People accuse me of being “driven” and can’t figure out how I manage to do as much as I do. I get it. I work 8-10 hours a day at the robot factory, then come home and work on my dozen simultaneous projects.
A lot of this comes down to some basic principles I live by.
Keep The Endgame In Sight
It’s as simple as it sounds. What is your endgame? What are you trying to do? Where do you want to be at the end of all this effort? As Morden and his masters the Shadows famously asked: “what do you want?”
Figure that out first. Me? I have a few of them. And some I’ve achieved. One of these endgames was to have solid employment to support a lifestyle that wasn’t an endless fail state.
Once you have this endgame, make sure you’re working toward it. It’s that simple.
Planning
Do I really look like a guy with a plan? No joke, I’ve had people accuse me of being the Joker because of how he’s portrayed in that movie. The funny thing is it’s for two completely different reasons. Certain unenlightened people take my lack of constant self-aggrandizement and updates on every tiny thing I’m doing as a sign of laziness; they’re the ones who think the Joker just bumbled his way through everything by sheer luck despite all evidence to the contrary. And then there are the people who actually paid attention to the movie and realize that one line was his biggest joke in the movie. That guy had multiple intricate plans and backup plans going at all times throughout.
I made the mistake of asking Stacie this as a joke a few weeks ago. First she gave me that look. You know the one. Then she accused me of planning “everything.” To which my response was “I do not! Picking my nose is purely on an as-needed basis.” From there it devolved into her demanding to see my monthly planner.
Monthly planner. As if. I plan my stuff by the quarter.
Anyway, here’s how I plan things out:
Start with the endgame. Doesn’t matter what it is, just figure it out.
Assuming it’s something more complex than “I want to go on vacation next summer” when that’s a matter of saving up some PTO and cash, making a reservation, and doing it, figure out the major components of it.
I wanted a better lifestyle – see above. So I went back to skool and lived like a monk for several years to get two solid degrees. Then I spent about as long working my way up in the “I build robots” industry. Now I have a solid job at the robot factory and I get plenty of good offers in my inbox almost daily.
No Zero Days
A “zero day” is a day in which you accomplish nothing toward your goals. I don’t allow myself to have them without a damn good reason. You know, like my far too frequent hostibulizations. Even if I end up in the hostibule unexpectedly, I have Stacie bring me my backpack as soon as she can. That simple step means I have my notebooks, tablet, laptop, phone, etc. available so I can accomplish something. Because believe me, if you aren’t at the moment stoned out of your mind on painkillers the hostibule is gorram boring. Since you don’t have anywhere else to go or anything else to do, take advantage of it.
My daily hostibule routine (subject to change if they drag me off to the MRI or shoot me up with some drugs that leave me unable to spell my own name) is sleep in, fire up the smooth jazz channel on the TV, order room service breakfast, spend the morning working on Monkey Business in between doctor visits, room service lunch, more Monkey Business, room service night food, still more Monkey Business, then sleep. Granted, most of the Monkey Business I get done in the hostibule is research, low-end admin stuff, project planning, concept art, and other background “infrastructure” tasks, but every hour I can work on it there is an hour I don’t have to work on it when I have access to my desktop (my laptop is not up to the challenge of 3D modeling or any but the most basic Unity tasks) and other resources.
Hence no or very few zero days. I think this last time I had one true zero day, and that was the day I checked in because everything was so hectic and nobody had any idea what the plan was. Once they got me into a room, though, I was golden.
I’m writing this two days after being discharged. Because of the pain and drainage in my knee, I have the rest of the week off, or longer if my doctor says otherwise when I go see her for a follow-up. Yesterday and today I’ve done some more planning and background work and made several (relatively simple but necessary) 3D models. If the doctors are going to give me four days off from work and not order me to stay in bed, you bet I’m going to see what I can get done with the extra hours.
The 80/20 Principle
Put simply, you get eighty percent of your benefits or problems from twenty percent of inputs.
When I first heard about this back in the ‘90s my coworkers and I thought the boss was joking. His response was to have us track the problems and where they were coming from – I was working overnight security in a section 8 building at the time, and we had written it off as a complete disaster full of scumbags. We had drug dealers shooting at us pretty regularly, and even the supposed good guys were not wonderful people. So we tracked all of our incidents for a month and it was something like 97% of our problems coming from around 5% of the people.
Anyway, this works in other areas too. Think about your typical day. Is everything you do useful?
Maxims 70 and 71
There’s this great webcomic called Schlock Mercenary. It just wrapped up recently after twenty years of daily updates. A running gag in the strip was people quoting The 70 Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries. While it’s clearly a parody of other motivational books, there are some really good ideas in there.
Maxim 70 states “Failure is not an option. It is mandatory. The option is whether or not to let failure be the last thing you do.” You’re going to fail. Sometimes with alarming frequency. Sometimes really badly. Thing is, that’s how you learn.
I once screwed up and transposed two wires in a plug for a motor driver. These thin little wires barely carried any current at all. Like if you stripped them and held them on your skin you’d barely feel it. It was enough to kill the driver though. Twelve hundred bucks of electronics dead in an instant. Needless to say, the project manager wasn’t thrilled. But you know what he said on the subject? “We still have plenty of time to order a replacement, and on a machine that costs half a million this isn’t that bad. When we’re working on stuff at this level, any screwup is going to suck – you’re not on an assembly line. Try not to do it again.” It probably helped that I was the prototyper that helped the engineer in charge redesign the control system.
What I did after that was pay extra attention to those thin little wires on the rest of that project and other projects down the road. It’s been several years and I haven’t had anything similar happen. That failure wasn’t the last thing I did in any way. I learned from my mistake and moved forward.
I know people who don’t understand that simple concept. At the first sign of misfortune, they give up. For them, failure is the end. In a few cases, they had something really good and when they screwed it up they just gave up. Instead of getting back on the horse they just stopped trying and went with the path of least resistance for the rest of their lives. They stopped taking chances and just gave up. Screw that.
This is such a solid principle I bought the keychain fob and carry it with me wherever I go.
No Gods, No Masters
Also known as having a strong internal locus of control.
When I was younger, I was surrounded by losers. A lot of this was due to circumstances beyond my control; a kid doesn’t have much say in where his parents decide to move. Not all, but a good part. While the specific peer pool was determined for me, my specific peers weren’t. And who I listened to was ultimately my choice. Due to some bad decisions, a lot of my friends were clods. Not all, but a lot of them.
What most of these losers had in common was a belief that they were mostly just along for the ride in their lives. They wouldn’t phrase it that way, but that’s the short version. To someone like this – which included me for a long time – the quality of your life is largely determined by the universe, other people, luck, whatever. Not only that but attempts to improve your situation beyond “your place” are actively avoided. And that is a toxic way to live. You end up missing out on so much because you honestly believe things happen because they’re supposed to or don’t because they’re not.
Yeah, no.
Here’s the interesting thing about higher education. Unlike high school where a lot of the teachers and administrators are petty tyrants who will screw you over simply because they don’t like you, it’s all up to you after high school. You can screw around and do the bare minimum, and your report card will reflect that. Or you can buckle down, learn the material, and do well, and your report card will reflect that too. Which can help when you’re looking for your first few jobs after skool. More importantly, those habits will show in your interviews and later your references.
Once you realize it’s all on you – barring some bizarre and rare circumstance like winning the lottery or a horrific accident that leaves you permanently disabled – it changes everything. Cheap Trick nailed it with their song “Reach Out. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6s1Jsz1lj1Y)”
I wanted a better lifestyle. So I went back to skool and improved my employment prospects. Then I worked my butt off to go from good prospects to good reality. I didn’t suck up to get promotions I didn’t deserve (and could be taken from me the instant I stopped), I put forth the effort and demonstrated extreme competence. My annual reviews are pretty short because there isn’t much to be said when you do good work and lots of it.
I wanted to make video games since I was a little kid. I remember spending days and days drawing pictures of things I’d include in these hypothetical games. Back then, I was surrounded by people who repeatedly assured me “you’re not going to design video games. That’s for college people. Be realistic. People like us work in factories.” Then when I was in tech skool I got bored enough to actually give it a try. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the skills to do a lot of what I needed to, so it kind of just rotted on the vine. So I went online and found some classes. Started taking them, and now I have a few demos up online with some much bigger projects.
One small part of this also includes not worrying about what people I don’t care about think of me or what I’m doing. I’ve known far too many people who think you aren’t doing anything unless you constantly tell people what you’re up to. And you know what? They don’t accomplish much. Largely because all that time they spend making sure people who don’t matter see them accomplishing something tiny isn’t being spent accomplishing something of note.
I prefer to let my actions and accomplishments speak for themselves. I do some dev logs over at Devil Monkey Games, but that’s kind of an indie developer community thing. I’ll probably discontinue them in favor of the monthly State of the Monkeys posts. They’re simultaneously the most annoying to write because I can’t write them ahead of time and the most useless because there’s rarely anything of note to report. Pretty much the definition of one of the tasks to be dropped under the 80/20 principle.
Make It Happen
All of the above is nice and it certainly looks good on a motivational poster or blog post, but none of it matters if you don’t do one simple thing:
Get off your ass and Make It Happen.
You heard me. You’ve seen my schedule. Because I Make It Happen, I’ve released a few video game demos and have several much more substantial game projects in the works. Because I Make It Happen, I write around ten thousand words a month on the Devil Monkey Games blog, all of it part of my game studio. Because I Make It Happen I have a solid job that more than pays my bills and if something changes there I have a pretty constant stream of other offers coming in every day.
Because we Make It Happen, we have a nice lifestyle, house with a big yard and pool, and several major lifestyle improvements in the works. People sometimes question my decision to become involved with and eventually marry Stacie. The big issue is that she’s an alpha female control freak. Yes she is. Here’s the thing about alpha female control freaks – they Make It Happen. When we need something, we figure out how we’re going to do it, break it down, and Make It Happen.