Lessons - Becoming an E-Sports Champion | Carlos Rodriguez - Founder & CEO of G2 ESports

If you're the number one esports player, no one's ever really done it before. There's no coach that has done this as a professional for 10 years, you know, before you were even born, that knows how to train, knows how to navigate, knows how to deal with contracts. So like, technically you're more or less on your own. Did you find somebody or was it, was it you sort of paving the way? Because when I look at you in your story, it seems like you paved the way for how to coach, how to train, how to negotiate, how to build a brand, how to sort of operate at a high level when you're actually as a player, it was just you, basically, and probably a handful of other people that were coming up at the same time as you. Yeah, this is actually a good point. Like, it is true that I never had a mentor as a player because I was, I mean, I was not literally the first player, but I was the first player, you know, in the sense of, it was, I was one of the first players, you know. And I could just look at my environment and say, okay, that works. Okay, that doesn't work. Okay, that guy got fucked. Okay, you know, I was just taking my learnings the hard way, you know. And yeah, you're right. I mean, I had to build my own path. And in a way, that's why I think, and I'm very grateful for this, the industry, like my reputation and credibility within the industry is really high. And it makes me happy that people look back and see me as, yeah, a legacy player that now is touching a completely different side of the business, you know. And ultimately, man, I feel like it's just, it's just, it's fun when you have to build a path that's never existed before because you like, you learn to take fuck up some failures as just another day in the office, you know. Like right now, like the culture of G2, it's incredible. Like I feel like people just know inherently that the only thing that will be held accountable to is to try out things. That's the one metric that everybody's held accountable to. Just try out things that haven't been done before or try out things that you think you can do better. And that's the only KPI pretty much, you know. If you fail at it, that's okay. But if you get nothing new done, if you're taking no risks, then it's when, you know, when I start looking at you, maybe not a good culture fit. And I think that comes from my times as a player. Like so many decisions were straight up wrong. Even in social media, just having a big mouth. And it sometimes was great, something was shitty, you know. And I built a brand, my brand is completely transparent. This raw guy that is just bantering with everyone, having a good time and sometimes misses the mark. That's pretty much me, you know. And I love it, you know, I really love it because you can't serve the wave unless you're at the exact proper place in the wave. If you're too high, if you're too low, you're gonna miss it, you're gonna miss it. So, and sometimes you will miss the mark, you will miss the wave. And sometimes you will miss the mark. It's gonna get you a lot of hatred and you have to be okay with that, you know. So I feel like it's failures, including shitty contracts signed, including bad decisions around changing players, including whatever it is. The fact that I can't look at a Bible and just say, okay, I was right, okay, this is wrong. And just look at just the results of my actions is very reassuring. And like almost liberation, you know. It's like a freedom, you know. You get in charge. You can trust yourself. You can trust, I think that's the most powerful thing you can ever do, you trust yourself. You know that if you had to do it all again, you had to figure it all out again, you just trust that you'd do it because you figured it out once. And now you start to understand that if you can figure out and navigate all the good, the bad and the shit that happened to you and you do it successfully once, you can do it multiple times. And you probably, you know, your career in your life is gonna look different in another 20 years from now, whatever that is. And then you'll figure that piece out. And I think that's probably the most powerful thing you can do. And you can only ever come to that conclusion if you failed a lot because then if you haven't failed, you don't know how to deal with the failure, you don't know how to trust how you'd react when set doesn't go the way you want it to go. So I think that's what I'm saying. It's just that the small things in the day to day, right? Like small things, small things, whatever small may be. You know, it's like when something is out of the comfort zone, it's like the reason you just don't wanna do it is because, okay, what if I do it and then I don't do it properly? Or what if I try to do it and it's just not the expectation I had? It doesn't matter, you know, just just go. You know, just do it. What's the worst case scenario, you know? You lose the evening, like what is the worst thing? You lose 100 euros. Like what's the worst case scenario? You know, just try it, you know? If you're really a failure in it, well, why not? If anything, you get a 100-year-old lesson. I always say that, you know?