(Don’t) Trust Your Gut

Trust your gut.

Sometimes.

The mind is a strange thing. Consciously, you can’t process or hang on to all that much. Trying to come up with a linear, rational explanation for everything you encounter is a slow, strenuous process. You can’t do it on a day-to-day basis for most things. And even if you could, you’d be constructing rationalizations from the things you can hold in “active” memory, which isn’t all that much.

The unconscious part of your brain, the gut, has access to a lot of things that your conscious mind doesn’t. So your “gut” can see patterns your brain can’t. When something feels wrong, but you can’t figure out why, the difference between the information that your conscious mind can access and the amount your unconscious mind can access is often the reason.

So you learn to “trust your gut”. And that can be good.

At a previous job, I first met the team about a month before my start date. And one of the people on the team – I knew instantly that this was going to be a terrible fit, and that this person would likely be why this job would eventually end. And I could point to a lot of reasons why. Obvious misogyny, overwhelming arrogance, etc. etc. These things are obviously bad. But unfortunately, they’re easy to rationalize away. I won’t have to work with him directly all that much (wrong). His work won’t impact my work (wrong). Blah blah blah. Rationalize away. But my gut was right. I didn’t trust it, and it cost me dearly.

So trust your gut.

But also don’t.

Because your “gut” is also a collection of patterns. Habits. Biases. Your gut may tell you “this guy is weird and different”, but it’s actually just that he doesn’t look like a lot of the people you normally interact with. That gut feeling… it’s racism. That indignation, when a woman on the team questions your decisions – I’m the boss, I’m way more experienced than her… that’s misogyny. And at some point or another everyone feels some version of this. The difference between someone who acts in racist/misogynist ways and people who don’t isn’t always what they think, it’s how they respond to what they think.

Trying to understand that certain “gut” reactions are the accumulation of patterns and experience and knowledge, but it’s locked away in a place that is impossible to directly access, and that certain “gut” reactions are the accumulation of biases and social constructs… and they both feel and look the same at first… it’s difficult. It leads to a lot of second guessing. It leads to a lot of difficult contemplation and self-analysis. Most of it’s not all that pretty (and if it is, I’d question whether you’re staring at yourself hard enough).

So trust your gut. But question it. Ask yourself why your gut felt one way, and see if your mind feels another way. In some sense, if I have, for instance, a negative reaction to a [different in some significant way] person in some context, and my gut says, “Hey!”, and my mind says, “Yeah, that’s not a great reaction, and it comes from (relative) lack of exposure,” the gut is me reacting to my history and society. The brain in this case is me exerting my will and striving for something better. Does it always succeed? No, of course not.

But this is one place where I think sometimes when someone screws up publicly initially then apologizes, this is where the difference between and good and bad apology can totally change how I react to a situation like this. Because we all have biases, and many of them are not good. Sometimes people can react “automatically” based on those biases, then they catch themselves, assert that this is not who they want to be. A good apology addresses the damage done, explains where the problem was, and how that person will work to be better in the future. So a good apology to me is the transition between a gut reaction and a thoughtful one. And I don’t blame (most) people for their guts.

A bad reaction (sorry if you felt..) shows you’re saying, “My biases do not need to be questioned,” and isn’t an apology at all.

But the gut/mind problem goes beyond just large-scale prejudices. It also goes to a lot of “how you respond at work” issues. My gut often tells me to get demonstrably angry. My mind tells me to not. I think if folks believe I’m a good leader, it’s because I often go *against* what I want to do based on my gut, and wait until my mind has a chance to formulate the kind of person I want to be.

So should you listen to your gut? Yeah. Sometimes. Is there a clear place to draw the line where you should & shouldn’t listen to your gut? No. But I think it’s still straightforward. You should always listen to your gut. You should question that feeling. You should say, “Is this reflective of who I want to be?” and then make the determination of what to do from there.

I think if that’s the only step you take, you’ll make a significant improvement in your life.

But it’s also not easy. It leads to a feeling of constant second-guessing. It’s a lot of work, and often interrogating your biases is unpleasant. It’s much easier to go with your gut and let it take you wherever. It feels better. It’s cathartic. But it also leads to a life led without improvement or direction, where you’re simply a passenger, with your biases and history driving the bus.

So yeah. Listen to your gut. Interrogate it. And then be the person you choose to be.

It’s Not Your Job to Change People

When I was starting out in positions of leadership, I felt like my job was to give each individual in my charge the best opportunities, give them increasing responsibilities and creative ownership, and to help them learn and grow as teammates who could one day hold positions of leadership of their own.

I don’t think that’s necessarily the wrong set of things to hold dear as a starting manager. But the one thing that’s changed the most about my attitudes as a leader is that when someone’s struggling to be a good teammate, or a good manager, there’s a certain set of flaws that I’ve never seen anyone overcome, and that in those situations, the 100% best thing you can do for the team is to fire them as fast as possible.

One of the biggest mistakes I made in my last job was that I kept on a “brilliant asshole,” because they were a critical bit in getting the project shipped. I’d continue to address their behavior in every way that I could short of letting them go, but I couldn’t fire them until we’d shipped. It would only be another few months.

Of course, those few months dragged on to a year+. And I knew that entire time that this person was unsalvageable. For that year+, a huge portion of the team bore the brunt of my mistake. They dealt with a teammate who generated great individual work, but had a catastrophic impact on their team. I heard the feedback. And I delayed, because firing them would push the launch back inevitably by 6+ months. But we ended up pushing the launch 6+ months for other reasons anyway.

I hoped I could make a difference in their attitude, and help them grow as a teammate. I couldn’t. I’d repeatedly give them direct and honest feedback. They’d say they’d do X, Y, and Z, but ultimately, they knew that firing them would have a really heavy cost, and I think they hid behind that in order to not change. But at the same time, when you have someone who’s this combination of abrasive, domineering and condescending… I’ve never seen anyone with that kind of personality change to the degree that they go from an intolerable drag on the team to even mid-level competent. I’ve never seen it. Ever.

There’s a point when you’re a team lead where you can’t think about the individuals. Where I could invest hours and hours of my time, and of the team’s mental energy to changing this person. But I absolutely should not. It’s my job to fire them and get them out. I don’t have to be mean about it, but I do have to be ruthless about it and efficient. Because it has nothing to do with that individual, and it has everything to do with the team.

One smart person cannot make up for the drag of an energy vampire on the project. There’s no level of individual brilliance that’s worth it, and that can’t be made up multiple times over by the increase in morale and cohesion and communication that come with getting them out. So for both “efficiency”, and morale, you cannot keep these kinds of people on the team. You have to cut them. You can’t let their rot fester on the team for months while you bend over backwards to give them opportunities to change because you are not the only one paying the cost. Everyone on the team is paying the cost for your indecision and inaction.

Your job isn’t to change people. Your job is to maximize your team’s efficacy, and that comes with getting rid of the assholes that make teamwork impossible.

I’ve always said that one of my core tenets was “no assholes,” but your core tenets are only what you do, not what you say. And in that respect, I failed at a very important part of my last job. It’s not a mistake that I’ll make again.

Show Up

Years ago, I was in the midst of some personal difficulties. A friend of mine heard about it, and drove over to my house. Texted me that he was outside, and was available to talk. I said “no,” I wasn’t in a good place to talk. They said something to the effect of, “Well, I’m just gonna sit here ’til you come out.” I went out a few minutes later, we drove to a nearby beach, and talked for a few hours. It was the turning point in that series of events, and one of the most memorable moments of my life.

It was that moment that taught me what it meant to be a great friend. Ever since then, I’ve tried to live up to that example for the rest of my friends. And while it’s never entirely clear whether you’re doing things right, I’ve never, ever, ever, regretted showing up.

Yeah, it’s effort. Yeah, it’d be way easier to let them sort it out, and let’s be honest, they’ll probably be fine in the end.

But what are friends for? Are they for shooting the shit casually when you’re bored? Are they so that you’re not alone when you go to things like sporting events? Meh. You can do that kind of stuff with anyone.

Friends – the close ones – are the support system that keeps you alive when you’re overwhelmed. When you’re on the receiving end of that support, it’s because you need it, and you need folks who’ve known you forever to help guide you through trauma. When you have the chance to be on the giving end of that support, jump in with both feet, and seize the opportunity to do one of the greatest things you can do for someone you care about.

Show up when they need you.

Be Nice

Note: I’m reposting some things I wrote a while back on LinkedIn here, in part to slowly “port” the content back to my own blog, but in part because some of this stuff is worth resurfacing. This was from Dec. 2014. It still feels relevant, and probably always will.

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Someone on your team comes to you and says there’s a problem. The last release broke the purchase flow of your product, and it’s costing you $10,000 an hour and lost customers. What’s your first reaction?

A lot of times, regardless of intent, the first reaction is one of bewilderment, anger, or frustration. Over the course of my career, I’ve heard managers shouting at people more often than not, almost every time, it’s the wrong response.

Which may sound obvious, since we’re sitting here looking at a post, and not desperately trying to get a $10K/hr problem fixed. But in the heat of the moment, most people revert to the full-scale freakout, and it’s in those moments where reacting differently can have a dramatically better effect.

Here’s the thing – a lot of places say, “Move fast & break stuff,” but they don’t really mean it. They don’t want you to break important things. They don’t want you to break things that will make them look bad. If you really mean for people to move fast, and you accept that the consequences of moving fast means that sometimes things get broken, then you need to accept that this will often cost actual money, and that breaking things is often not a failure of the team.

What you want as a leader is that in times of crisis, people should want to bring things up as quickly as possible. You want them to tell the truth immediately and work to fix the problem without worrying about blame or consequence. In that moment, you want no barriers to fixing the problem.

If you’ve reacted badly in the past and yelled at someone when something’s gone wrong, that’s not going to happen. First, instead of “moving fast”, those people are now in “risk mitigation” mode, which means they’re worried less about finding success and more about avoiding failure. These are dramatically different mindsets, and risk mitigation prevents people from making bold choices.

The correct response in a time of crisis is:

  1. Remain calm
  2. Help people get back to an acceptable situation as quickly as possible
  3. Follow up by understanding what went wrong, and if there is a good way of preventing the same or similar mistakes in the future.

I understand how simple and obvious that sounds.

If more people actually responded that way, I wouldn’t be writing this. But primal reactions are hard to suppress, and even if most people want to react to things this way, often they start with a “WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED!?!?!” Some people think this is their “right” or that a bit of fear makes for a good motivator. But the reality of it is that if you have hired good people, there is nothing you can say or do that will make them feel worse than they already do. You don’t need to point out their failing, they already know something terrible has happened.

They’re coming to you because they need your help to recover. If you yell at them, or threaten them, or otherwise react badly, consider how they’ll respond the next time something bad happens.

Creative, collaborative, risk-taking environments are built on trust. Trust is a brittle thing. Once it’s broken, it’s incredibly difficult if not impossible to recover. If you want the benefits of a highly iterative, fast-moving team, you need to pay the cost of learning to react to crisis situations well. You need to make sure that you are the first person that people want to talk to in case of a critical emergency. Not because you need to be the lynchpin of the response (usually, you won’t be anyway, because it’s the team that screwed it up that will fix the problem), but because as a leader, you need to know what is happening and you will set the tone for how the team responds.

For that to happen, in times of crisis and chaos, before flying off the handle, you need to remember that the best way of getting the result you want is simple: be nice.

* Addendum from 2023: “Help people get back to an acceptable situation as quickly as possible” is definitely an important step. But a lot of the work involved in this step has to be done before anything goes wrong. You need to build the infrastructure that lets you roll back code easily and reliably. If you don’t have this infrastructure, every mistake will be a disaster. So since you know for certain that things will eventually go wrong, you have to build this out as early as you can. If you think you can build this out after the 1st crisis happens, the 1st crisis may be the only crisis your company ever has before it dies.

Big Dreams Bad Ideas

I’m not great at mentoring entry-level folks.

This is something that I wouldn’t have expected – I was an entry-level person once, right? Should be straightforward.

But I think the weird thing is that while the advice I have for folks is often quite simple – focus on one major idea, reduce risk wherever possible, make something much smaller than you expect and only add complexity once that simple thing is working – implementing that and understanding its value requires a *significant* amount of the kind of context that you only get from shipping games.

Every young game dev I’ve talked to has huge dreams. They want to make big, complex, ambitious things. But even moderately sized things blow up into incomprehensible complexity so fast that it becomes really difficult to learn anything from the experience other than “something somewhere went wrong.” By keeping things small & focused, you can understand the parameters of the thing you’re building, and iterate with a much better understanding of what’s actually happening.

Basically, by keeping things small & comprehensible, you’re going to learn much faster than by trying to wrangle three interconnected new systems where changing one variable in one place completely changes the behavior of the all three systems simultaneously.

The reason I’ve tried for years to get this across to new devs is that if you can get to this point quicker, you’ll learn faster. Which is beneficial, right?

But I think to some degree, learning that interconnected systems explode into incomprehensible complexity is one of those things that human brains aren’t wired to naturally understand, and new devs maybe need to crash into that wall headfirst a few times before they even understand there’s a wall there. Telling someone they need to do things a certain way to avoid crashing into a wall they can’t see… doesn’t work.

So yeah. My point, I guess, is that if you’re a moderately experienced dev who’s smashed into that wall a few times & thinks, “There must be a better way of doing this!” There is! Hit me up. I’d love to help you figure it out. gamedev

Start Small

If I could get across only one thing to most folks building brand new products, it’d be this: Start small.

It’s not a simple thing to do. To start building something small means deeply understanding the problem you’re trying to solve. You have to know what’s important to end users and what isn’t. What you need in your product that will make a difference in their lives, vs. what is nice to have. You can’t get caught up in your own ego, and your desire to make something you’re proud of, happy with, or is a full realization of whatever dream it is you have.

You have to be ruthless. You have to cut away everything that it’s vital to the core of what you’re trying to build. This is where a lot of people trying to do “MVP” make mistakes. You cannot cut away what people need. You can’t deliver a shitty version of the whole product. You need to deliver the *smallest possible thing* that *does what a user needs*. It doesn’t have to be pretty, or easy to use (unless those are rare parts of the core concept). It doesn’t have to scale or be reliable. It doesn’t have to have social invites or animated buttons.

It doesn’t have to be the whole idea. Especially for games.

But it has to have that kernel of the thing you’re trying to pitch to folks. And it has to be good enough that you can understand when you see someone use it if it’s working. So while it can be busted, it can’t be *too* busted. While it can be ugly, it can’t be too ugly. And all of that is context-dependent on what you’re building and who your users are.

But the smaller you start, the more understandable your problem is. The more understandable the user’s response will be. The more you can shrink the number of variables involved, the more you can understand the variables you kept. Every system explodes exponentially with each new variable. Too many, and even if you’re getting data, that data will be incomprehensibly complex. If you can get your thing down to *one* new thing, you’ll be able to understand the impact of that one thing. Two, maybe. Three, forget about it.

Small. Build small. Pare down your idea until it’s almost nothing. Then you’re in the right ballpark.

How to Get Better at Public Speaking & Having Difficult Conversations

One thing that’s come up in discussions with a handful of folks recently has been about presentations & talks with folks in various awkward/difficult situations. And I’m not going to pretend that I’m any good at any of this, so I hope this doesn’t come off like, “I’m awesome at this s**t, learn from me:” – more, “I’ve had some experience with this s**t, and I’ve at least shaved the most awful edges off, here’s how:”

Practice.

I know, right? Seems crazy. But over the last 3.5 years, I’ve now given probably hundreds of presentations – many are just little weekly updates, some were talks about the company’s philosophy, some were attempts at motivation – they’ve run the gamut. And I think consistently, everyone underestimates how much preparation goes into these things.

For the most part, preparing for a significant (and new) 30 minute talk in front of a team takes me about 8 hours. I’ll make a Keynote presentation as a way of “thinking it out”. Usually this comes with at least a little bit of structure – how to reinforce a point I want to drive home. What kind of visual “language” will help reinforce it, and be memorable. The slides start off all text, and over the course of development, I’ll try to replace as much text with images as possible – in part because text sucks for presentations, in part because the presence of text encourages you to just read your slides, and in part because the images just look better & are stickier.

But the whole time, every iteration (of which there are usually dozens), I’ll “walk through” the presentation, and try to think about what I’d say. I don’t generate a “script” – I think part of trying to be engaging is reacting to things, and being spontaneous. But it’s spontaneity within a structure which is provided by the slides, so you don’t forget the things you’re trying to get across.

So (hopefully) the end result feels “off the cuff”, because a lot of the actual content is improvised on the spot. But the main points are not. The overall flow is not. This goes for presentations to large groups, and it also applies just as much to difficult conversations with individuals, though those don’t usually involve a Keynote presentation.

One thing to note – I think the bulk of the “work” building presentations is figuring out the correct order for content. Getting the ideas in the right order can have a huge impact on how it’s all ingested by the viewer, and having a flow to your presentation that makes sense takes a lot of iteration and practice.

If you’re going to have a difficult conversation with someone in a work environment, HAVE NOTES. Practice. If you need to, practice WITH SOMEONE ELSE (if they’re in the position where you can talk to them about the issue you’re having with whoever). These conversations are always insanely difficult, and it’s very difficult to get your points across in a clear, coherent, and memorable way if you do it all off the cuff. The other person’s reaction and emotions will pull you WAY off your “plan” – but having a plan means you have something to come back to. Practicing with someone else means you can anticipate some of the things that won’t go to plan and have another plan.

Anyway – the point of this is that for me, the way I got through these things – presentations, difficult conversations, etc. – is practice. Is planning. Is preparation. Is iteration. A 30 minute presentation may feel like it doesn’t require much forethought, but if you’re talking to a team of fifty people, consider what that costs to the company in time and money, and then invest the time preparing accordingly to make it worth their while.

Thinking About Work

One of the surprising things of the last few months is that I’ve had reason to think about what a new job for me would look like. And there’s a lot.

I mean, I’m privileged as fuck to be able to even consider some of these questions. But I do get to consider them, and so instead of blindly doing the “default”, I’ve gotta think about what the best, most sustainable, most fulfilling version of work looks like for me.

Full time? I don’t know. I think probably if I was working 9-2:45, that’s about the right amount. Which means about 30 hours a week. Work when the kids are in school, and when they’re home, they’re priority #1.

Remote? Sort of. This is probably the biggest open question, because there’s two things I know for sure:

  1. I never want to work full-time in an office or commute ever again. Period.
  2. The thing I miss about work is the people, and the kinds of interactions and idea-acceleration and spontaneous nonsense that comes from being in the same place at the same time.

So while I really worry that it’s trivial to end up with the “worst of both worlds”, I think something like working co-located a few times a month for those in the area, and ensuring that about once a quarter we’re in the same place at the same time makes some amount of sense. And it’s probably an evolving thing. Early on, at the very beginning, more face time, but as we coalesce on the details of what we’re building and how, more independence. But even when we’re in the same place at the same time, temporal flexibility is required, and the ability to go deal with family stuff is #1. How to manage that? I still don’t really know.

There’s also questions of how much I’d be “in charge”. I expect that if we were to do a thing, I’d mostly be focused on high-level stuff. Team structure/culture, game direction, focus, process. But the details of what we’d be building would not generally be my focus most of the time. I think that makes a “not full-time” schedule more compatible with my actual job.

Will something actually happen? I have no idea. I think the opportunity to think about this, and potentially make something really cool with people again is alluring. But yeah – the world’s changed since the last time I had a job. Much of what I know about work is different, and learning to adapt to all the new bits and pieces, and wielding the old experience that still works… it’ll be an interesting challenge to navigate.

Most of the studio leads I’ve seen fail over the years failed because they couldn’t adapt. It’s not that they weren’t smart. It’s not that they lacked experience. It’s that the world changed, and they couldn’t see that the things that brought them success before wouldn’t bring them success again. For me, as a team lead (and also in my personal life as a parent) – missing this transition is one of my biggest fears.

We’ll see what happens, I guess.

Writing

One of the goals for this “school year” (yeah, the kids go back to school tomorrow!) is to start writing more on my blog, rather than on LinkedIn or anywhere else that’s owned by some giant corporation. Between Twitter’s catastrophic self-inflicted implosion or Facebook’s constant privacy and ethics woes, it’s clear that even though these platforms help focus an audience and provide nice means of feedback, I want the things I make to live on a platform that I own, and not have it attract eyeballs or create value for someone else.

That’s a big theme of the last few years. Over and over again, I’ve busted my ass to make other people rich, and I’ve managed to make them very, very rich. Far richer than I’ve made myself, by many orders of magnitude. I’m really fucking good at it, and I’m not going to do it for other people from here on out, even if the consequence of that is not doing it at all.

But in any case, the point is that I’ll be writing more here, or on some more focused public-facing locale that discusses specific topics. Probably resumes, game design, and leadership. I don’t know if all three would be in the same place, but who knows.

One thing that’s been bugging me for a long time, though, is how many “old school” gamers I know who have embraced the modern business of mobile games. Pay-to-win, the never ending crush of timers and FOMO, blah blah blah. In some ways, it is what it is, and you can accept it and internalize it, or you can be someone shouting at a tidal wave. I get it. But the thing for me is that while I do think that mobile games are here to stay, I don’t have to like it, and I don’t have to spend my time making them.

In 2009, we pioneered a lot of F2P stuff with Self Aware Games. Am I proud of that? Kinda? I mean, we had to survive, and to survive, we had to try a lot of things we’d never done before. We weren’t the first to offer chips in a casino game for real money, but we pushed the boundaries in a lot of ways – some interesting, some effective, some that likely established some precedents that made the world a worse place.

For me, F2P was interesting, because it enabled live games-as-a-service, where you’re making $, which allows you to keep spending on keeping that game interesting. And creating that feedback loop, where we build stuff, we observe the players, see what’s working, and respond was always really interesting and satisfying. And for a while circa 2009-2016, which was when I stopped working on mobile games, the fact of the matter was that premium priced games were literally impossible to base a business on. Piracy rates were astronomical, and the price people expected to pay for thousands of hours of work was $1 and not a penny more.

So F2P grew out of the circumstance. And the live-ops side of things is super interesting. Still is. I think it’s one of the places where there’s still a lot of fertile ground, but so much of gaming is driven by F2P and VC backing that the push for growth-uber-alles-all-the-time leads you down some weird roads, and makes a lot of games inevitably feel more like pain that fun.

For me, there has to be a future in games as a business. Where you acquire users, and those users are “profitable” from day one. And you grow at a sustainable rate, because you’re growing only when your player base supports (or demands!) growth. Not because your VC needs you to be a $1B company in 24 months or bust. Not because the founders all wanna be part of startupland and the pseudo-“celebrity” that goes along with it. Not because you’re so steeped in the F2P pressure-oriented psychologically manipulative FOMO sea that you can’t see any other way.

I don’t know what that is (yet), but there’s something there. Maybe it’s Apple Arcade. Maybe it’s a chance to reset the business side of things as Vision Pro’s marketplace gets established. I don’t know. But I know that the F2P grind isn’t for me. Not as a player, not as a developer.

Pain is the Mind-Killer

I got a terrible case of plantar fasciitis a few days ago. Standing up felt like someone was stabbing a ragged knife deep into my heel, and every step was blinding agony. Even lying down off my foot, the base level of constant pain kept it constantly in the foreground of my mind. Stretching, shoe inserts, and painkillers have made things better, fortunately, but one thing I observed was that over the course of the last 36 hours, my worldview shrank considerably.

That is, so much of my mental attention was focused on the pain, and trying to avoid it, mitigate it, whatever, I literally couldn’t pay attention to anything else. I couldn’t read things and understand them properly. I couldn’t make plans. I couldn’t respond with thought and consideration when someone asked me a question. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that something like 80% of my conscious mental bandwidth was thinking about pain 100% of the time.

I am lucky in that I’m not in chronic pain. This was a temporary condition and appears to be improving. I feel like my worldview is opening back up. I don’t know what it’s like to live with chronic pain, but it felt like the world “closed up” in my mind.

The other parallel I have is with learning new things. When I first went to a trackday, I couldn’t “see” the track. I was laser-focused on whatever was right in front of me, because everything was happening at speeds I’d never dealt with before. As I got more comfortable, I could then begin to better see other cars, further down the track, etc. But at the very start, if you’d asked me what kind of car was right in front of me, I don’t think I could have answered you correctly because so much of my mind was occupied by “WTF is even happening???” It was like that with the pain. All I could focus on was what was literally right in front of me, and even then, just barely.

I don’t have any deep insight here, other than I hope to be able to be more forgiving and thoughtful when people who are experiencing this sort of thing need accommodations in the future – not just for the pain, but the impact it has on ones’ ability to interact with literally everything else.