What to learn from the Founder of Million-dollar Game - Monopoly

Let’s take a look at the life of a man who has been attributed as the first game inventor to become a millionaire.

Charles Darrow was an unemployed salesman and inventor living in Germantown, Pennsylvania, who was struggling with odd jobs to support his family in the years following the great stock market crash of 1929. Remembering his summers spent in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Charles spent his spare time drawing the streets of Atlantic City on his kitchen tablecloth, with found pieces of material and bits of paints, wood etc. contributed by local merchants. A game was already forming in his mind as he built little hotels, houses and other tokens to go along with his painted streets.

Soon friends and family gathered nightly to sit around the kitchen table to buy, rent and sell real estate, all part of a game involving spending vast sums of play money. It quickly became a favorite activity among those with little real cash of their own.

The friends soon wanted copies of the game to play at home (especially the winners.) The accommodating inventor began selling copies of his board game for four dollars each. He then made up a few sets and offered them to department stores in Philadelphia. Orders for the game increased to the point where Charles decided to try to sell the game to a game manufacturer rather than going into full-scale manufacturing.

He wrote to Parker Brothers to see if the company would be interested in producing and marketing the game on a national basis, but the company turned him down, explaining that his game contained “three fundamental errors” including: the game took too long to play, the rules were too complicated and there was no clear goal for the winner.

Undeterred Charles continued to manufacture the game, and hired a printer friend to produce five thousand copies. He had orders to fill from department stores including F. A. O. Schwarz.

One customer, a friend of Sally Barton, daughter of Parker Brothers’ founder, George Parker, bought a copy of the game. The friend told Mrs. Barton how much fun Monopoly was, and suggested that Mrs. Barton tell her husband, Robert B. M. Barton, who was the then president of Parker Brothers. Mr. Barton listened to his wife and bought a copy of the game.

Not long after he arranged to talk business with Charles in Parker Brothers’ New York sales office, offering to buy the game and give him royalties on all sets sold. Darrow accepted and permitted Parker Brothers to develop a shorter variation of the game, added as an option to the rules.

The royalties from Monopoly made Charles Darrow a millionaire, the first game inventor to make that much money.

So what can we learn from this?

Here are ten million dollar ideas drawn from the example of Charles Darrows…

1. Think – Take time to think. Pause from your busy life and think.
2. Identify – Identify a problem and seek a solution. Stay alert.
3. Explore – Delve into new areas of thought with fresh eyes. ‘Livingstone, I presume?’
4. Doodle – Keep a journal and write down ideas whenever they come into your head. Keep a record.
5. Review – Go over your records of old ideas. There is a season for ideas. It may have been winter the last time you looked, but now it may just be spring.
6. Experiment – Try things. Don’t discount anything until you have exhausted all the possibilities and then some.
7. Brainstorm – Pull together a team and throw up your ideas. Write down what your team comes up with. This is the place for idea multiplication.
8. Initiate – Don’t wait for a publisher to recognize you. Self-publish. Charles Darrow created the game long before the ‘big guys’ ever noticed.
9. Twist – Look at existing ideas and add your own unique twist to make it faster, smoother or better. There is always another way.
10. Succeed – Turn recess into success by just staying committed to yourself and your ideas.

With those ten ideas activated you will be in a position to turn any recession into a powerful succession.

And when it comes to succession – participate!

information source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darrow

Post written by Peter G. James Sinclair.