We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Myles Nye. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Myles below.
Myles, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?
After navigating the business from its inception through the lockdowns, my business partner told me a year and a half ago that he wanted to bow out of our partnership. In an amicable way, I bought him out and went from being co-founder of my first business to, fifteen years later, a first-time sole owner. I can’t tell the story of how the transition went because it’s still happening: this is a story I’m in the middle of it, and it is hard, especially with the state of the events industry feeling uncertain. This sector hasn’t yet landed where it’s meant to be in the age of COVID vaccines. But I do not need to worry about failing to push myself or getting opportunities for growth, because I am being pushed and I am growing as a business owner. I don’t have a choice! So I am trying to grow as healthfully as I can. If I’d wanted, I could have taken my partner’s retirement as an off-ramp and done something other than run this business. Instead, I took a risk, I want to continue to spread our message and deliver excellent service to our clients. It’s a risk I wanted to take and I’m still taking it, and everyone who brings us on to play our games is taking it with us, and for that I am full of gratitude.
Myles, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
Wise Guys Events creates playful experiences for professionals. Clients hire us for team building games that don’t make you cringe. I’m a challenge designer for Survivor, plus I’ve consulted for escape rooms, game shows, board game publishers, and puzzle hunts, so I’m really about as elbow-deep in games and game play as it is possible to get. Clients love our games because they’re new, they’re never cheesy, and their players have so much fun they don’t realize they’re accomplishing something.
I started the company because of my expertise in game design but, with the addition of Awesome Ashby to the team, what we really are now is experts in executing sensational events. Our proven process means that when a client works with us, we take everything off their plate – all they have to do is show up with the people, and we make them look like a genius for choosing us.
My special super ability is the power to pair any group or occasion with a suitable game. Games are my hobby as well as my business. In addition to working for corporate clients including Apple, Nike, Disney, and Toyota, we also participate in festivals and cultural happenings such as Getty Day of Play and IndieCade in LA, and the Come Out and Play Festival in San Francisco and New York, plus I’m always reading games books from the hippies in the 70’s inventing the New Games Movement to Victorian parlor games of the 1800s. If there’s a game that would be a fit for your group, I’m the person you want selecting it!
One of the things I’m most proud of is my consulting work on Survivor. In my capacity as a team building game facilitator, it is my pleasure to help groups work together better. However, when making a game for reality TV, you want to provoke people to fight or to suffer, or preferably both – quite different than our corporate work! Some of the challenges I’ve contributed became all-star challenges, thanks to the talents of my boss John Kirhoffer, the Challenge Producer, and his team. Watching A Crate Idea and The Game is Afoot become recurring segments on the show, as well as working closely with Executive Producer and host Jeff Probst to create the rebus puzzle that formed the backbone of The Game Within the Game, and earning the show’s only ever Game Designer credit, was a feather in my cap for sure.
Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?
For other resources, I’d have to say therapy! I’m very much “guy who never stops talking about his therapy,” and especially during the most anxious and frought days of the 20’s so far, having a therapy practice was irreplaceable for maintaining my connection to my family, my creative energies, and my integrity. It’s made me a better employee of my company and a better boss, as well as a better man. I’d encourage anyone who’s interested in self-betterment to seek therapy. You don’t have to have something “wrong” to start the relationship; as they say, the relationship is the therapy.
But for less intense resources, I loved “Getting to Yes,” “Never Split the Difference,” “Profit First,” and “Growing a Business.” I love Tom Henschel’s monthly emails from Essential Communications, and I love Thiagi’s monthly gamesletter.
How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?
I recently read for the first time David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement speech, “This is Water,” and it got me thinking about empathy. I think the best thing we can do as a society is perspective taking: exercising the muscle that allows you to put yourself in another’s place. The benefits of this practice are far-reaching, and it is a major contributor to public betterment. It is a first step to replacing a scarcity mentality with an abundance mindset. I also think it’s worth asking ourselves why we don’t like the things we don’t like: it’s easy to have a knee-jerk reaction to anything that might give us discomfort or provoke unpleasant thoughts, but sometimes that’s exactly the place we need to direct our attention to break out of unhealthy patterns we may have fallen into. 
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Wise Guys Events