What a MMORPG called Black Desert helped me understand about making money

So, a while ago, when I purchased my new computer, I discovered a new MMORPG called Black Desert with the help of a friend. After trying it for around a day using a 7 days trial account, I fell in love with the combat system. To be honest, I think Black Desert has one of the best combat systems out there, and the most beautiful graphics.

I'm not gonna go into details too much, since this is not a review, and whether I think this game is good or bad, that's another discussion. The thing is that this game is really focused around making in game money, in order to buy better gear for your character and make it as strong as possible.

Because making money is such a big thing, a lot of people spend hours and hours grinding every day in order to get items that they can later sell for money. If you're not familiar with the term "grind", it usually refers to an activity someone repeats again and again in order to get to a certain result. In this game, grinding is usually referred to fighting all kind of monsters for hours in order to get good loot.

Anyway, yesterday I was on YouTube and I saw a video named "Black Desert Online [BDO] How I Make 1 Billion Silver in a Week" (silver is the in game currency) that kinda got my attention.

I'm not that much into the game, even though I enjoy some aspects of it, and I certainly don't have the time to spend God knows how many hours playing just to get stronger in a game that has no end, but I was still curious to find out how someone can make such a huge amount of money in that game while most people can't.

So, I watched the video, and it was clear from the start that the guy who made it knew what he was doing. However, all he said about the actual strategy he used to get money in the game wasn't as important for me as the one thing he said at the beginning of the video, something that made me realize that the same simple principle he used in the game can be applied to making real money, a principle most people forget about or simply choose to ignore.

What he said, is this: "There's no secret to it. It just takes a lot of hours. What's my secret? I play this game way more than any normal adult should. That's the trick."

Now, it doesn't matter if you think he's wasting his time, or if I think he's wasting his time, that's not important. As far as I know he has a Twitch channel where he streams the game, so that's good for him.

But what he said really made me think about how similar making money is in that game compared to real life.

When I first started playing, I spent quite a few hours in the game, daily, grinding, killing all kind of monsters, and that resulted in a lot of money being made. Since I stopped doing that, I stopped making a lot of money.

Thing is, as simple and as obvious as this may sound, it applies to real life as well, a lot more than some people realize. Yes, sure, working smart is great, and finding ways to automate some of your tasks is extremely important.

However, the main principle remains - the more time you invest into "grinding", the more money you'll make. It doesn't matter if we're talking about the game, or about real life.

Think about it in terms of actual work - if you spend 5 or 6 hours every single day, doing one activity, like writing, you would be able to write enough articles to probably last you for several weeks, especially if you've been writing for a while and you have enough experience. Now compare that to writing for only one hour a day.

If you spend 5 to 6 hours a day coding, especially if that's not your job, you'll be able to make a bunch more progress and learn a lot more things than those who spend maybe 30 or 60 minutes coding.

If you spend 5 to 6 hours a day drawing, you'll probably get a lot better at it than those who spend only one or two hours a day doing it.

So, the more time you spend working on something, the better you get at it, and the higher the rewards you'll get will be.

It's such a simple concept, yet so many people forget about it. It's not about using all kind of weird tricks, it's not about finding the right thing to do all the time, it's simply about how much time you spend working. Even if you do something simple, the more you do it, the more rewards you'll be getting.

Maybe this is worth remembering when you're trying to think about working less and relax a little bit more. Maybe it's worth remembering when you're searching for easier ways to work in order to spend more time doing something different.

I'm not saying you should ditch all the things you learned about working smart and making progress without investing crazy hours into your work. However, sometimes all you need is a principle as simple as "the more I do it, the more I'll get out of it" in order to make a bunch of progress.

Sometimes, all you need to do is to spend a bunch of time working and forget about finding shortcuts.