Just a quick post here to recommend a book I thoroughly enjoyed:

Pour Your Heart into It:
How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time

It’s a really interesting way to tell a story. It’s a biography of Starbucks, told in the first person Howard Schultz, by the president and former CEO of Starbucks. The book is written with a specific timeline focused around the company, peppered with crises and shows the way Howard dealt with all the crises that nearly destroyed the company and what he learned from it.

It’s almost as if the book was written in the same way you’d write fiction, with real character development, except with the company itself as a character. And it manages to do this without seeming like it’s trying to be cute. It’s just… good. It’s a really engaging way to write a business biography.

Structure aside, I enjoyed the book itself a great deal. He set out to build a company with a soul and a passionate, committed team from the lowliest coffee-peddler all the way to the top of the food chain, and he shows how he did it and why it worked… or didn’t.

It shows how the company went from a small coffee beans-only store in Seattle to an international success that’s branched out into soft drinks, ice creams, and even music.

A few things about the book surprised me.

First, Starbucks has been around since the early 1970s, but only sprang into prominence in the last ten years. The foundation for greatness was always there but it only recently sprang into being such an incredible brand. This couldn’t have been accomplished without the company being committed heart-and-soul to being the best at what they do, and finding out how they cultivated and tapped into this soul makes for a great read.

Second, Starbucks doesn’t franchise! Every single Starbucks location (over 6,000) is corporately owned and run to manage quality. Generally franchising is faster, cheaper and easier since you’re putting most of the burden of establishing the business on the entrepreneur that’s going to manage it. But the fact that Starbucks doesn’t do this and STILL maintains the unbelievably high rate of growth that they do is amazing.

Third, ALL Starbucks employees, even part-timers, get stock options and health insurance. They were one of the first companies in America to offer this to part-timers. This ties into the whole “how to build a company with a soul” concept, and is pretty amazing considering how much money they could save by not giving a damn.

After reading it, I’m even more convinced than before that it is possible to accomplish more and better things with a small, nimble, passionately devoted company that respects its employees than you could with a large, lumbering, faceless behemoth of a corporation.

I don’t mean to sound like a hippie when I say that. I’m still 100% pro-corporations and pro-business. I just prefer the more human, more respectful way of playing the game. The one where respecting your employees and not being evil ultimately annihilates the slower, weaker and less respectful of their most valuable assets… people. 🙂

I mean, good lord, look at the size of Starbucks. It’s a gigantic company. Their product is good, it’s consistent, it’s EVERYWHERE, their people are always amazing at every level, and they grow larger and more profitable every day, even though they go to ridiculous and expensive lengths to take care of their people, donate to charities and try to make the world a better place by utilizing their leverage as a large corporation.

If a company THAT BIG can prove the formula works, what else could people accomplish with the same attitude, in a different industry?

We’ll see.

I have come to the conclusion that ANY, ANY, ANY mod or game website that shows UN-POSED renders of the models is completely unprofessional horse-puckey that you should close immediately.

Any serious developer will put the model in-game, and make it look enough like it works to take a screenshot and post.

Anything less than that is pure desperation for content, and reveals insecurity, incompleteness and a probable notification of future failure.

Case in point: Team Orbit

Sorry, guys, but this is the same as everything else I’ve ever seen. Learn.

I’ve been enjoying a blissful nine days of freedom from work before the final push. I’ve been doing a great deal of reading, playing games, cleaning the apartment, spending time with my beautiful wife, and hard-core relaxing.

It was a gorgeous day out today — grey, sunless, drizzly and overcast — so I decided to sit out on the patio and dig back into Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger.

I’ve written a bit about this book before but set it down for a while. It’s been calling to me from my bookshelf and I cracked it open again and found where I’d left off… in a series of kick-ass bulleted principles. A few of them knocked me off my feet. Here are some of them…

– The only way to win is to work, work, work, work, and hope to have a few insights.

– More important than the will to win is the will to prepare.

– Above all, never fool yourself, and remember that you are the easiest person to fool.

– It is better to remember the obvious than to grasp the esoteric. It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.

– Continually challenge and willingly amend your “best-loved ideas”

– Enjoy the process along with the proceeds, because the process is where you live.

One of the things I find so valuable about this book is that Charlie Munger has devoted his life to the pursuit of knowledge. He’s applied his mind to a lot of the same questions I’ve had and he’s faced the same problems I have. But, what interests me is that he’s spent infinitely more time on them than I have. Reading what he says is a bit like looking at the answer sheet to the questions that bother me.

I believe that people can only change to a certain extent. I also believe that people can only learn some things by actually doing them. And that no amount of reading, foreknowledge or preparation in the world can equal direct hands-on experience.

I think the value in reading most books really comes in when you’re already throat-deep in a problem you just can’t figure out, and you read a book to get someone else’s idea on it, and one sentence LEAPS out at you and everything in your head suddenly clicks. But that certainly wouldn’t have happened if you’d simply read the book first and waited to start doing whatever it was you were doing.

I didn’t realize that until recently. I always used to throw myself into things facefirst and learn as I went, but at some point I came to the conclusion that I should learn first and do later. And I don’t feel I’ve done much of anything since I made that decision. And now, years later, I’m completely reversing it because it’s simply not true, at least in my case.

What it boils down to is “learn as you go.” Which, according to my aforementioned point, would make no sense unless you’d first read the above. 😉

That’s all for now.

I read this blurb this morning in Business 2.0 and thought it was cool. It’s like what I talk about… how persistence through failure and rejection increases the odds for success. The article was about making cold calls for sales (calling someone unsolicited to try to sell them something) but it applies 100% to trying to get a job, or really any type of goal-reaching.

In baseball, even the best hitters make outs 70 percent of the time. Likewise, cold calls usually end in a “no,” no matter how skilled you are at making them. The key, therefore, is to remember that with each rejection, you’re one call closer to a “yes.”

“People have a fear of cold-calling only because they don’t anticipate those kinds of numbers,” Schiffman says. “My motivation increases with each ‘no’ I get.”

That last part is powerful. Look PAST the failure, the ‘no,’ and look forward to the success, the ‘yes,’ you will ultimately reach if you keep trying. Most people won’t even do this.

I was checking out the blog of someone I know and he made a post talking about the pain of having your art beaten all to hell by criticism.

It got me to thinking. Something that’s helped me over the last few months is realizing there’s sort of a duality of self involved in this, two opposing natures, in creating game art.

There’s the touchy-feely artistic side, where you get in your groove and intuitively build something up with care and coax the beauty out of it. The nice side.

And then there’s the other side, the critical, gritty, unrelenting pound-it-with-a-hammer-until-it’s-right perfectionist side. The mean side.

You can’t have too much of one or the other. Too much art, not enough criticism, can produce soft, weak, mushy output, and you’ll never improve. Too much criticism, and you can simply strangle the art right out of anything you touch, and you’ll hate making art altogether.

Therein lies the interest, and the challenge. How much is too much of one or the other?

For fear of sounding like a hippie, it’s like the yin-yang concept. Opposing natures, but interwoven. Finding the balance between the two can be tricky, but understanding the two different halves is the first step to figuring out what that balance is.

Thinking about creating game art in those two distinct phases has helped me weather criticism pretty well. “Okay, I made this. Time to beat the hell out of it until it’s the best it can be.”

It helps mentally brace me, and the more I understand that that’s how it works and that I’m NOT crazy for bouncing between those two extremes, the less dread I have going into it.

Short update, practically stream-of-consciousness, but something I felt worthy of sharing.

I was just heading home from work, wrapping up a nearly 15-hour day. I was exhausted, in a terrible mood, frustrated with something I was working on, and felt like I was half dead from the sleep deprivation, extremely high stress and horrible eating habits that are a normal part of my daily routine.

Note the use of the past tense.

I was thinking back to one time when I was particularly happy and telling one of my friends how happy I was, and that everyone had the capacity to be happy inside them, and that it was simply a choice they had to make.

I started thinking about that and I realized, dammit, I was really onto something. Happiness IS a choice. It’s a decision. One that’s too important to be left to other people or the events that shape our lives. Happiness is the most important thing you’ve got, so why in the world would you cede control of something so important to anything outside yourself?

I closed my eyes, sighed, flexed all the muscles in my body, took in a deep breath, sat up a little straighter and smiled. That was all it took to shake the horrors of the day away. I decided that I’d rather be happy than brood over what a shitty day I had.

Brooding isn’t productive. Brooding is consciously rubbing your nose in what you don’t like feeling. I’ve *never* come out better after brooding over something negative. In fact, it only prolongs what I wanted to forget. In light of that… good god, why am I doing that to myself? So I stopped, and I’m happy now.

Happiness is a choice. Make it.

I finished reading Then We Set His Hair on Fire: Insights and Accidents from a Hall of Fame Career in Advertising, which I talked about in my last post. Ultimately it didn’t teach me so much as it entertained me, but it did help me generate one interesting realization: Advertising is the game industry.

I’ve long looked for parallels between other industries and the game industry. The entertainment industry is close, but to me, advertising has a little more relevance in terms of the development process. Mainly, highly compressed but purposeful creativity. I’d imagine that the human toll on advertisers and game developers is eerily similar.

I’m thinking of digging into some advertising books soon to see what kind of problems the advertising industry has solved that the game industry thinks are unique. 🙂

That’s one of the only thoughts I’ve had lately, though. Apologies for the rambling, disconnected nature of this post because that’s the only way my brain works anymore. 🙂 … ;(

I got married on November 5, and I’m still crunching to finish Daxter. Sadly, I’ve been doing a shitty job of maintaining work-life balance. Been trying this last week to focus on doing things outside of work that actually make me happy, because I’ve been letting a lot of things fall by the wayside that I shouldn’t. All my own fault, really, but it’s only natural to let yourself get this intense the more you focus on it.

I’ve gotten three or four new books from 800-CEO-READ. I don’t have them all with me right now, but the one I’ve started reading that I’m excited about is:

Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman

It’s written by the founder and owner of Patagonia, the world-famous outdoor clothing company. I’m still just digging into it, but he has a fascinating initial description of how he actually built the company and all the amazingly small steps he took to create what amounted to an unintentional empire.

He started as a mountain climbing enthusiast that wandered around, homeless, living wherever he could find. The more he climbed, the more he wanted to make better gear for himself, so he learned how to blacksmith and bought his own forge. From there, he started making more and better equipment for himself, starting out very crude but eventually getting more and more sophisticated. As he got better at making them, he realized he could sell some of the equipment, just enough to stay alive and keep climbing. And it all snowballed from there, with small steps, using the crudest level of bootstrapping to grow.

Two of my favorite examples from the book so far. The first one was describing his company’s first general manager:

Roger showed his business acumen at an early age. One day in the early seventies, he took ten boxes of brand-new pitons behind the shop. They were a combination of Lost Arrows, Bugaboos, and Angles, all chrome-moly steel models. Roger took a large handful of pitons from one of the boxes, connected them all to a rope, and proceeded to drag them aroud and around on the concrete. I asked him what in the world he was doing.

He explained that this was an export shipment to Graham Tiso in Edinburgh, Scotland, our distributor for the UK at the time. Roger explained that after roughing up the pitons, he would soak them in a barrel of vinegar and water for a few days, then remove them to dry and rust in the open air. They could then be exported to the UK as scrap metal, without being subject to customs duties. Upon receipt of the pitons, Tiso would polish and oil them until they were like new and sell them at a price that was affordable even for dirtbag British climbers.

And now my favorite, describing how he created a massively successful new type of jacket for mountaineering:

At a time when the entire mountaineering community relied on the traditional, moisture-absorbing layers of cotton, wool, and down, we looked elsewhere for inspiration–and protection. We decided that a staple of North Atlantic fishermen, the synthetic pile sweater, would make an ideal mountain sweater because it insulated well without absorbing moisture.

We couldn’t muster an order large enough to have the fabric customized, so we had to use Malden’s existing stock, which came in an ugly tan and equally hideous powder blue. When we exhibited the jackets at a trade show in Chicago, one buyer, fingering a jacket, asked our salesman, Tex Bossier, what kind of fur it was made of. “It’s rare Siberian blue poodle fur, ma’am,” Tex deadpanned. Ugly as they were, and they pilled like crazy once in use, the pile jacket soon became an outdoor staple.

The whole book so far is a really fascinating example of seeing a man that had no interest in business or running a company creating a large and immensely succesful worldwide corporation, solely from moment-to-moment improvisation, bootstrapping and the desire to do well at whatever he set his hand to.

It’s tremendously inspiring so far, and reiterates to me my belief that any large, successful endeavor is merely a series of very small, often simple steps that add up to something amazing.

More to come soon. Writing here makes me happy, and that’s a priority of mine again. 🙂