There was a time when my most dependable travel companion wasn’t a phone. It was a Game Boy.
My dad had gifted it to me, complete with that gloriously over-engineered magnifying-glass attachment with its own little light. I carried it everywhere. And at night, when I probably should have been sleeping, that light would come on and I would play Tetris.
Hours of it.
Falling blocks. Turning pieces. Waiting for exactly the right shape to appear.
I knew that game intimately.
Or at least I thought I did.
Decades later, I watched Tetris and discovered that behind one of the simplest games ever created was an extraordinarily complicated story involving the Soviet Union, communism and capitalism, questionable rights deals, middlemen, Nintendo, enormous commercial stakes and people flying halfway around the world on little more than conviction.
But the part that stayed with me wasn’t really about gaming.
So when I recently watched Tetris, the movie, I expected nostalgia.
Instead, I got a lesson in business.
And, perhaps more importantly, a lesson in people.
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The game was simple. Owning it wasn’t.
The first revelation for me was that Tetris came out of the Soviet Union.
Here was one of the world’s most commercially successful games, created inside a system where the relationship between an individual, an idea and ownership was completely different from the capitalist world rushing to buy it.
Then came the madness.
One person thought he owned certain rights. He sold them to someone else. That person licensed another part to somebody else. There were computer rights, console rights, handheld rights and different territories.
Suddenly, the little game I played as a child became a lesson in something much bigger:
Having something valuable is not the same as knowing who actually has the right to sell it.
And that remains incredibly relevant today.
Deals often look clean from the outside. Behind them can sit layers of introductions, intermediaries, permissions, relationships, assumptions and people interpreting the same agreement differently.
Which brings me to something else the movie made me reconsider.
We underestimate the middleman
We tend to think of middlemen as people who simply stand between two sides and take a cut.
The good ones do something very different.
They connect worlds that would otherwise never understand each other.
In Tetris, you have Soviet bureaucrats, game developers, international businessmen and Nintendo executives operating with completely different languages, incentives and ideas of ownership.
The real value lies with the person who can move between those worlds.
That exists everywhere.
The best middlemen are not brokers. They are translators of context.
They know who needs to speak to whom.
They understand what each side actually wants.
And sometimes they see the deal before either side sees it themselves.
That is an enormously underrated professional skill.
But the most powerful currency wasn’t money
This was my biggest takeaway.
There were people in the Tetris story with more money, more power and, on paper, stronger positions.
Yet Henk Rogers kept gaining something much harder to purchase.
Trust.
He went to Moscow.
He showed up personally.
He sat across the table.
He explained what he had done.
And when others were playing games with rights and contracts, his relative straightforwardness started becoming an advantage.
It reminded me of something that becomes increasingly obvious the longer you work:
People don’t always choose the most profitable person to work with. They often choose the person they actually want to work with.
Someone they trust.
Someone who answers the phone when things go wrong.
Someone who does not hide the bad news.
Someone who does not try to win every single transaction at the expense of the relationship.
Someone they simply like dealing with.
We talk endlessly about qualifications, experience, expertise and networks.
All important.
But there is another form of professional capital that never appears on a CV:
What do people feel when your name comes up?
“He’s good.”
“She delivers.”
“You can trust him.”
“Call her. She’ll figure it out.”
“I like working with them.”
Those sentences can move careers more than most certificates ever will.
Relationships are not networking
There is also an important distinction here.
A network is a collection of contacts.
A relationship is accumulated trust.
You can collect a thousand LinkedIn connections in a year.
You cannot accelerate ten years of somebody knowing how you behave.
Relationships are built when there isn’t necessarily something to gain.
The introduction you made.
The call you returned.
The credit you gave someone else.
The problem you helped solve.
The confidence you didn’t betray.
The deal in which you could have squeezed a little more out of somebody but chose not to.
Each one seems insignificant.
Until years later.
Then suddenly somebody takes your call because of something that happened five years ago.
Someone introduces you because they trust you with their own reputation.
An opportunity arrives without you applying for it.
That is when you realise relationships compound too.
Perhaps Tetris was the perfect metaphor after all
As a child, I thought Tetris was about making blocks fit.
Watching the movie decades later, perhaps it still is.
Except the pieces are people.
One person has the idea.
Another has access.
Another has capital.
Another has authority.
Another understands the market.
Another simply knows how to bring everyone together.
Individually, none of the pieces completes the line.
The magic happens when they fit.
Maybe that is how careers work too.
We spend years collecting skills, experiences, friendships, credibility and goodwill without knowing when any of them will matter.
Then one day, a person you met years ago connects with something you know today and an opportunity that did not exist yesterday.
And suddenly everything fits.
I spent countless nights as a child trying to arrange those little falling blocks.
I just didn’t realise Tetris was teaching me about life all along.