I apologize for being a week late to comment here. Your email is often one that I deliberately leave unread in my inbox triage because it's a treat, and I want to save it for when I can actually enjoy it. But then it slips below the event horizon of my email client, and life rolls onward. That's what happened for this post, which I didn'…
I apologize for being a week late to comment here. Your email is often one that I deliberately leave unread in my inbox triage because it's a treat, and I want to save it for when I can actually enjoy it. But then it slips below the event horizon of my email client, and life rolls onward. That's what happened for this post, which I didn't actually read until I read the NEXT one and followed the link back here.
I would like to push back a little bit about some of your goal evaluation. I started my first company back in the prehistory of the world (in the early 90s, before the internet was a thing), and things worked out great. I bought a house and it worked out great. I thought I was King Midas: things just work out!
But of course that's not the case, because even if you are King Midas, bad things happen. And my golden touch soured eventually. Not everything turned out well, and my future house purchases have been, let's just call them "poorly timed."
In my successes and lack of successes, I've tried to figure out what makes the difference, and I think I've cracked it. I've figured out the secret to some of your failed rolls.
Luck.
Seriously. It's all luck. Luck is the secret sauce. Luck is why Elon Musk is rich and why I am not. Luck is why some companies succeed and others fail. Sure, being really bad at something decreases your chances for luck, but even being really terrible at something doesn't destroy luck. I mean, just look at most of the guys who have had desks in the Oval Office. With a very few exceptions, they're all just idiots who got lucky over and over.
And that's the other secret so far as I can tell: luck comes around eventually, and our job is just to wait it out. There's an anecdote in the biography of Elon Musk about gambling. He loses and loses and loses and loses and loses, and he keeps throwing his money after it. Eventually, because that's how these things work, it turns around and he wins big. If it had been me, I would have given up after the first loss. But Musk has more money than brains (to be fair, he had more money than brains from the beginning. I think Musk is a dangerous idiot, but that's irrelevant to this example), and so he was able to keep his seat at the table, losing and losing, until luck finally caught up.
This is relevant because you've shown that you're a guy who can stick it out. You can publish ONE HUNDRED games. That's astounding! That's a lot of work! That's a lot of high quality, enjoyable work that many people appreciate. I wish that I had an accomplishment like that in my pocket.
So over the last 100 didn't pivot into a room full of gold coins that you can swim in like Scrooge McDuck. Will it happen in the next 100? I don't know, because I'm not an omniscient diety (alas). It might, or maybe in the 100 after that. Or maybe it'll be a different-but-just-as-great outcome.
The point is that by completing 100 of these things, you've shown whatever omniscient dieties who control this sort of thing that you're a guy who will out-wait luck. You'll stay at the table until you roll the natural 20.
And, boy howdy, I salute you for it. You've accomplished something marvelous so far, and if you stay on this path, success is guaranteed (eventually). Not from hard work, because that's just the table stakes. Your success will come because you stuck around at the table long enough that luck finally worked. You'll write an Adventure Snack (or whatever you're calling it by then) and send it off, and all of the sudden it goes viral and you've got 50,000 subscribers. 500,000. You'll know it's not even your best work! It didn't seem all the special, but it got lucky, and now you've got thousands of paying subscribers and you're getting interviewed by journalists and you are getting calls from games studios and Hollywood and distant cousins...
It's not going to happen to me, because I don't have 100 games (or 100 anythings) under my belt. I've given up and left the table. But not you: you're still sitting at the green felt, rolling the dice again and again and again. And that's awesome.
All of this is to say that some of this, like the number of subscribers and paying subscribers, is only distantly in your control. Mostly it's just a question of you continuing to play until your lucky number gets called. You're doing it right! And so long as you keep doing it, it'll all happen. Eventually.
Thank you so much for the kind words and thoughtful analysis, Jeffrey. It sounds like you've had a remarkable career – the kind of story that people make biopics about! I ran a company for eight years and the most I made was enough to pay a few months rent on a rent controlled apartment, lol.
I agree that so much of life comes down to luck and staying in the game. I do think we can increase our odds by understanding the game and playing it well. Maybe a micro text adventure could be a breakout hit, and if I kept doing things the same way, eventually I'd strike gold. But I'm not seeing that in the marketplace or among the fandoms who I think would be predisposed to liking them, so the odds of that feel unlikely.
So I'm seeing things differently these days, hence the changes to my newsletter. Rather than chasing hits, I want to design a setup for myself where every game I make is a satisfying accomplishment just for having finished it, and anything else that happens beyond that – all the luck stuff – is merely a bonus. So I get that sense of accomplishment after every game, not every 100 games.
That said, I am still at the table and I plan to stay here. But I'm not at the table to win a jackpot. I'm here to have some fun, a drink, and memorable conversations. Let the chips fall where they may.
I apologize for being a week late to comment here. Your email is often one that I deliberately leave unread in my inbox triage because it's a treat, and I want to save it for when I can actually enjoy it. But then it slips below the event horizon of my email client, and life rolls onward. That's what happened for this post, which I didn't actually read until I read the NEXT one and followed the link back here.
I would like to push back a little bit about some of your goal evaluation. I started my first company back in the prehistory of the world (in the early 90s, before the internet was a thing), and things worked out great. I bought a house and it worked out great. I thought I was King Midas: things just work out!
But of course that's not the case, because even if you are King Midas, bad things happen. And my golden touch soured eventually. Not everything turned out well, and my future house purchases have been, let's just call them "poorly timed."
In my successes and lack of successes, I've tried to figure out what makes the difference, and I think I've cracked it. I've figured out the secret to some of your failed rolls.
Luck.
Seriously. It's all luck. Luck is the secret sauce. Luck is why Elon Musk is rich and why I am not. Luck is why some companies succeed and others fail. Sure, being really bad at something decreases your chances for luck, but even being really terrible at something doesn't destroy luck. I mean, just look at most of the guys who have had desks in the Oval Office. With a very few exceptions, they're all just idiots who got lucky over and over.
And that's the other secret so far as I can tell: luck comes around eventually, and our job is just to wait it out. There's an anecdote in the biography of Elon Musk about gambling. He loses and loses and loses and loses and loses, and he keeps throwing his money after it. Eventually, because that's how these things work, it turns around and he wins big. If it had been me, I would have given up after the first loss. But Musk has more money than brains (to be fair, he had more money than brains from the beginning. I think Musk is a dangerous idiot, but that's irrelevant to this example), and so he was able to keep his seat at the table, losing and losing, until luck finally caught up.
This is relevant because you've shown that you're a guy who can stick it out. You can publish ONE HUNDRED games. That's astounding! That's a lot of work! That's a lot of high quality, enjoyable work that many people appreciate. I wish that I had an accomplishment like that in my pocket.
So over the last 100 didn't pivot into a room full of gold coins that you can swim in like Scrooge McDuck. Will it happen in the next 100? I don't know, because I'm not an omniscient diety (alas). It might, or maybe in the 100 after that. Or maybe it'll be a different-but-just-as-great outcome.
The point is that by completing 100 of these things, you've shown whatever omniscient dieties who control this sort of thing that you're a guy who will out-wait luck. You'll stay at the table until you roll the natural 20.
And, boy howdy, I salute you for it. You've accomplished something marvelous so far, and if you stay on this path, success is guaranteed (eventually). Not from hard work, because that's just the table stakes. Your success will come because you stuck around at the table long enough that luck finally worked. You'll write an Adventure Snack (or whatever you're calling it by then) and send it off, and all of the sudden it goes viral and you've got 50,000 subscribers. 500,000. You'll know it's not even your best work! It didn't seem all the special, but it got lucky, and now you've got thousands of paying subscribers and you're getting interviewed by journalists and you are getting calls from games studios and Hollywood and distant cousins...
It's not going to happen to me, because I don't have 100 games (or 100 anythings) under my belt. I've given up and left the table. But not you: you're still sitting at the green felt, rolling the dice again and again and again. And that's awesome.
All of this is to say that some of this, like the number of subscribers and paying subscribers, is only distantly in your control. Mostly it's just a question of you continuing to play until your lucky number gets called. You're doing it right! And so long as you keep doing it, it'll all happen. Eventually.
Thank you so much for the kind words and thoughtful analysis, Jeffrey. It sounds like you've had a remarkable career – the kind of story that people make biopics about! I ran a company for eight years and the most I made was enough to pay a few months rent on a rent controlled apartment, lol.
I agree that so much of life comes down to luck and staying in the game. I do think we can increase our odds by understanding the game and playing it well. Maybe a micro text adventure could be a breakout hit, and if I kept doing things the same way, eventually I'd strike gold. But I'm not seeing that in the marketplace or among the fandoms who I think would be predisposed to liking them, so the odds of that feel unlikely.
So I'm seeing things differently these days, hence the changes to my newsletter. Rather than chasing hits, I want to design a setup for myself where every game I make is a satisfying accomplishment just for having finished it, and anything else that happens beyond that – all the luck stuff – is merely a bonus. So I get that sense of accomplishment after every game, not every 100 games.
That said, I am still at the table and I plan to stay here. But I'm not at the table to win a jackpot. I'm here to have some fun, a drink, and memorable conversations. Let the chips fall where they may.