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. 🙂

Time for a little heave of self-indulgence and jabbering on about what’s on my mind.

Well, I’m reading again, for the first time since earlier this year. My day job keeps me fantastically busy most of the time. Daxter is shaping up faster than I can even imagine and we’re looking good for the spring release we’ve been planning. Things will be very crunchy for me until then. Crunch usually beats the thoughts out of my head but I’m getting better every day at dealing with that.

So, as I said, I’ve been reading again. The inimitable 800 CEO READ keeps sending me free books which I’ve been greedily devouring.

The first of these is Rules of the Red Rubber Ball : Find and Sustain Your Life’s Work.

It’s a small, hardcover, beautifully put together book of inspiration, passion and encouragement to follow your dreams and never stop chasing them. The book is full of pages that fold out, words that stream across and all over the page, and all sorts of other interesting effects and styles of type that make every page unique and exciting. Every page is as visually invigorating as the words printed on them. This would be a fantastic book to send to a high school or college graduate.

The next is Then We Set His Hair on Fire: Insights and Accidents from a Hall of Fame Career in Advertising.

This is a fantastic book written by the former chairman of BBDO North America, reputedly one of the largest and most famous advertising agencies in the world, servicing clients such as GE, Pepsi, FedEx and Pizza Hut. Straight away he defines the difference between an idea and an insight, which I found particularly interesting. I’ll excerpt his brief explanation, since he’s written copy his entire life and can sum it up better than I can:

This is a book about insights in business–how we get them, how we recognize them, how we keep them coming.

Insight is much rarer–and therefore more precious. In the advertising business, a good idea can inspire a great commercial. But a good insight can fuel a thousand ideas, a thousand commercials. More than anything else, an insight states a truth that alters how you see the world.

And he goes on to explain, as he says, how you get insights, how to recognize them, and how to keep them coming. He regales us with tales of meeting with Jack Welch, then-CEO of General Electric, and the frantic rush to win their advertising account with their famous “We bring good things to life” slogan, to his direct involvement in Ronald Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign, to how he nearly botched a multi-million dollar account with Pizza Hut.

The author tells the kind of stories that people gather together in groups to talk about, and then extracts important lessons from them. It’s so engaging that I breezed through over 150 pages seemingly in an instant. Even if you’re not terribly interested in advertising, the stories he tells are fun and interesting as a simple memoir. The high-profile nature of his work makes it even more interesting as you flip through and think “I remember that ad! So that’s how it happened? Unbelievable!”

Fantastic read so far, can’t wait to finish it. Couldn’t recommend it more. Moving onto other books!

Today I started listening to an audio book called Good to Great. This book is the result of a five-year-long study of a sample group of companies that started out as merely good companies and then skyrocketed into fifteen-plus years of sustained success. His explanation of the research process is absolutely staggering.

The author and a research team of over 20 people spent years of painstaking research finding out what it was about these companies that made them so great and collecting reams of data on these companies, their biggest competitors, and other companies in a similar category at a similar time, and attempts to derive a series of common principles between these great companies that we can learn from. There’s much more to it than that, but frankly, I can’t fit all that into my head at once. 🙂

I’ve barely scratched the surface of the book, but the first observation he made was that all the chief executives of all the companies that made this mysterious transition from a good company to a great one were modest, unassuming, even moderately self-effacing people. That’s not to say that they didn’t burn with passion, but they’re quite the opposite of the maverick, self-aggrandizing egocentric warrior CEOs brought in to effect change that make headlines.

In fact, the author’s research indicates that CEOs like that can often be a death knell for a company, which I found fairly amusing.

My point in bringing this up is that it’s starting to give a little credence to something I’ve long suspected but never been able to prove: Modest but driven people win.

I’ve thought about this a lot. This is a bit of a continuation of my thoughts in my Smart People are Dumb, Failure is Awesome post.

You can come into a company or a country as a ruler and violently coerce people to follow you, through physical violence or sheer force of will. Anyone with the right amount of moxy can pull it off, and many do. Were I a thornier sort, I’m sure I could pull off the same maneuver somewhere or another, and more quickly achieve the success I strive for.

But the problem I have with that is that it seems to take so much moment-to-moment effort to shove people around to achieve the results that you want, that you can’t let your guard down for a moment lest you be betrayed. Witness the fall of infamous rulers of all sorts throughout history. They put themselves in a position where they can’t trust anyone around them. What kind of life is that?

I’ve come to feel that the real trick is to act in such a way that you inspire trust and confidence and self-esteem in those around you, and they follow you out of respect and allegiance rather than through fear. Create a system, a machine, that can run itself by harnessing the power and passion of the best that exists inside people.

It seems like that’d be almost more work than pointing a gun at someone and demanding what you want. And, initially, it sure is. But think of the future. Think of sustainability. In the long term, wouldn’t you want to be able to lie back and relax and let the machine run itself because you’ve been good to it and respect it? Rather than because you’re pointing a gun at it?

I’ve always believed that it’s an entirely achievable goal. But I’ll be damned if I know where to start doing it. 🙂 The only core belief I have in that vein is that the key to being a good person is to make other people feel better about themselves. As I see it, the more I learn and live, the closer I’ll come to figuring out how to achieve something like that.

But back to the book… seeing the author discover that scientifically, without a single deviation, all the managers of all these fantastic companies have this in common is tremendously encouraging to me. It shows that I may really be on the right track in thinking of these things. Like driving blind in one direction so long you think you’re lost, but then you see a sign on the side of the road showing you that your destination is just a few miles further down the road.

Good stuff.