s going to be things that are outside your control. Now I’m telling you not to lose time by focusing on those things or on things from your past that’ll keep you from advancing forward on your project. Don’t hold any grudges. Don’t remember any slights. Just focus on the road ahead. This stuff may sound like Common Sense 101, or even Tony Robbins 101, but common sense isn’t so common, and a general admission ticket to a Tony Robbins event will cost you $895.

If you’re going to be successful at launching and promoting stuff, you can’t succeed unless you have everything you need straightened out and ready to go. In a videogame, the outcome is predetermined. The sequence to get to the end may vary, but there’s usually only one true ending. Life isn’t like that. Because of this, everything needs to be set up flawlessly at the start, which is why we’re talking about this at all.

Avoid this surefire way to guarantee failure

So while there is no one thing that will raise your probability of success to 100 percent (each step is more about making incremental progress to get you as close to 100 percent as we can,) there is one thing you can do that will guarantee your campaign’s complete and total failure: Not knowing what success (and failure) will look like.

Let me give you a personal example. I’ve always wanted to live in Los Angeles. I love the weather. I love the beautiful women. I love the movies and want to write them. But I have a problem. I have a really weird set of skills right now. You don’t hire someone like me for a permanent job. You bring me on to consult for however long it is, you pay me, and I go back to doing what I was doing before when we’re done. If I do my job right, you get all the credit, because nobody likes an agency or marketer taking credit for a successful campaign. That honor belongs to the client. Fun job? Sure. But is it consistent? Not at all, which makes this job hard to build a life around. So, I devised a plan to solve that problem. I’m going to go to graduate school at the University at Buffalo. I’m going to get a Master’s degree in something that can’t be automated (because humans need to interact with humans with this particular job), and I’m going to get a job with that degree in LA while pitching screenplays. This way, if I can get into writing movies? Awesome. If I don’t? I’m good. I got my job. I’m in LA and I gave it my best shot. I know what success looks like. I also know what failure looks like.

Having both end points of my campaign clearly defined helps formulate the plan to get there. The trick to raising your probability of success is to actually define what success looks like, and then reverse engineer it. In other words, I know exactly what I need to be studying, working on, and writing between now and when I get to LA to achieve it. I also know what failure looks like too, and failure isn’t scary if you know what it looks like. In this case, even if I lose, I still win. If you can arrange that sort of scenario for your campaign, then you’re in pretty great shape.

Not being able to visualize either scenario is a success killer. It makes people do nothing because they fear failure. Or they allow the fear of failure to hamper their campaign, forcing the campaign to play it safe or not take any risks (whichever cliche you prefer, both are equally true).

Without knowing the outcomes you want, you can’t work towards them. Without knowing what failure looks like, you’ll shoot yourself in the foot and be worried about what happens if you fail, which will cause you to make mistakes. Reverse engineering success is a lot like going to get that gravity gun and getting where you want to go.