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Got an IRL Side Hustle? Succeed Sooner with these Stardew Valley Lessons
Accelerate your growth and reach profitability, by applying these learnings from the Stardew Valley universe.
In the entrepreneurial world it’s all about optimising time, productivity, and efficiency until you can reach profitability. Whilst these topics have already been covered time and time again (can anyone say, “eat the frog”?), there’s a few untapped lessons lurking in the video game Stardew Valley. Here’s the most important lessons I took from the game, that I use every day to achieve more with less—in the long run.
Spoiler warning: there are mild Stardew Valley spoilers ahead, from the early game.
Time isn’t your problem. Energy is.
The old way of thinking about productivity has reached its limits. We’re told growing up that time is money, and that efficiency is the key to get more done with your day. It does work for a while, but we typically carry on riding that train until we burn out. Instead of managing and making time in the literal sense, you really want to be thinking of your day in terms of energy.
To understand this best, we need to establish a few key concepts about energy in Stardew Valley:
- You start out your day with a fixed amount of energy
- Certain actions or tasks will use more energy than others
- If we burn all our energy, we can’t do much else the rest of the day
In Stardew Valley, most players start out believing that time is the enemy to making progress. Once you start planting more crops and chopping more trees, you’ll learn that energy is the biggest problem to earning more money and freeing up your time to do fun things and explore. Life is very much the same, but we’re not taught that—let alone how to maximise and sustain our energy.
Lesson: think about what are the most important tasks you have in a day, and prioritise achieving those earlier on. If you have time but no energy, don’t…
