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As Successful As Your Last Title

It took me longer than was probably needed to realise.

You hear the phrase “you’re only as good as your last work” a lot. Whether in film, television or games, people will remember your last work.

When that last work is successful, they’ll of course remember the body of work that came before but it’s hard when you’re on the inside.

If you’re bridging projects or feeling the momentum dip between projects, you have to keep putting in the reps. Showing up day after day. We were lucky enough to have our ninth birthday in June, I’m excited to see where year 10 goes. Throughout the 9 year period we’ve had peaks and valleys, and that’s how it should be. I’m one to celebrate less on the peaks and really dig in throughout the valleys. The valleys for me is where I thrive to get better and learn more through improving process and routine.

You need to have the intrinsic motivation of just creating great work and to not let people engaging with you be a reflection of who you are. The world is busy and people understandably forget. But you’re creating work for them. You’re showing up for them. It isn’t about you.

Binding our wishes to what will be

In the Daily Stoic this morning, there is a passage that reads ‘Binding our wishes to what will be’.

As we begin the 2nd of November with the biggest game launch in the studio’s 10 year history, there is a feeling of it being out of our hands.

We’ve done the prep, made the best game we could, kept the team healthy and happy, created marketing assets and shouted about the game.

Of course, there’s still lots more to do to continue to talk about the game post-launch, the real work begins now, but for the initial reactions, we have done all we can.

Whatever project you’re completing and pushing over the finish line, it was the journey that got you here. Of course the results are required for future projects to get off the ground, but right now, you did all you could. The rest is out of your hands.

The three masks of a creative startup

The creative, the manager, the entrepreneur

After nearly 10 years after founding White Paper Games, I’ve only just become aware of the many masks and how people are unable to read who you are at any given time.

I read a book a few years ago which I highly recommend to anyone in creative fields called the E-Myth.

I have quite strong beliefs when I communicate. I listen often but when I’ve formed an opinion, I use this to drive my feedback.

Most often, these are in creative situations. I try to use rational drive these discussions which Adam Grant in his book ‘Think Again‘ also says could be an issue, but I realised in creative discussions people don’t know who I am.

Am I the ‘boss’? A term that never gets used but are they seeing me as someone who says it should be done X way from an authoritive perspective?

We believe in strong creative disagreement and we can have many heated meetings. This is always focused on what’s best for our users/players over and never a personal attack and we believe this creates the strongest ideas when people are able to poke holes. You can refer to this as an idea meritocracy.

But when I’m in one of those discussions, I’m in there as a designer, alongside everyone else, but people are unable to see that. They either see me as a production manager, as a studio founder or ‘boss’.

I don’t speak unless I have a strong opinion about something, but how do you know between people thinking your creative idea is the right one as opposed to agreeing due to an unwritten hierarchy?

You need to find people that can engage and question.

You need to separate yourself from the many masks as soon as you’re able to. If you want to be a creative, let someone else handle the day to day business. This can be super tough for 2 reasons.

Money, there’s never enough of it. After 9 years, we’re only just getting to hiring our first ‘non-developer’ role.

You need to spend time an energy making sure the person you bring in understands your vision and purpose. You’ll find it hard to verbalise this over the first 5+ years so you try to take on those roles as well as the creative but as you’ve probably experienced, this can lead so many more complications when scale is introduced.

Being aware and understanding the different masks you might wear will help inform your view in meetings and creative collaborations.

The phrase ‘wearing many hats’ is unhelpful. It doesn’t get to the psychology of the team dynamics and could instead be seen as you’re doing multiple roles, but it goes deeper than that.

You can wear many hats and be proud of this fact because it shows you’re able to (or in a lot of cases unable to) balance the work and do each hat justice. But people can still see you when you change hats. This isn’t the case with a mask. You’re unrecognisable and it’s for you to decipher how you’re able to communicate with your team about this. Knowing it exists allows you to provide context to your thoughts when having a creative disagreement.

Another One of Those

You see them coming once you’ve been there a couple of times.

Ray Dalio uses the phrase ‘Another one of those’.

You learn to see the signs and you get a little better with dealing with them each time.

Throughout your journey you’ll have actions you’re good at and actions that need improvement. Whether signing the next project, hiring a key role or marketing a product, it’s always ‘another one of those’ once you’ve been through it.

Reflect and learn from past actions. Dissect what was & wasn’t successful. Refine your approach. There will always be refinement, but with another one of those, you’ll learn to see the key points.

If you can see it in the distance and have time to prepare, you’ll feel better with yourself. Then, once it’s passed, you have more data to compare with past and present experiences. You’ll see that you’ve grown on this path.

The inflection points may happen every 5-7 years or so. They’re key deciding beats which will dictate your journey.

They’re inevitable and invariable but they’ll make you antifragile.

What can you do to prepare for your next inflection point and how will that change your strategy?

Intrinsic VS Extrinsic

I’ve come to realise in the last 10 years of development, there’s a single differentiating factor between success and failure. Or more specifically, perceived success and failure.

If you’re constantly looking inward, trying to create the work for yourself and not putting external pressures on yourself, you’re focusing on the intrinsic rewards.

If you’re constantly trying to judge yourself based on other actions people are taking or trying to gain certain accolades, you’re putting too much weight on factors outside of your control.

If you do the work and show up each day, yes there are many fires outside of your control, but what you do control is creating the work and if it’s just the work that matters, everything else is figuroutable.

Betting big

In my experience, you need to bet big to establish yourself.

You need to keep pushing in production until it’s right. You need a big idea, which may get scoped down, but you can’t start small.

If you start small you run the risk of going unnoticed. It’s likely people don’t want what you’re offering.

By all means start with constraints. Don’t plan something unachievable. Break it down into it’s component parts and tackle it in steps. But don’t start small.

Starting small means you’ll target a smaller market. You’ll likely give up from betting small because you didn’t get the extrinsic recognition you thought you’d receive.

If you bet big, you may not get all the way, but you stand more of a chance to carve a new blue ocean for yourself.

Strong opinions, weakly held

We have two core values that speak to openness and communication within the team;

‘To foster open discussion and provide candid feedback on ideas regardless of job role or seniority’ & ‘To be concise and articulate whilst also listening to each other’s perspectives to seek understanding on a given topic’.

We’ve always been a team of condensed hierarchy. New people joining the team have as much input as more senior people. Everyone discussed their thoughts and the best idea wins.

There’s a dichotomy I’ve noticed between having a good idea and how you communicate that idea. I’ve always been strong headed in my beliefs. A quote from Paul Saffo, technology forecaster and Stanford University professor, resonates strongly with me: “Have strong opinions, but weakly held”.

Throughout my career I’ve caused friction by having a strong opinion. When you’re wearing many masks its hard for people to differentiate who is speaking.

Some people on the team struggle to articulate themselves succinctly in real-time, but people listen. We try not to interrupt. We let other’s speak if it felt like we interrupted a pause they were taking.

When in design discussions, when you have to get into the weeds and cause some tension, I don’t believe work with a clear direction can successfully exist without people arguing for a clear direction (this includes the whole team not just an individual), it can cause offense.

Especially when you abdicate from a role. You have to remove your ego and know that someone more specialised for that role will have a better idea.

When that situation arises, you need to remind yourself of the mission. Why did you put this person in that role. Hold to your core values and know you’re working for the thing that’s bigger than yourself and you’re showing up to do the work for the team, not yourself.

I’ve caused offense and friction from doing this the wrong way, you have to tread the line and hold true to your core values. Even remind yourself on a cyclical basis.

You can’t be precious but you have to be clear and have strong ideas you articulate clearly, but when someone inevitably comes up with a better idea, as long as it doesn’t conflict with the mission, you have to loosen your strong belief and align with theirs to move the project forward.

Working on your business instead of inside your business

Michael Gerber has a great book where he coined that phrase.

In the early days of bookstrapping, you’re touching every moving cog and focusing on your energy on setting the course for the journey.

But once that journey is underway, you need to learn to pull yourself away from every task. It’s hard to delegate, but in order to stay focused on the direction, you have to give up some of the control.

If you’re only dealing with tasks when it gets too late to avoid them, you’ll constantly be carrying about the weight that slows down the momentum of turning the flywheel. This of course is the dichotomy between firefighting and letting fires burn out sometimes and you have to know what areas could cause true damage.

I learnt a good habit from Jim Collins where he writes down every task he does in a day in 15 minute blocks. I did this for a full 7 week cycle and with each task I assigned a task type such as finance, team, production, design, tech, fix, admin etc.

You’d be surprised in the number of directions your pulled in a day.

You need to highlight the areas of key importance for you. The rest, if important, you’ll need to eventually hire for. And the bonus of having the tasks tagged and archived is that when you come to writing a job description, you’ll know what the role will entail as you’ve been doing it; they’ll just do it better than you and allow you to work on your business instead of inside it.

Betting Big

In my experience, you need to bet big to establish yourself.

You need to keep pushing in production until it’s right. You need a big idea, which may get scoped down, but you can’t start small.

If you start small you run the risk of going unnoticed. It’s likely people don’t want what you’re offering.

By all means start with constraints. Don’t plan something unachievable. Break it down into it’s component parts and tackle it in steps. But don’t start small.

Starting small means you’ll target a smaller market. You’ll likely give up from betting small because you didn’t get the extrinsic recognition you thought you’d receive.

If you bet big, you may not get all the way, but you stand more of a chance to carve a new blue ocean for yourself.

Context Switching

Instead of multi-tasking, I try to think of it as context switching.

When you have many different masks to wear inevitably you have many different contexts to switch throughout the day and I generally have a 13 hour work day from 5am to 6pm. It’s important to schedule reset points throughout the day to recharge and keep your energy levels.

Having themed days is something I learnt from Jack Dorsey. If you have multiple job roles, having specific types of tasks to do on each day of the week helps.

I then write down my top 5 high value (HV) tasks to do that day. Some people prefer physical paper, I’m fine with Evernote w/ a checklist. As long as I get these 5 tasks done, it’s a good day.

The first 3 hours of my morning are for HV tasks. The tasks that can take any between 30 minutes to 90 minutes. Progressively throughout the day I open up the floodgates to fight fires and tackle the 1st-4th priority tasks.

By 3-5pm I’m on the ‘quick’ tasks that could take anywhere between 1 minute to 10 minutes and I’m ticking off as many as my brain has power for.

It’s important to know your body’s energy levels and have systems and routines in place to handle the workload but if you understand that you will have to switch contexts and go in and out of deep work, eating the frogs first thing in the morning allow you to fight fires in the afternoon.

Switching contexts costs power. If you start with smaller tasks in the morning, you’ve expended more energy and don’t have enough load for the bigger things. Staff offline where possible.

Stay focused and then complete tasks which require people interaction once you’ve got your 5 HV tasks completed.