#i was not a beta who joined in 2005. but i did join before its first anniversary and that is still pretty wild to me

[dundotten]

some doodles bc i was thinking about the anniversary today

club penguin is a legal adult now ???

club penguin OLD ??? ??

[aion-rsa]

Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive is Built on the Shoulders of Giants

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When Brandon Sanderson wrote The Way of Kings, the first book in The Stormlight Archive series, he was ready to give up on publishing. Throwing away any ideas of what the market wanted, he decided to write something instead for himself. Now, 18 years later, Rhythm of War, the fourth book of The Stormlight Archive, marks Sanderson’s 25th novel (in addition to assorted novellas, short stories, and graphic novels), and something over seven million words of published fiction. He is, of course, not the only person who has enjoyed the epic fantasy saga.

That success was never a guarantee. Sanderson wrote 13 novels before he sold one: Elantris, in 2003. (It was published in 2005.) “The Way of Kings was number 13, the last of those unpublished books,” he recalls to Den of Geek. When trying to write for the market, he produced what he feels were some really awful novels, and beginning The Way of Kings was a way to return to the types of stories that he loved: big, chunky fantasy. “I love big epics,” he says. “I grew up on Anne McCaffrey and Robert Jordan and these really great, meaty epic fantasy series, which are my first love… I always wanted to do one of those myself.”

Rhythm of War continues the story of a war between humans and the parshmen (the singers) who are the native species of the world of Roshar. As powers of old have returned, the humans and the spren (magical spirits attuned to certain emotions or elements) have begun to reform the Radiant Knights. The singers have joined with powers to become the Fused, hosts to ancient souls in modern bodies.

The human cast includes Kaladin, a surgeon who became a soldier, benched at the beginning of the book due to his PTSD; Shallan, a woman with dissociative identity disorder who is also a master illusionist working in tandem for the heroes and a secretive spy enclave that claims to have answers to the universe; Dalinar, a Bondsmith who can heighten the abilities of others (among other gifts), and who struggles against pressures to become a high king; Navani, his wife, a queen who is more an engineer; and many others. This volume also reveals the pasts of singer sisters Eshonai and Venli as, in the present, Venli develops a secret plan for the singers’ independence, free from both human and the Fused. 

The spren are one of the most fascinating fantasy inventions featured in the series, and their role is even more important in Rhythm of War as Shallan and her partner, Adolin, try to form a treaty with the honorspren to aid in the war. The spren, especially those who have bonded with humans, are reminiscent of the daemons from Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series, but they are also quite unique. Sanderson was partly inspired by Japanese kami, and the idea that everything has a spirit. In the world of The Stormlight Archive, the minds of people shape the energy of the world, the spirits that embody objects and emotions. By depicting the spren, Sanderson wants readers to immediately know they are in a fantastic world.

“When people have powerful emotions, they attract spren,” Sanderson explains. “They also fulfill a writerly need: a lot of times, as writers, we’re looking for [ways to] show, don’t tell.” The spren give Sanderson, he explains, a way to reveal the emotions of his characters without using cliched expressions and depictions, while at the same time heightening the sense of the world as fantastical. “It’s also just a lot of fun to write,” Sanderson adds.

Sanderson is well known for writing strong women. (In a favorite line from Rhythm of War, one character, trying to convince Kaladin to partner up, reminds him that he likes smart girls: “Is there really anyone who doesn’t like smart girls?” Kaladin immediately replies.) Sanderson’s inclusion of prominent female characters with agency as central protagonists in his work comes from the fantasy he grew up on: Anne McCaffrey, Barbara Hambly, and Melanie Rawn. The book that made him into a reader was Hambly’s Dragonsbane, which features a woman who gave up her career in magic to raise a family—a book that gave Sanderson insight into his mother’s own choices in life. When he finished, he recalls thinking: “Wait a minute, I think I just finished a fun story about slaying a dragon, and I think I understand my mom better.… That lesson stayed with me my whole life, and my whole career.”

Sanderson strives to create authentic depictions of characters outside his own experiences. “When I write characters, I try very hard to represent that character, and anything about them, as well as if that character could write, they would represent it,” Sanderson says. He hopes that when readers find a character they identify with, they read that character and think, of Sanderson: “Wow, he must be like me!” To do this, Sanderson relies on beta readers—especially in cases like Shallan’s dissociative identity disorder (DID). “DID is represented so poorly in storytelling,” Sanderson explains. “It’s really sensationalized a lot of times. I wanted to do it right.” It took many drafts and very patient beta readers to build Shallan into the fully fleshed-out character she has become.

While Rhythm of War has many moving pieces, it’s surprisingly accessible for readers who haven’t picked up previous volumes of The Stormlight Archive, while returning fans of course will feel right at home in Sanderson’s rich fantasy world. Sanderson intends all of his books to have a quality of completeness—he works to make sure that each novel has its own identity, and that the novels don’t blend in with each other. He did not design Rhythm of War with the intent that readers would pick it up first, but he’s pleased it also works that way. “I remember doing that as a kid,” he says, “not knowing the series even was a series, or not being able to find the first one, and being like, ‘Well, I’m just going to read this one.’ There’s actually a fun to that, a piecing things together.”

Readers who have been following The Stormlight Archive since The Way of Kings was released back in 2010 have been waiting eagerly (and patiently) for each volume; it’s been just over three years since the previous installment in the series, Oathbringer, was released. But, for some Sanderson fans, the wait for the series has been even longer. “Way back when I first sold Elantris,” Sanderson remembers, “my editor … said, ‘What else do you have?’” So Sanderson submitted The Way of Kings, though it was not quite ready for publishing—something the editor and Sanderson both agreed on. “Writing a 300,000-word novel is a special skill,” he explains, “and I had not practiced that specific skill yet.”

Somehow, Amazon got word that The Way of Kings existed and put up a listing for the title. As Sanderson became better known, he told fans that asked that he did plan to return to The Way of Kings, but in the meantime, fans started to post fake reviews for it, Sanderson says, complete with doctored customer photos. One fan created a book cover with an image of Elvis and a fake blurb from Terry Goodkind. Readers continued to express their eagerness with this sort of fannish love until the real version of The Way of Kings was published in 2010. (The fake listing has since been removed, after Sanderson made sure to take “copious screenshots.”)

Between the false listing and the publication, Sanderson worked on those skills to create a true epic. Part of the experience needed for such a creative feat came from taking on the final books of The Wheel of Time series after Robert Jordan’s death.

“I usually use the metaphor that I was like Sam carrying the Ring for a little bit to finish it off,” Sanderson jokes. “The Wheel of Time experience basically forced me to go to the writing books gym and lift weights much heavier than I was accustomed to.” (Sanderson’s work on completing the series led the current-in-development Wheel of Time Amazon television series team to enlist him as a consulting producer. He has read several of the scripts and given the team advice as needed. Though he is not able to reveal much about the project, Sanderson reports: “I really have enjoyed the process of enjoying with Rafe [Judkins], the showrunner, on the television show.”)

Working on The Wheel of Time book series helped Sanderson figure out what he wanted to accomplish with The Way of Kings and the subsequent books, avoiding some of the problems he’d identified in epic fantasy. With The Stormlight Archive, Sanderson explains, “I’ve tried to make it not feel slow. I’ve tried to make it feel like each book has its own soul.” 

As for the real series’ reception: “The fans just latched onto it immediately,” Sanderson says. The series itself has so many moving parts, it’s hard to make a good elevator pitch, so Sanderson claims the series’ fans had to already trust him in order to begin. He recalls the pre-internet days when readers never knew when a new book in their favorite series was coming out; now, with the immediacy and accessibility of the internet, Sanderson tries to be upfront with his readers that each Stormlight Archive book will appear about once every three years.

To “hopefully keep fans satiated between volumes,” Sanderson and his team have also included pages of original art, and beautiful front-paper and end-paper portraits in full color in the series. “Why is there not more art in books for adults?” Sanderson wonders. “Why do kids get all the art?” Including original paintings, diagrams, and illustrations reinforces Sanderson’s deep world-building. Reprints of the earlier books in the series have sometimes even had art added as readers have asked for more detail about particular aspects of the world.

Credit: Art by Ben McSweeney © Dragonsteel Entertainment, LLC

The series is planned to be ten books. “I do plan it to be two five-book arcs,” Sanderson explains. “Book five should bring us to a pretty major climactic moment in the series.” In the meantime, fans of Sanderson’s world can play in it themselves via the board game, Call to Adventure: The Stormlight Archive, which features over 150 cards with art based on the world. With so much world-building already done for The Stormlight Archive, fans may wonder if a tabletop role playing game, similar to the Mistborn Adventure Game from Crafty Games, based on another of Sanderson’s series, is in the works. “No immediate plans,” Sanderson says, “but I’m sure we’ll do one eventually.”

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Sanderson easily acknowledges the influences and inspirations of writers who have come before. “I have an advantage over a lot of the epic fantasy writers of my youth in that I got to read all of their books and see what was working and what wasn’t working,” he points out. But, in addition to building from other writers, Sanderson is dedicated to exploring the real world through his imaginary ones.

“Fantasy is wonderful escapism. This is why I love to read it,” he says. “But it is also a path to understanding other people. That’s what I love about fiction, and that’s what I love about fantasy in particular. It’s perhaps too lofty for me to aspire to change the world through my goofy fantasy novels, but I at least want to try to represent the world accurately so that, when you’re done with the book, if you’ve read about people different from yourself, you have come to understand them a little bit better.”

Rhythm of War is now available to buy wherever books are sold. You can find out more here.

The post Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive is Built on the Shoulders of Giants appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[megadarkbouquettidalwavethings]

Dropbox Chief to Join Elite Ranks of Idea-to-I.P.O. Founders

Whether Mr. Houston successfully takes Dropbox public will be closely watched, with other privately held tech companies like Uber and Airbnb also edging toward an I.P.O. Dropbox, which is based in San Francisco, is unprofitable, and Mr. Houston now has to navigate through a challenging time, both guiding his company around the tech giants that are squeezing into its space and adapting his frat guy persona to a changing culture.

“He’s maybe one of the last ones of a very un-C.E.O.-like C.E.O.,” said Jeffrey Mann, a vice president at research firm Gartner, who follows the file-sharing and collaboration industry. “He was technical. He started out by coding. Most start-ups now when they get to that size, founders like him get pushed aside for someone with a finance or management background. But he managed to stay there.”

Dropbox said Mr. Houston was unavailable for comment, citing the quiet period before an I.P.O. But according to interviews with more than a dozen people, Mr. Houston — a private man with a love of 1990s rock and business books — built his company with an easygoing management style and a dry sense of humor, which helped him deal with the bumps along the way.

Mr. Houston grew up in Acton, a suburb outside Boston, the oldest of three children. His father, an engineer, and his mother, a librarian, noticed early on that Mr. Houston was precocious and encouraged him to explore his interest in computers, but did not want him skipping grades.

“His parents wanted him to stay in first grade for socialization, and they didn’t want to use the term gifted,” said Claudia Couto, who taught at Mr. Houston’s elementary school and tutored him privately. She is now retired.

As a middle schooler, Mr. Houston beta-tested computer games looking for security flaws. He worked for a robotics start-up as a teenager and repaired computers for neighbors. He got a perfect score on the SAT and attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2001.

Photo

“He’s maybe one of the last ones of a very un-C.E.O.-like C.E.O.,” one tech analyst said of Mr. Houston, center, at an event in San Francisco. Credit David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

At M.I.T., he joined the Phi Delta Theta fraternity, which he has said helped him learn how to build a corporate culture.

Continue reading the main story

“My first management experience was being rush chairman for my fraternity, and I learned a bunch of things,” Mr. Houston said in a New York Times interview in 2016. “You deal with a lot of the same broad questions — who do we want to be as an organization, what kind of culture do we want, what kind of people are we looking for? — that you do when you’re starting a company.”

After his sophomore year, he took a year off and started an SAT prep company called Accolade with one of his former high school teachers, Andrew Crick. Upon returning to M.I.T., Mr. Houston decided to learn as much about business as he could, plowing through business books from a chair he set up on the roof of his fraternity, he has said.

A Pearl Jam fan, Mr. Houston in 2005 formed a 1990s cover band called Angry Flannel, which played at venues around Boston.

On a bus one day from Boston to New York, Mr. Houston forgot his USB flash stick. Frustrated, he started coding what would be the foundation of Dropbox. He became less interested in Accolade, which closed.

“He was really interested in entrepreneurship, which was not a common trajectory for M.I.T. students,” said Kyle Vogt, 32, chief executive of the self-driving car company Cruise Automation, who met Mr. Houston at an M.I.T. entrepreneurship club event. “The default back then was to stay in Boston or go to New York and work for a hedge fund.”

In 2007, Mr. Houston entered Dropbox into the Boston program of Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley start-up incubator. Paul Graham, who was running Y Combinator, said Mr. Houston needed a co-founder fast. Mr. Vogt referred Mr. Houston to Arash Ferdowsi, an M.I.T. student. Within two weeks, Mr. Ferdowsi became Dropbox’s co-founder; he owns a 10 percent stake of the company.

The duo worked in Cambridge, Mass., but struggled to land more funding.

In August 2007, Mr. Houston and Mr. Ferdowsi moved to San Francisco to get closer to the start-up scene. A month later, they raised $1.2 million from investors including Sequoia Capital.

Mr. Houston and Mr. Ferdowsi moved into an apartment building in the city’s North Beach neighborhood. It was known as the Y Scraper because of how many Y Combinator company founders lived and worked there. Mr. Houston and Mr. Vogt later became roommates.

Continue reading the main story

“To this day, he still likes to have people over to his apartment and do jam sessions,” Mr. Vogt said.

Mr. Houston also became close to Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. In 2013, Mr. Houston joined Mr. Zuckerberg as a co-founder of FWD.us, a group that mobilizes the tech industry for immigration reform.

Running Dropbox, Mr. Houston was at first determined to aim its product — which lets people store and access their files in the cloud — at consumers rather than businesses. He spent lavishly on employee perks, totaling $25,000 a year per person by 2016. The company once paid $60,000 for a five-foot chrome panda for its headquarters, becoming a symbol of start-up excess.

Then hurdles sprang up. In 2011, a security researcher complained to the Federal Trade Commission about the way Dropbox encrypted files. Mr. Houston called dealing with the criticism “a rite of passage.”

Dropbox also developed a reputation as an unwelcoming workplace for women. “Some of the things they’ve been struggling with are how to balance Dropbox being a fun place to work with accusations of having a frat boy atmosphere,” Mr. Mann said.

Dropbox’s business evolved in 2014 after Mr. Houston hired Dennis Woodside, a former Google executive, as chief operating officer. Now its products are primarily used for work, with businesses paying a subscription fee for the platform. A rival company, Box, which was aimed at businesses, went public in 2015.

“From Day One, Dropbox has been an incredibly user-friendly product — which is a big reason why it spread virally — but it also took the company too long to realize the money was in being a business-focused company, not a consumer-focused one,” said Ben Thompson, the analyst behind the influential tech newsletter Stratechery.

In 2015, investors began questioning whether high-priced start-ups were living up to their skyrocketing valuations. Dropbox, already privately valued at $10 billion, was marked down in value by some large institutional investors.

Continue reading the main story

Dropbox instilled more financial discipline. In 2016, employees lost many in-office perks. (The panda remained. A note posted nearby said it would serve as “a reminder” to be thoughtful about spending.)

Whether Dropbox can compete against behemoths like Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and Google, which all provide cloud storage, remains a question.

“Here you have somebody who’s literally in competition with all four, except Facebook,” said Hadi Partovi, an early Dropbox investor. But he added that Mr. Houston’s even-keeled demeanor had allowed the company to work with competitors like Microsoft and Google.

Today, Mr. Houston lives in the Millennium Tower, a glass high-rise in the South of Market neighborhood. His apartment floors are stone and the furniture is minimalist and modern. In the living room, he has built a midsize stage to perform music. He has a house in Hawaii where he vacations.

He is a bachelor and, his friends said, lives like one.

“He never cooks. He’s a snack guy all the way if that makes any sense,” Mr. Croswell said. “He definitely wants a family.”

On weekends, he and his friends around the country still put on their headsets and play video games together.

“He doesn’t have to do any of the hacks anymore,” Mr. Croswell said. “Software companies all fixed that kind of stuff.”

Continue reading the main story

NELLIE BOWLES

The post Dropbox Chief to Join Elite Ranks of Idea-to-I.P.O. Founders appeared first on dailygate.

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

I will try to keep it brief, lest this become a book! (eh, publishers?) I hope this encourages others to share a “3-things…” post. It’s fun to introspect and accumulate learnings from your career. But first, a shiny picture of some films I’ve worked on!

Why 3 things? It’s something Randy Pausch asked us to do after each project at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center. “List 3 things that worked, 3 things that didn’t and 3 things you’ll do differently next time”. I’m modifying Randy’s thought exercise a bit to bring you 3 things I learned per each job I’ve had in my career so far. Let’s begin.

Electronic Arts / Maxis

Software Engineer, 2005–2009

The Spore team hitting “First Internal Playable”. I am towards the top left

In 2005, I joined Maxis straight out of grad school at Carnegie Mellon to work on Will Wright’s game “Spore”. I was part of the core engine team.

1. Invest in your own tools

My career has been about building tools for creative people. Tools for gamers to create their own universe (Spore), tools for professional artists to craft beautiful characters (Pixar), tools for education (Teal Labs) etc. Early on, I learned that the most important thing is to get your own tools right. Evaluate and improve your workflow constantly. Huge thanks to @AndrewWillmott for being an amazing mentor who showed me this and so much more. Which brings us to…

2. Seek a good mentor, be a good mentor

People who think deeply but communicate simply tend to be good mentors. Other kinds of mentors guide you through their work, instead of their words. Regardless of their style, good mentors make all the difference. While receiving mentorship is key early on, paying it back by guiding others is equally rewarding later in your career.

3. “When it’s ready” is the best deadline

I learned a lot from the production cycle of Spore because we got one half of the product right and the other half wrong. The Creature Editor in Spore is a great example of investing tremendously in a product till it’s ready. The game part of Spore, however, was presented too early (and too well). Then, the longer we took to finish it, the more deadline-oriented it got. Ultimately quality suffered. My learning: Deadlines should be kept simple — show something in private user tests every X weeks. Then focus on scope and quality and do a public beta when it’s ready leading up to product release.

Pixar Animation Studios

Shading Technical Director, 2009–2014

One of the many soft perks at Pixar. Oscar pictures with the directors! Mark Andrews (left) and Lee Unkrich (right)

In 2009 I joined Pixar after a rather grueling interview process. I was put in charge of a 16 year old application, written in an obscure programming language. 50 artists hated it but used it as their primary tool to shade all the characters and sets on all the movies in production. No engineers wanted to work on this thing. Welcome to Pixar!

1. Document your journey

Having a reasonable portfolio of work displayed on my website has opened doors for me time and again. My Pixar interviews went terribly. Most of the team didn’t think I had the chops for the job. But the leader of the engineering group — Bill Polson had seen my website. Apparently he was the only one who had. So he called everyone into a room, put the site up on the screen and said “This guy has done more computer graphics than a lot of you in this room combined” — he was exaggerating, but his point was well taken and I got a shot! A few months into the job, a number of folks came by and told me the story of how they had rejected me in interviews but were very glad to be wrong. Phew!

2. Eat your own dog food

Don’t just sit in your own chair. Visit people in departments downstream or upstream from yours and try to do their job. If you become your client you will be able to deploy your vision as if it was the client’s idea all along. At Pixar, I was able to reform the entire shading pipeline across a period of 2 years while 50 artists used it daily without disruption. Like any good method actor I took it too far and eventually gave up my software engineer role to become a shading artist working on characters and sets using the tool I once maintained.

3. Do different things, don’t be afraid to start from zero

I feel the most fulfilled when I’m learning tons of new stuff. Bill Polson once said to me — “If you’re going to work somewhere for 5 years, make sure it’s not the same year repeated 5 times”. I live by that. You don’t need to “be an artist” to make good art or “be a programmer” to develop great software. Put your ego away and try new things. I went from being a tools engineer to a character and sets artist at Pixar. The transitions were tough and not necessarily smart career moves but the personal growth was immense.

I learned so many amazing things at Pixar that I could write a book. Luckily my hero and Pixar president Ed Catmull already did — Read Creativity Inc.

Lumos Labs (Lumosity)

Senior Software Engineer, 2014–2016

Lumos Labs is based in this historic San Francisco building. I took this picture on one of our daily bubble-tea breaks.

In grad school, I co-founded the Experimental Gameplay Project (EGP). We made 50 game prototypes in one semester and had the best time ever. I was always looking for a job version of the EGP. In 2014, I discovered Lumosity and immediately wanted to work there EGP-style.

1. Separate makers from fakers

This learning is for interviewers and managers trying to hire candidates that are a great fit. Lumos Labs sent me a design document and asked me to build a game using only HTML and JS. I had about 6–8 hours to do it. During in-person interviews I was asked to make lots of modifications to my game. They do similar tests for all the roles they hire for. Build something, then modify and defend it — so much more effective than typical interviews!

2. Challenge your ethos

Lumosity prides itself on the scientific research they put into their games. I can tell you it’s not a marketing gimmick, though the FTC thought so. At Lumos they take the science stuff so seriously that we could barely get any games approved by the Science Team. This was a problem because our customers wanted more games, different kinds of games and were using the product to have fun. Whether games make you smart or not, the truth is people practice because it feels good to work out your brain. And in my opinion, by not providing lots of new stuff regularly, we lost a lot of players to the competition. Sometimes we make the mistake of implicitly following what has worked before and get too close to our ethos to challenge it.

3. The whole can be greater than sum of its parts

To me, Lumosity’s greatest achievement is showing that a subscription based product made entirely out of mini-games can be a huge success. When a number of small projects serve a common theme they can really turn into something very deep and meaningful even if each project itself is relatively shallow. As a fan of quick and small projects, this gives me great hope.

Teal Labs

Chief Technology Officer, 2016

Getting mobbed by kids!

I’ve always been very interested in educational technology. So I spent 2016 working closely with a K-12 school. My team and I deployed iPads for 350 students and 5o teachers, created custom apps and came away with tons of learnings about learning itself!

1. Surround yourself with your audience

At Teal Labs I insisted that our office be inside the school we were working with. So we sat in a room behind the library where we welcomed invasions by kids during recess. I also made it compulsory for my team to take classes or co-teach at least once a week. This helped us make relevant and engaging products and improve upon them in a tight feedback loop.

2. Give students tools to produce content

We invest so much in giving fantastic content to students on a plate. They eat it up voraciously, but it doesn’t translate into skills and knowledge. It just turns kids into content-addicts expecting easy content all the time. On the other hand, if a child is asked to research and teach a topic or create a report on it, the retention of learning is much higher. Teaching is the best learning, as they say. My Teal Labs experience taught me that educational technology should be about engaging tools for students to create, teach, perform and present. Then, as Will Wright would say, “get out of the way and watch them go!”. “Tools to produce content” is also the answer to — What role should VR/AR have in education?

3. Education and Entertainment are the same thing

The best learning experiences are so fun, that you lose track of time. The best entertainment experiences are so transformative that you end up growing and learning something about yourself. Engagement is a key ingredient to both education and entertainment. In the classroom we found that engagement comes from meaningful social interactions with other students- discussions, performances, collaboration and competition. We built an asynchronous multiplayer game for 350 students. The game was about capturing territory in a common world by doing math problems. Each student collaborated with everyone in her class but competed with students from other classes. We saw 40x more participation in math as a result!

Masala Games

Director, Developer, Janitor, (side project since 2012, For reals in 2017)

I have no idea what I’m doing, but it’s fun

After being lulled by the sweet embrace of gainful employment for 12 years, I finally made the jump into full time independent development. I am making my own games right now because it’s my favorite thing to do and I want my kids to grow up and play 10 awesome things that their papa made.

1. Business is a crazy emotional roller-coaster

Being your own boss is the best! There is nothing more exhilarating than people buying and appreciating a product that is all your own. But there is nothing more depressing than not being able to reach those people. My first game Word Mess has 603,143 downloads (in 5 years) and I have cheered each one of them like I cheered Toy Story 3 winning an Oscar. My recent app Text Mess, on the other hand, has only been downloaded a 100 times in its first 10 days and I feel like jumping off of a bridge :P Hopefully I can learn to trust the process and be cooler about the ups and downs.

2. Clearly define what risk and success mean to you

You can succeed without any major risks if you plan smartly, execute patiently and course correct regularly. It comes down to how you calculate risk and define success. Success for me is financial independence and 100% ownership of my work. To me, risk is when uncertainty can’t be bounded within a small ok-to-fail region of tolerance. In other words, I don’t like risk :) That’s why I’ve patiently saved and learned for 12 years before venturing out on my own. What do risk and success mean to you?

3. Find a good bouncing wall

You are too close to your work. Find a good bullshit detector who will tell you like it is. Ideally, they are also part of (or understand) your target audience. In my case, my wife usually plays this role. She is brutally honest (sometimes too brutal) about the stuff I make. Build a group of early-feedback providers like it’s Pixar’s Brain Trust.

Handy cheat sheet of Shalin’s learnings

Invest in your own tools

Seek a good mentor, be a good mentor

“When it’s ready” is the best deadline

Document your journey

Eat your own dog food

Do different things, don’t be afraid to start from zero

Separate makers from fakers

Challenge your ethos

The whole can be greater than sum of its parts

Surround yourself with your audience

Give students tools to produce content

Education and Entertainment are the same thing

Business is a crazy emotional roller-coaster

Clearly define what risk and success mean to you

Find a good bouncing wall

There you have it! Learnings from a colorful decade or so of career. I am incredibly thankful to my mentors, coworkers and friends for this amazing journey. I hope #4 encourages you to make your own 3-things post. If you do, send it to me-

Say hi: @ShalinShodhan

Random picture of my boys and I rocking mutton chops

[Cross Posted]

[My other Gamasutra article from 12 years ago!]