My guest for this episode is Justin Gary, an award-winning game designer, author, and speaker. We discuss how Justin turned his passion for gaming into a lucrative career, the key decisions he made that led to his success, and a few of the many lessons he’s learned along the way.
Justin Gary is an award-winning game designer, author, and speaker. He started his career in gaming at the age of seventeen when he won the Magic: The Gathering US National Championships. He went on to play Magic professionally for several years, winning a Grand Prix, Pro Tour, and World Championship along the way.
Justin dropped out of NYU Law School to pursue an opportunity as a game designer. He went on to lead-design the DC Comics: Infinite Crisis set and create the World of Warcraft Miniatures Game. Justin left his job as a game designer to start his own company.
In 2010, he created the smash hit deck-building game Ascension. Justin’s latest project, Ascension Tactics just raised nearly half a million dollars of pre-orders on kickstarter, more than triple the original goal.
In this episode we talk about:
- What Justin learned from playing Magic professionally and the biggest distinction between those who succeeded as professional gamers and those who didn’t (9:40)
- How Justin found the courage to quit in the middle of law school and pursue his passion instead (19:40)
- How you can tell if you are on the right path in your own life, or just following someone else’s plan (22:30)
- The key to happiness that most people get backwards (40:30)
- How to get started as a game designer (44:45) — like most of what we discussed in this episode, these principles apply to any creative work (art, starting a business, writing, etc).
Books Mentioned:
- Open by Andre Agassi
- The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
- A Whack on the Side of the Head: How You Can Be More Creative by Roger VonOech
Links:
- JustinGary.com – Justin’s main website
- Think Like A Game Designer – Justin’s book and podcast (look out for the online course coming soon)
- @Justin_Gary on Twitter
Listen and Subscribe on:
Transcript
Neville:
There’s a lot I want to talk about in terms of making games and making them successful, and how you got to there, but I’m curious where you were supposed to be at this point in your life. If you had listened to, I don’t know, your parents or schoolteachers or those kind of influences that we all have, was everyone telling you, “Hey, you should be a game designer,” from when you were a little kid or what was… What was the default path?
Justin:
Oh, no, it was a very different path I ran. So, both of my parents are attorneys and my stepdad is also an attorney. And I was always destined to be a lawyer. That was what I was born to me. That’s what I was supposed to be. I was the captain of my debate team. I actually went to law school.
Neville:
Wow.
Justin:
In high school I was voted Most Likely to Disagree with Anything You Say.
Neville:
That’s a dubious honor.
Justin:
Yes, indeed. I’ve mellowed out since then. And yeah, I went to the most expensive law school in the country, NYU Law. That was my path, and it was only through a very difficult realization and break that I was able to veer away and drop out of law school and become a game designer.
Neville:
Did you know what type of law you wanted to practice from a young age? Was it something that you were actually passionate about yourself, or was it just like, “This is the thing I’ve got to do it to make Mom and Dad happy”?
Justin:
Yeah, not really. I did love debate, where I love breaking things down into their component parts and kind of figuring out the truth of what’s going on, and looking at things from different angles, and I enjoyed that process. But when it came to law, the types of law I was most interested in was international law and constitutional law and basically law of things that doesn’t really exist, like the most esoteric stuff, things that interested me the most.
Justin:
I remember in law school, one of the classes I really enjoyed was one of the most boring sounding names. It was the Administrative and Regulatory State. Sounds like bang your head against a desk, but what it was, was showing you behind the curtain of how laws get made and how the system works. So as a gamer, intrinsically, it was like, “Oh, okay. I can see how you manipulate these things and get this stuff done,” and how the whole system came together. And that kind of system design was fascinating to me, which again, will come into play here.
Neville:
System design, and also law is not a career I associate with creativity. Certainly there’s elements of creativity in creating an argument or something like that, but it sounds like even within law you latched onto the part that allowed for some of the creativity.
Justin:
Yeah, that’s right. And there’s some other things about law that are really interesting to me. I mean, again, for people who are passionate something specific that they want to do, and they want to help people, they have a specific… I don’t want to discourage everybody from being lawyers, but I want to discourage many people from being lawyers, because 1) it’s sort of this default path for a lot of people in my family. You’ve got plenty of choices for career. You could be a lawyer, a doctor, or dentist. No problem. And I think that lawyers, a lot of what your job is, is to always be thing about the worst case scenario. To always be thinking about how somebody can screw you over and what could go wrong, how do you defend yourself against these things. And that training for your brain, I don’t think tends to lead to a good life.
Justin:
If I’m always looking for what can go wrong in any relationship and any business deal, I’m always trying to find these angles, your brain’s going to look and find those things everywhere in the world. So I found that happening to myself a little bit. I didn’t like who I was when I was really in law school and kind of thinking in those terms all the time.
Neville:
That’s really fascinating. I’ve never thought about that specifically about being a lawyer, but I think about that same exact idea all the time, and I associate it more with just like an engineering mindset because that’s exactly what we’re trained to do, especially, I used to work in IT security and it was the exact same thing. Any situation that you face, it’s like, “Okay, well, how could this go wrong?” Or even simple engineering. If you’re building a bridge, building the bridge is not really the engineer’s job. The engineer’s job is to figure out everything that could go wrong with the bridge, if the wind is coming this way and there’s an earthquake at the same time, two cars are spaced this far apart, but this one really weird edge case could happen. And then it all comes crashing down.
Justin:
Yeah. I think that’s right. I mean, you know, to some extent this is true in all aspects. An entrepreneur, he needs to be thinking of the same things, what can go wrong in my business where the threats from other… whether it’s competitors or the economy or the environment, some amount of that is healthy and valuable, but being careful to not let that become your dominant mode of thinking and being able to see the things that can go right and also recognizing that… maybe not with the bridge, maybe I want you to be really careful with the bridge, but with other things, if the stuff goes wrong, it’s not that bad. You’ll be able to recover, it’ll be okay.
Justin:
And it’s great, I think that that type of mentality ends up becoming very, very critical. And I frame myself that way as a designer. When you’re designing and creating something new, you will fail 100%. It’s going to happen again and again and again. The first few prototypes and games I make are always terrible, and then when I reiterate them and then be like, “Okay, now it gets a little better. Now it gets a little better.” And then eventually you can get to something that works. And that mentality is super empowering because in all careers, whether you want to learn to play an instrument or write a book, or whatever you want to do, you’re going to have these failures and you’re going to have these kinds of setbacks and challenges, but none of them are fatal. They are a necessary part of the process, and if you are able to focus on that learning and growth and have faith that the end result is not going to be the same as the starting point, you really can have a pretty amazing life.
Neville:
I think there’s probably a lot in your life that’s led you to believing that. I mean, I wholeheartedly agree, but I think those are values that intellectually I’m with you on, but I think it’s difficult and it’s like an everyday practice to actually embody those, right? I mean, going back to the engineer example, as a lawyer example, I’ve had plenty of friends, and me, at a point in my life where I would see a girl at a bar, you want to go talk to her because you think she’s cute or something, but maybe she has a boyfriend, maybe she’s in a bad mood, maybe, maybe, maybe… You come up with this list of like 100 things that could go wrong, why you shouldn’t do it, and you talk yourself out of it.
Neville:
And as you said, for most things we do in our lives these days, there’s no saber tooth tiger around the corner that’s going to eat us. These things aren’t life and death. And especially if you’re a creator or some kind of creative person, in order to get better you have to be willing to keep putting stuff out there and trying, and maybe not hard failing, but doing something that isn’t perfect, and then iterating and making it better and making it better.
Justin:
Yeah.
Neville:
How did you get to that? So you’re in law school, you enjoy games. Were you playing games seriously at that point, like where…
Justin:
Yeah, so I started playing games seriously well before that. In fact, I played games obviously with my family, and we were a pretty competitive bunch in general, some cutthroat [crosstalk 00:07:13].
Neville:
Bunch of lawyers in the family.
Justin:
Yeah, seriously. I mean, with my parents [inaudible 00:07:13]-
Neville:
The Monopoly rule book came out more often than usual.
Justin:
Yeah, they trained me well. They did not let me win when I was young. I had to win for myself, and if I could outargue my way into a point, then I’d get what I wanted. And then I discovered a game called Magic: The Gathering when I was 16. And when I was 17 I won the US national championships. And that sort of catapulted me on this different path where I started traveling around the world and playing in tournaments for money, and that’s how I paid my way through college. So I ended up getting this exposure to this whole other world, and it did a lot of things for me. 1) Of course it built me connections in the gaming industry. 2) It gave me a way greater breadth of experience just being able to sort of… Every other month I would be in Tokyo or Sydney or Rome or London. Everybody else is flipping burgers or hanging out at each other’s houses or whatever.
Justin:
So that was all great, but it also really taught me the value of failure, because I would be playing games where I’d have $10,000 on the line, and I would make a mistake, and you have to live with that. And that lesson gets driven home very quickly, and you go back and you play again. And in fact, even the best players, you’re losing a good chunk of the time. Maybe a majority of the time even in a lot of scenarios. That’s just an unavoidable part of the process of playing games and playing at the highest competitive levels.
Justin:
So you have to get comfortable with failure, and the best players, I saw the biggest distinction. By far, the biggest distinction between the people who succeeded and the people who didn’t were the ones who would learn from those failures and take those lessons and then apply them in the future. It’s very easy in a game like Magic… So for those that aren’t familiar with it, the easiest way to describe it is sort of a combination between chess and poker where you get to build your own deck before you come to the table.
Neville:
That sounds a lot less nerdy than the Casting Spells and Mana and Ogres and Majors that I [inaudible] with it, but chess and poker.
Justin:
Yeah, yeah. Again, depending on my audience I can describe it in different ways, but yeah, from a logical strategy kind of standpoint, that’s the [inaudible] way to think about it. And so you have a lot of cases where because it’s like poker, you can get lucky or unlucky or a bad draw and it can lose you the game. For a lot of people, that psychological out of, “Oh, I just got lucky.” “Oh, this guy, he’s lucky. He’s not really good,” or, “This thing happened,” whereas in reality, if you had made a different play three turns earlier, that luck wouldn’t have mattered because you would have put yourself in a position where it didn’t matter what you drew that turn. Or a variety of situations like that where you can be like, “Oh, actually if I just represented to my opponent like I had this, then they would have played differently, then I would have be able to capitalize on that.”
Justin:
[inaudible] dissect things at a deep level and say in every situation that I was in, I would take the frame of, “Okay, what could I have done differently?” Is there anything in that scenario that I could have done differently to change those probabilities or put myself in a better position? Or even to see in the situations where you win, where, “Oh, actually I won there, but that’s only because I got lucky, and if I had done this three turns earlier, I wouldn’t have needed that lucky draw at the end.” That, forcing myself through high level competition to learn that lesson again and again and again and again, I think was a really valuable way when I started to drill home that idea of failure and learning and repetition that I think has served me pretty well over the years.
Neville:
And so you were a teenager at this point, and you were basically compete… I had no idea there was that much money in Magic to begin with first of all, but you were competing at this high level in Magic, and so you were basically then, what, finishing a game or a tournament and then just going back to your hotel room and tearing down what happened and what you could have done differently? How does that look?
Justin:
Yeah. One of the best things also there, I mentioned sort of building a network of people, I found really smart friends. I found people that were better than me. In fact, when I went to college… I grew up in Miami, I went to college up in New Hampshire, and the best team in the world at that time was in Boston. So I would drive to Boston to go play with them and learn from them and work with them. Then we would dissect those games in between rounds. We wouldn’t even go back to the room. In between rounds we’d be talking about our games.
Justin:
If you were a [inaudible] matching, that would be live streamed. Back then it wasn’t live streaming, but broadcast, and then we would dissect it right there. So having smart people around you that can help you and help analyze what you’re doing in all kind of little Magic mastermind in that situation…
Neville:
Yeah, yeah.
Justin:
And again, those people when you go through the fire together, when you play in these tournaments and you play and you compete and you kind of have to… We’d battle against each other too sometimes.
Neville:
Sure.
Justin:
That builds not only your character, it reveals the character of the people that are around you. And then some of those people are the very same ones that I started my company with and started working together and building things down the road. So that’s another great piece of it… And this is something I’ve also learned. One job I had when I was working at another company and working for somebody who was a little bit of a… I’d describe as a Bond-ville and our CEO was both [inaudible 00:12:26]. It was pretty amazing.
Neville:
Were there single monochrome gray outfits and stuff too? Or did he have a hairless cat?
Justin:
Yeah, yeah. But going through that, you have this sort of crazy person at the top and a lot of challenging infrastructure, the people who you knew you could rely on, like the people who would do what they said they’d do and would deliver and you could work with, and that you could trust, those people, those relationships became amazing. And again, those were the first people that I hired when I started my company or that I would go work with and partnership in other areas. So finding the people who you can struggle with successfully, who you can go… That’s where true friendships and really powerful bonds can be formed. So that was another upside of the Magic career, I think.
Neville:
When you describe it like this, I can totally understand the poker/chess analogy, when you listen to the top, let’s say, chess players in the world, they’re at the Grandmasters, not only do they analyze their own games like this, but they actually know historical chess games or even current chess games. They can tell you move by move what happened, where someone made a mistake, even if it was 20 moves before the game actually ended because they’re, as you said, playing it out strategically long-term and seeing, “Oh, yeah, there’s some luck, there’s some whatever.” There’s some entropy and unpredictability, but you could have done this thing at this step. Is that something you learned watching the other top players at that time? You just surrounded yourself with them and just had this immersive…
Justin:
As far as why did I react the way I did and learn that skillset, I don’t know. I think some of that was there, I think some of that did come from my parents and from those early games sitting around the kitchen table playing. It was always they wouldn’t let me win, but they would help with the dissecting of the breaking down of stuff. And so I think some of that came around the kitchen table, and I just always had a competitive drive in me, and that drive to compete and win required you to face these things. Either you’re going to crumble and lose or you’re going to take the lesson from the loss and be able to come back and do it again.
Justin:
I think it’s partially from early upbringing, partially from modeling the people around me who were successful, and seeing how they behaved, and partially from that, yeah, that just intrinsic joy of debating and dissecting things. I think that’s just part of my DNA is that something that I think we share, sort of being able to take something and analytically break it down and look at it from every angle, and say, “Okay, here’s [inaudible] put together. Now, okay, I can put it back together again.” For me, that’s just fun.
Neville:
You said earlier something that struck me, which is you perhaps lose more often than you win, or at least you have to get used to losing. That’s just part of it. I think most of us probably haven’t spent a lot of time watching Magic: The Gathering tournaments, but or even competitive gaming, tabletop gaming. What you said just made me think back to Andre Agassi’s book Open, and he talks a lot about that. Also one person wins the tournament, but everybody there is a professional tennis player, and all those other people lost basically. They didn’t win. They might have come in second or third or fifth or whatever, and they might be great, but they didn’t win. So you have to just get used to that.
Neville:
And I guess some people just, as you said, crumble under that, but other are able to separate the ego and the pain of, “Oh, I lost. I didn’t win. That sucks,” from the analysis, just that cold, hard, “What could I have done differently?” Sometimes it’s just an unlucky break, but there’s still some strategy in all of that. I can totally get how that makes you successful as a gamer, but was there some moment where you decided that I don’t want to just play these games, I want to make these games? Was it like an ‘a-ha’ moment or how did all that come about?
Justin:
Yeah, in some ways, the situation kind of forced itself upon me that created this opportunity, and in some ways I had to decide and make that moment and leap. So, the way it went down was I had finished my first year of law school and I was pretty miserable. I mean, it was probably the most… I’m a pretty happy guy by default, but I think that was the most unhappy I think I’ve ever been. I had put on like 25 pounds, I’d actually thrown my back out from reading in the library. I didn’t even know that was possible, but it happened.
Neville:
You got the world’s nerdiest injury.
Justin:
I got it [inaudible 00:16:59].
Neville:
“How’d you hurt yourself? Did something go wrong with the Magic: The Gathering tournament?” “No, no, books in the library.”
Justin:
Books in the library. I threw my back out for two weeks just from bending over and reading.
Neville:
I shouldn’t laugh, it’s…
Justin:
I can laugh at it now. So anyway, I finished law school and then in the summer you’re supposed to go get an internship at a law firm, but there was this company called Upper Deck that was out in San Diego, and they were working on a brand new game, new competitive game, called Versus System, which used Marvel and DC Comics characters and battling and whatever. So they contacted me as well as a bunch of other Magic pros and top tier group gamers to come and try out the game and give them feedback and kind of work on it a little bit over the summer. And so an all-expenses paid trip to San Diego for the summer sounded amazing, right?
Neville:
Yeah.
Justin:
So I was like, “Yeah, sure, no problem. I’m in.” And so I go out to San Diego and I just have the time of my life. Every day I’m walking out by the beach. I’m talking with a lot of these same smart people that I would talk about Magic and things back in the day. We’re breaking down what’s going on. Now I have this new problem of figuring out how I… You know, designing games is different than playing games. There’s this whole other creative process of I had to kind of analytically break that down and think okay, how do I make this fun and how do I make this something that will sell, and what does the product look like. And I was just having a great time thinking through all this stuff, working through it. We did that for two, three months.
Justin:
And then at the end of it they said, “Hey, listen, we think you’re really good at this. If you want, there’s a job here for you.” And so that forced the question. I had to go, “I don’t know what to do here.”
Neville:
Were you still a student at that point or had you already graduated law school?
Justin:
No, this was my first year of law school. This was the summer after my first year of law school. So law school’s only three years. The first year is the hardest by far. Everybody says that. Everything after that is kind of the same stuff over and over again basically. So I finished the first year, and then I actually go back after my internship and I have to make this decision. It’s like, okay, well do I go through law school and go start a job? My parents are obviously very clearly, “No, that’s crazy talk. This game thing is fun, but go get real. [crosstalk] law school and country. You should go finish your law degree and then you can figure it out after that.”
Justin:
Now, keep in mind, when I say top law school in the country, I mean most expensive. I mean, it’s $50,000 a year that I’m spending and taking out in debt for this, because, you know, that’s what you’re supposed to do.
Neville:
Sure.
Justin:
So I go back and I remember… I’ll never forget, so I go in, there’s a career counselor at the law school, and so I go to get advice from the career counselor.
Neville:
Who’s not in any way going to be biased towards you continuing. They have no skin in this game, right?
Justin:
Well, it’s a funny story because I go and I have this conversation. I sit there, and it’s like, “Listen, I have this dilemma,” and I explained the situation that I got this opportunity in San Diego doing this thing. And the counselor stops and looks at me and he’s like, “What are you still doing here?” I was like, paused, and I realized that’s someone who becomes a law school career counselor is someone who graduated law school but didn’t want to be a lawyer anymore, so they’re a career counselor. So they actually have a very [inaudible 00:20:03].
Neville:
So they understand you.
Justin:
And the truth is, when you really think about it and break down what’s the worst thing that can happen, you can leave law school and come back anytime in five years and pick right where you left off. They always come back. I wouldn’t miss anything. I wouldn’t miss a beat. But if I left this opportunity to go become a game designer and try that out, then who knows if that opportunity shows up again. And so I made that decision at that time, and my mom… It was hard. I didn’t want to… In retrospect, it’s like, “Yeah, duh.” But at the time it was so [inaudible] and the point of this podcast is to break people out of their normal patterns and to see that there’s other paths that are available.
Justin:
I got lucky to some degree that the path kind of showed itself to me, but it’s the pain and the resistance and the challenge of breaking out of that normal path is very real. My mom cried when I told her that I was leaving law school, and the pressure to conform to what society expects of you, and the family and friends, or people around you, it’s enormous and it’s real. And then that resistance is the thing that you have to focus on it’ll come. So breaking it down and saying, “Okay, what’s the real harm here?” And then realizing there is none. I mean, literally of a year. I spent a year [inaudible 00:21:11].
Neville:
You can save $50,000 a year and make money.
Justin:
$50,000 a year. I’m going to make $50,000 a year and I’m going to do something that’s awesome, you know?
Neville:
Yeah.
Justin:
And so really being concrete with understanding what the real consequences are, and then again, the consequences on the other side, like I have something that I can do that I’m very excited about and passion about. And I didn’t put it this way at the time, but the thing that I really try to focus on now is what is it that gets you energized? What is it that where you’re getting up in the morning and you’re excited about the day and that you have that energy and enthusiasm, because that’s the key. That’s the clue that tells you you’re on the right path. If you spend… not that you’re going to love everything about your job or that you’re going to love every day, sometimes days are rough, but if you are consistently getting up, and you’re dreading getting up and hitting that alarm clock and trying to snooze and not being willing to get up and face your day, you’re not excited about what’s going on, you are on the wrong path.
Justin:
And if you are excited about stuff, even if it’s tough, even if you’re having trouble, but you’re still enthusiastic and working, I can work 10, 12 hour days and I don’t mind it most of the time because it’s just I love what I’m doing, I’m excited about it. And that fuel is a really great indicator for people to know what the path they should be taking is. And so yeah, that’s where I made that key decision and made the leap, the first of a few really key decisions that kind of put me on the path I needed to be on.
Neville:
I’m imagining you selling this decision to your mom and just weighing out what the logical argument first… permission to approach the bench, and then come with this. “This is why I should do it.” But I agree, and I think that’s a lesson what you just described that’s taken me 36 years more or less to learn, and that’s that you’re not a robot and it’s not like… The decisions are not happening independent of you. You can say, “Oh, this market is hot right now,” or, “This career is a good career.” Or in the case of entrepreneurs, we talk so much about product market fit. This is what the market wants, this is the right product and all that.
Neville:
But the founder or the person or yourself, you have to have energy and enthusiasm towards that. That’s not just a nice-to-have little, “Oh yeah, I also happen to enjoy it.” Because that actually determines whether you’ll be successful or not, because you will hit some snag at some point along the way, or yeah, you’ll run up against your mom, and if you can’t really convince her that this is a good idea, like, “Yeah, you know what, you’re right, Mom. I should just go back to law school,” if you don’t have that enthusiasm for whatever you want to do.
Justin:
[crosstalk] everywhere. One of my favorite books on this is The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, talks about this. He’s primarily on the context of writing, but it applies to everything. It’s just that [inaudible] always going to be resistance to around doing things that are hard, around doing things that are meaningful and challenging that your soul is calling for. There’s tons of forces, and whether that’s the pressure from your parents, whether that’s the fact that your business isn’t succeeding and you’re losing money, whether it’s the fact that your boss is a pain in the ass, or the fact that you’re ill or you’ve got to deal with a bunch of stuff and you’ve got crying kids in the background, whatever. There’s always things that could pull you away from your path, from the things that you really need to do. There’s always excuses that can come up. And if you don’t have that energy and that enthusiasm and that drive, you’re going to get pulled off the path. That obstacle is going to stop you.
Justin:
Obstacles only… whether they’re obstacles of those frightful things that you see when you take your eyes off the goal, is a very key challenge. I’ve heard stories of people that it is possible to make a business that’s just like you’re, “I’m just here to make money and I don’t care about what I’m doing. I’m just trying to [inaudible 00:24:39].” I know people that have done that or at least they self-describe as doing that, but not very many. It is the vast, vast majority of the people that I know personally that have succeeded are the ones that have done something that they’re passionate about and just don’t quit, and work through it.
Justin:
And yeah, you’re going to shift and pivot and move exactly what you’re doing, and exactly the market you’re trying to do. You’re not going to get it right, as I mentioned. You’re going to have to fail and iterate and move forward, but it’s following that path of passion in this smart way where you’re creating and iterating, for me and most people I know is the path that really leads to success. And it’s ironic, right, I want to sort of pause on this point a little bit because thinking well, I’m going to pick the best market and I’m going to pick the thing, I just want to solve for X, where X is the most dollar [inaudible 00:25:23]. That seems like a logical thing to do, but in practical reality humans don’t work that way.
Neville:
Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean. That’s a better way of putting it. You’re in that equation also. You can’t just solve for X, and you’re just solving and you’re not part of the equation. It’s Justin Gary Games, your name is on the door, you have to care about it. And for those who are able to build businesses where this doesn’t apply, I think you’re right, I think those are few and far between. But I also think they tend not to be these sort of creative, pour-your-soul-into-it businesses.
Justin:
Yeah. [crosstalk] they’re like just, “All I’m doing is connecting other products and [inaudible 00:26:06].”
Neville:
Yeah. They’re jumping on an opportunity and it’s like if that opportunity is there and you have a chance, maybe, but most of us are trying to create something. We’re rubbing two sticks together and hoping for a spark. You need that energy behind it.
Justin:
It’s a powerful frame that is not intuitive, and it’s not something that you get taught in school, so I think it’s a really useful way to kind of drive forward. And again, you can be smart about it too. When I say “follow your passion,” I don’t mean drop everything and go start just playing music for money down the streets or whatever. There are ways to do this that are smart.
Justin:
When I left law school I had the ability to go back. I had a job. When I quit that company to start my own, I had a year’s worth of savings saved up during that time. And I knew I could go get another job if I needed to. I think you can be smart as well as passionate. You can set up for that… have the myth of the entrepreneur as extreme risk-taker, I think, is somewhat corrosive to people because the goal of an entrepreneur is actually to minimize risks. You want to find these things that reduce the probabilities, that reduce uncertainties at the lowest cost possible.
Justin:
And the same thing… with game design, this is one of the great things and the principles of it, when you’re designing something you want to get the iteration costs as low as you can. How quickly and cheaply can I get from testing something and getting feedback, to building it again and testing it again? And the better that cycle is, the better your product’s going to be, the more likely you are going to be succeed in the long haul.
Neville:
I definitely want to come back to that. I love what you’re saying though in terms of… It almost sounds like the so-called risky decisions in life are probably less risky than most of us think, right? But then also, again, you’re not outside that calculation. You can do things to make them less risky. So you left law school, did you have a backup plan of like if this doesn’t go a certain way by a certain time, I’m going to come back to law school? Or you just knew? Did you ask them, “Can I come back?” How did that conversation go?
Justin:
I talked to the career counselor and they’re like, “Yeah, you can come back. Anytime in five years, we just have a policy, anytime in five years you can just come back. Just let us know. Send us a form and you’re back.”
Neville:
Right. And include the $50,000.
Justin:
[crosstalk] so okay, that was easy. And then the…
Neville:
But I think so many people would get stuck right there. They would be just like, it seems this blocker, like, “I’m in law school and I’m down this whole path,” or, “I left for one semester and that’s it. My future is ruined.” And what you’re saying is, “Oh, this opportunity came up, I decided to follow it for a while, and hey, if it didn’t work out, I could just go back to law school.” It can seem so obvious.
Justin:
Once you see through the veil, it’s pretty… There was somebody in my law school class who was in their 60s, who was freshman year in law school. You can do this, whatever you want, man, it’s okay. So the path is still there. And so in that sense I could always go back to where I was. And the next sense, I mean, I had a job lined up. So I had a career, I knew I could make money already in that particular jump, and so I had a large runway of let’s see how this goes. And obviously if it didn’t work out, I did have in my head, I’m going to try this for a year, and if it doesn’t work after a year, then I can go back, and I’ll only have missed one year of law school. I’ll just start up in the semester afterwards. It was an easy thing. But it didn’t take a year. You know what I mean? Within months I was thrilled and doing well and enjoying what I was doing. There was no chance of me going back after that.
Neville:
It almost sounds like it was less risky for you to go the way you went, because that job offer wasn’t going to be there forever. You’re a recent Magic champion. Your name had some draw to it. They were inviting you to come there because of your success, and obviously that success is fickle, right? You can’t guarantee you’re always going to be the one who won the tournament [crosstalk] talked about.
Justin:
It was guaranteeing that I wasn’t, because I actually stopped playing Magic when I went to law school, because it was just law school [inaudible] so much time, and that I couldn’t travel and play Magic at the level that I was used to. So I actually quit Magic to start law school, and so I wasn’t going to get any tournament finishes. I wasn’t going to be able to continue down that road. And you’re exactly right, there was this new product that they were launching with the big Marvel and DC brands. They were in the middle of creating it and getting it out there. These job opportunities existed. It’s not easy to get a job as a game designer generally, and so that opportunity was there. If I let it go, maybe I could make it happen again, but it certainly did feel like there was this opportunity, this magical opportunity window that I could take advantage of to accelerate that career path far beyond.
Justin:
I spend a lot of time advising people on how to get into the game industry now. Both, I have the book I wrote as well as the podcast of my own, both called Think Like a Game Designer, and it’s usually… There’s a lot of steps. You have to get contribute into the community, and generally try to find ways to do work for free and put your products out there, and iterate before you’re getting paid. Anybody can follow that path, but I kind of had this jump start basically that I would [inaudible] give up if I didn’t go down that road.
Neville:
Yeah. So that was the first leap of faith that you had to make, which again, now when we describe it, it sounds much less risky, but I’m sure it didn’t feel that way at the time. But then you said that was the only job you had in the industry over a period, and then you left that and started your own company.
Justin:
Yeah, yeah.
Neville:
How did that come about?
Justin:
I remember the moment where I made this decision. So I was working on this brand new project. I was going to create the World of Warcraft Miniatures Game, and this was sort of… I’m sure you’ve heard of World of Warcraft, this huge brand, and I was making this brand new game, this brand new licensed thing, and I remember… So I just finished from becoming a game designer, and I transition to be a brand manager to be able to build the product and actually figure out how to get it made and everything, and I’d been getting promoted. It was my first time going into the executive board room myself. So I’m sitting out in the lobby waiting. I’ve got to give this presentation and convince them to do the project. I’m staring at this ugly green carpeting and awkwardly smiling at this gray-haired receptionist that’s sitting there.
Justin:
They finally call me in, and I see the huge board room, and it’s like this classic intimidating giant board room. It was a sports memorabilia company, so there’s a Michael Jordan-signed jersey on the wall and Babe Ruth bat, and Tiger Woods golf club. It’s like, “Okay, cool.” And the CEO’s this billionaire owner or whatever. He’s just laying back in his giant leather chair and the giant mahogany table, the whole classic movie scene. CEO’s on one side the table, CFO’s on the other side of the table, and from my perspective, they’re drilling me with their eyes, kind of staring at me. I don’t think that’s what they were doing, but it’s what it felt like.
Justin:
I go up to give my presentation, and I know that the room is air conditioned, but I’m hot. My palms are sweat and I’m just like… give this presentation. I prepared quite a bit, come into this. This was a big deal for me. So I go, I give the presentation, and then they’re silent at the end of it. It’s like these butterflies in my stomach. Am I in over my head? This is a huge multi-million dollar project, what are we doing? And then they start talking, and they start bouncing the ideas around, and I’m like, “Okay, cool, they’re into this.” And they’re like, “Oh, well, what’s the market in Europe going to be like, and what are the regulations here going to be?” They started bouncing around.
Justin:
Now, I’ve done a lot of research at this point, so that’s where it becomes clear to me that nobody in that room has any idea what they’re doing. No clue. And at first this is scary. At first this is a terrifying moment, because I’m like, “Oh, my God, they don’t know what they’re doing. What if we make a mistake? What if we fail?” This is a huge project. I always assume that there would be adults in the room, these [inaudible] that would tell us what to do, and let me know what’s up. And I’m kind of getting anxiety around this.
Justin:
And then all of a sudden, it just transitions to calm. Nobody knows what they’re doing. That’s not a terrifying realization. That’s a liberating realization. Because if they don’t know what they’re doing, I cannot know what I’m doing just as well. I can just make a decision. Leadership is being able to… It’s not about being successful or knowing what’s up, it’s being able to act in the face of uncertainty, like own the results, and then roll other people in your vision. And so from that moment, I knew that I was going to quit that job. I knew that I was going to start my own company.
Justin:
And so, I spent a year from that moment, and I launched the project, we had success. I saved up muscle money so I had some time on my own, and then I gave my two weeks’ notice. I remember the conversation I had with my boss where I tell her I’m going to quit and give my notice, and she’s like, “Well, do you have another job lined up?” “No, no.” “Well, you know what you’re going to do? You have a clear plan?” “Not exactly.” “But it’s a rough economy out there. Are you sure you want to face that? It’s really uncertain.” I’m like, “Well, no, but uncertainty’s here or there. I can’t protect myself from that.” And her jaw just drops, and walk out of the room, wave at the receptionist, and started my company.
Justin:
So it was like that big moment there, and again, similar types of calculations where I knew I could get another job again if I needed to. I had savings to give myself a year to get me some runway. I didn’t know exactly what my company was going to look like or exactly how it was going to work, but I created that space and it was a relatively low-risk kind of thing. And I didn’t know what I was doing. I still don’t really know what I’m doing, but I’m willing to own that and iterate and try things and move forward, and that really drove home that point at that moment, it was a key transition for me.
Neville:
That’s am amazing story. I can totally picture you sitting there and just going through all of that. We have those moments where we realize, as you said, that yeah, everybody’s making it up as they go along. There are no real adults in the room. What’s the Steve Jobs quote that like, “All the rules in life, but the whole world’s all made up by people who are smarter than you”? I think most of us realize that too late in life where we realize that we don’t take action based on it. But you saw that, and realized that, “Hey, these guys are officially in charge. They don’t have magically all the answers.”
Neville:
It sounds like now what you’re saying is not because they were stupid or incompetent or lazy or any of those things. It’s that nobody has all the answers.
Justin:
Right. It wasn’t that they were dumb or bad at their jobs or whatever, it’s just that the illusion that they had certainty, the illusion that they knew everything was vanished in that moment.
Neville:
Yeah.
Justin:
And that’s really the key, right?
Neville:
Yeah.
Justin:
We don’t need that illusion. And you can look at it from the other side too. I’m sure there’s a lot of people out there, even that are successful, and we all have this imposter syndrome. We have this stance of, “Well, okay yeah, I’m successful, but maybe I kind of got lucky here, and I don’t really know, and I’m not really sure what to do now.” Everybody feels that, and this realization can also help you there because that’s okay. It’s okay not to know. Nobody knows. And so just [inaudible] you solved the problem of the path doesn’t mean that the next problem’s the one that’s automatically solved, or even a similar problem is solved in the same way.
Justin:
And so, it’s just have that open attitude, again, owning the consequences, being willing to face uncertainty, and enrolling other smart people and learning from inevitable failures. If you can do that, that’s the basics of the formula. And it really does make all the difference in [inaudible 00:37:39]. Prior to that, we told a lot of my story, and in many ways I’d taken some unorthodox paths before that, but they were all kind of laid out for me.
Justin:
I started playing Magic because it was fun, and then I just won the national championships and was like, “Oh, cool. Now I can go do this. I’ll go do that.” And I went to law school because it was the next thing to do. And then a job threw itself at me for game design, and so I kind of went and did that. And then I was working on the project that I liked and just kind of moved along that track and moved up the corporate ladder. It wasn’t until that moment that I’m like, “Wait a minute. I don’t have to just follow the things that show up. I can create a path.” And that was a really big… That was when I felt like I became an adult, when I realized that the adults didn’t know what they were doing. So okay, great, I’m an adult too. Congratulations.
Neville:
It’s amazing when you put it that way because when you think back to school and just the education that we received, I value education, but I think there’s something that it doesn’t prepare us for, and it’s that what you just described. When you go through school, you maybe have projects, you get all this education, you get creative, whatever, but there’s still… There’s a person, usually the teacher at the end who’s like, “Yes, you did this right,” or, “No, you did this wrong.” “Here’s the answer. Here’s the answer key. Here’s how I’m grading you.” There’s some sort of known judge who can tell you that it was right or wrong or whatever. They do have the answers.
Neville:
And then you pierce that and realize that once you get to adulthood, or once you get to a certain point, it doesn’t work like that anymore. And nobody knows, it’s just let’s try and see how it goes. I think even confidence is something that we get wrong. We think that confidence is having all the answers, or knowing ahead of time. It’s exactly what you’re describing, it’s this like, “I don’t know, nobody does, but I can figure it out. I believe in myself enough to be able to figure it out even though I’m not sure right now.”
Justin:
Yeah, that power comes from… So, most people are internally focused and externally referenced. That means that I care about what I get, and I judge how well I’m doing by how the outside world is responding to people like me. Am I getting money, am I getting whatever, you judge things like that. And if you can reverse those trends, if you can be externally focused and internally referenced where I know that I can figure things out and I’ll be okay no matter what happens, I’ll figure out a path, I’ll be able to… I’m just going to act out of integrity. I’m going to be able to do these things, and that’s going to be great. And then I’m going to focus on adding the item to the world.
Justin:
You can do that shift. It’s a game changer because that confidence now comes from this internal source. Am I acting in accordance to my values? Am I able to not be afraid of discomfort and uncertainty? Uncertainty and discomfort are inevitable parts of life, and we spend most of our life running from them. And that is a easy thing to say and a very hard thing to internalize. And you know, you and I have had conversations about this before, it’s so much about consistently reminding ourselves of that and being able to train yourself, you know what? What is this I’m really afraid of? It’s going to be fine. I don’t need these necessarily conversations.
Justin:
I purposely keep my expenses low. I purposely don’t try to get these fancy cars and all the things that end up becoming traps because those become the norms, and if I don’t have all that stuff, then all of a sudden I feel not enough. I feel not okay. And don’t be afraid to spend money and have fun, but don’t let yourself become trapped by whether it’s money or success or fame or all of this acceptance from others. You have to be able to accept yourself. This took me a very long time to internalize because… We all have this, and I certainly grew up this way. It’s like I wanted to please my parents and I wanted to be a people pleaser to the people around me, and I wanted them to like me. That’s all totally natural, but the more you can shift from that to this sense of I’ll figure it out. It’s going to be okay. That’s where true confidence and power and peace come from.
Neville:
I mean, absolutely. We could just record that and play it on loop for the rest of everyone’s lives, and I think that would be a good reminder, because it’s one of those things that intellectually I’m 100% with you, but it’s a daily practice to remember that, to try to practice that. It sounds like Magic in some ways, I think, kind of taught you parts of that. You get lucky breaks in gaming and in sports, and you get unlucky breaks and just remembering I just got to keep training, I got to keep doing the thing. I got to keep playing my game, not worried what they’re doing on the other side of the table or the court or whatever, and just internally referenced, like I’m just doing what I know I’m supposed to be doing.
Neville:
Going back to your story for a minute, so you created your game company. You also since then, I mean, obviously launched many successful games since then, but along the way you mentioned you’ve also launched a book and now a podcast, and I believe you have a course forthcoming, there are Think Like a Game Designer?
Justin:
Yeah, the book launched just about two years ago, podcast launched about a year ago, and then the online course is launching this year in a couple months.
Neville:
So Think Like a Game Designer, so this is for anyone who wants to become a game designer like yourself?
Justin:
Yeah, the beginning of the book is about the universal creative principles. It’s some of the stuff we’re talking about here. How do you deal with fear and uncertainty? How do you get started? How do you overcome obstacles when you get stuck? It talks about what I call the ‘core design loop,’ which is how you go through that process of ideating and creating parameters and brainstorming and prototyping and iterating. And then, from there, then it goes into the breakdowns of specifically how do you make games, how do you get a job in the game industry, are you able to… whether you’re selling your game or producing your game, or all that sort of stuff. Then it gets into the nitty gritty of I want to be in this space, I want to create stuff like this. So that’s kind of the arc of the book.
Neville:
So for someone listening who’s interested specifically in game design, I mean, obviously buy the book or get it from the library, take the course when it comes out, listen to the podcast, but give us something actionable. If I’m a person that enjoys planning, say, tabletop games or I get a Ascension Miniatures from the Kickstarter and I love it, and I’m like, “I want to do this with my life,” as you’ve done. How do I… It just seems like such a… How do you break into that? Where do you even start?
Justin:
I’ll start with a couple simple principles and actions that anybody can take. So 1) if you love games, which hopefully you do if you want to become a game designer, if not, different path may be the way to go, the job of the game designer is to craft an emotional experience in the audience that’s not about the rules or the art or the pieces. All those things are components that come together to craft an emotional experience. So what you want to do, when you’re a player, just like when you watch a movie… When you watch a movie, you get lost in what’s happening. You lose your sense of identity. You just follow along with the characters, you’re blowing… things are blowing up or you’re laughing or whatever the experiences, you’re lost in it. Same is true with the game. Often you’re like, “Oh, roll the dice and hoping for exciting that to happen.” Or you’re hoping for that lucky card draw, or you make that smart move.
Justin:
But, what you want to do is when you play your games next, think like a designer. Step back. And whenever you have a strong emotional reaction, or even better, when you see someone else have a strong emotional reaction, step back and think what caused that? What about the game, what about the situation? Was it the fact that we were all here and laughing and they did something funny? Was it the fact that there was this tension around something that was a low probability moment that had to draw and had to come out? Was it the story that evolved from play and these cool components that made it feel like it was immersive?
Justin:
Start thinking like a designer to see… Start training yourself about what is it that makes games great. What is it that you love in games? Because that’s going to then help you decide what kinds of things you want to create for yourself. So that’s one thing you can just do, basically the same stuff you’re doing now, which is playing games, but just step back for a moment and see, and see what’s going on behind the curtain. And you can train that instinct, becomes really critical.
Justin:
The second thing I will say is you always need to write things down. Around the office we call this ‘Hunan beef.’ We were working on a game, this is a game called SolForge that I co-designed with Richard Garfield, who’s the same guy that created Magic: The Gathering, which was a really cool experience for me to be able to work with the guy that made the game that started my whole path. So we’re working on the second [inaudible] for this game, and we’re brainstorming around the table, and we were going through ideas, and it was like a multi-hour process we’re doing it. And I see somebody at the table who’s writing things down, because I told my team, “You got to write things down. Super important.”
Justin:
And then, we start getting kind of hungry. It starts around lunch time. We’ve kind of made some good progress. We have a good vision for what we want to do. It’s like, “Okay, cool. Let’s set this aside. We’ll go get lunch.” And then we go, we get lunch, we come back and then we’re working on some other projects. It’s like a couple days later before we’re able to come back to work on SolForge, and I’m like, “Okay, I don’t really remember what was going on,” but I know that somebody on my team was writing things down, so I go and I pick up the notepad that he was writing on, and I see what’s written on there, “Hunan beef, Kung Pao chicken, fried rice.” He was just writing down his damn lunch order. Nobody had any idea. So we totally lost everything we did that day. And so now literally around the office whenever we’re starting to talk about something, I’ll go, “Hunan beef…” and somebody’ll start writing things down and send around notes and stuff.
Justin:
And so, I tried to reinforce this lesson because everybody has great ideas. A lot of times people think I don’t have ideas. I’m not really sure what’s up. And the truth is people just don’t take the time to write down their ideas and then come back to them to develop them into real things. And so, even when you just have a random thought, when you’re playing these games, if you’re going through this other exercise, where like, “Oh, man, it was really cool that this guy got this moment where they got to draw a card and play the right thing, but oh, maybe it would be really cooler if they could look at two cards and keep one, that way they would get a little bit more strategy, and that would be a little bit more fun.”
Justin:
And so write down, hey, okay what if we had this game where I took the thing and modified two cards? And you can start with your first designs, literally just take a tweak. Modify a game that already exists. Don’t have to start from scratch. It’s okay. Everybody’s afraid of copying or they’re afraid of being copied. Get that out of your head. Until you’re way, way down the road, this is just not a thing. People are just too afraid. You cannot help. If you’re trying to copy something else and making a change to it, you can’t help but bring your own authentic self to it. You can’t help but make it something that only you could make it. You’re just genuinely trying to create a thing.
Justin:
So don’t worry about copying other people. In fact, you absolutely should. Same is advice for writers. Find the writers you love and then just copy their style. And then eventually you’ll come up with your own style. And then on the flip side, don’t be afraid to show your game to other people. The process, the success comes from that iteration process and going over and over and over again, and doing the things, and doing the work. Somebody else is not going to take your idea. It’s just not worth it. The idea is not valuable enough. It’s the execution that matters. So being able to have something written down and being able to go through that process is key to getting down this path.
Neville:
In design to me, from the outside, seems like such an esoteric thing. There’s the sort nerdy… I keep teasing you with this, but nerdy kind of tabletop games, it’s some kind of little niche world, and obviously there’s some decent number of people who play them, and a much smaller number of people who create them. But the lessons that you’re describing from your own life, and now for being a game designer, show your work, write stuff down. But especially this idea of starting with something that already exists and making your own riff on it. I mean, that’s musicians start as cover bands often, or at least even if they don’t start as an official cover band, they’ll play their favorite… Anyone who’s ever picked up a guitar didn’t start by writing sheet music, or a guitar tab. They started by playing something that they liked.
Neville:
It was Nirvana for me when I was a teenager, that was the inspiration to grab the instrument. Painters, you learn technique by copying the artist that you love, or just the greats who came before you. I never thought about it that way, but it totally makes sense when you say it, even for game design. It’s like, “I love this game, but I would do this a little bit differently. This is how I would make it.”
Justin:
Yes, [crosstalk] the exact same thing. We talk about Ascension. 10th anniversary Ascension is tomorrow when we’re recording this thing. You know what I did for Ascension? There was another deck-building game out there called Dominion, which had this principle of you start with a basic deck and you build a better deck throughout the course of the play all in one box. I thought that’s awesome, but you know what would be really cool, is if it was instead of all the stuff being available at the beginning of the setup, if it was random and you just had a deck of cards that was you only saw a couple of the cards at a time. They were constantly changing.
Justin:
And so my first prototype of Ascension was like shuffle the Dominion deck together and dealt it out and saw what happened, and got the heart of the estimate. I was like, “Okay, what I would need to do to make it work is XYZ thing.” And then I made my own prototype and kind of went down from there. But it was as simple as that. So I just want to demystify the process. And as you said, this is not just for game designers. It’s sort of the thing. When I say, “Think like a game designer,” yes, the book is primarily targeted to game designers, but it is really about the creative process and these things.
Justin:
I’ve learned these lessons the hard way. We started telling the story when I had to go from being… We glossed over this part a little bit, but when I go from being a law student and a former pro-game player, to being a game designer, I was terrified about that. What is it… Aren’t there creative people out there? I didn’t think of myself as a creative person. I was an analytical person. But once I started reading books about it, I started talking to other people about it, it’s like, “No, it’s just a process.” Creativity is just a process. You follow this process, you will be creative. Everybody has creativity in them. It is not some magic hidden thing out there. It’s work. It’s not going to happen for free.
Justin:
A lot of people are like, “Oh, I have this idea for a game. Let’s make it, and you pay me 10%.” Like, “Okay, don’t work that [inaudible 00:51:24].” It doesn’t work that way. You got to work. But it’s not magic. It’s a simple process and you just got to follow it. True for business. True for books. True for games. True for all of it.
Neville:
That’s what’s coming through to me over and over as we’re talking about this is how much… How obscure some of these domains are, and yet how universal all of these principles are. I will probably never try to make my own version of Magic: The Gathering. But as we’re talking, there’s just light bulbs going off over and over in my head as you’re saying things. I’m like, “Yeah, that reminds me of either something that’s already happened in my life or things that I know I should be doing.” And especially, the one that keeps coming up over and over and this idea of iteration, that you keep coming back to. Make something and make it better. Make something, and then make it better, or figure out how it could be better, or do one version of it or one test of it. Is that something that you were taught at some point or how did you come across this idea of this iteration loop and design? Is that specific to the games or does that apply in general?
Justin:
[crosstalk] principle. It’s that code in a lot of books. I think one of the ones that was the most impactful for me was A Whack On the Side of the Head. I forget the author’s name, but it’s a book on creativity, and it talks about these kinds of principle. He described it as, “There’s these four roles. There’s the artist, the judge, the warrior…” I think there’s one more. Yeah, yeah-
Neville:
I can see where this book would resonate with you. [crosstalk 00:53:01].
Justin:
[crosstalk] the artist lets you, just all ideas are fair game, just kind of check out… oh, the explorer. The explorer is go find things in the world and really try to expose yourself to as many ideas as possible. The artist is creative and anything goes, open up your mind, don’t sensor yourself. The judge is the censoring, this process of I’m going to take all the crazy ideas, I’m going to filter them down into just the few, and things I think could actually work. And then the warrior is that, “Okay, I got to iterate. I got to put it out there. I got to be willing to kind of go and try and go and do again.”
Justin:
I remember, that really stuck with me. It was, whatever, 20 years ago or whatever I read that thing now. And some of that formed the foundation of the core design loop as I described it. And so those principles were around to be discovered even back then.
Neville:
Probably the single biggest takeaway for me from knowing you is just… You’ve become a voice in my head that just tells me every time I start thinking of an idea or something I want to do or something I’m supposed to be doing, to stop being so precious about it, and stop building it up into this giant thing of, “Oh yeah, I have this idea that one day I’m going to do X.” Tear that down into a tiny, manageable chunk and ship that one little chunk. Just do that first thing and put it out there in the world somehow. It’s not enough to just think about it. Somehow put it out in the world, test that, give it to somebody else, “Hey, what do you think of this thing?” It kind of sucks, but even if it’s going in a direction that’s useful, just do some little bit of that, and then just keep making it better as opposed to building it up into this huge thing that you’ll never actually do, and again, be risking it.
Justin:
Yeah, yeah, there’s this [crosstalk] that happens in the world is really dangerous. The idea is at most 10% of what’s going on, it’s the execution is 90% plus. You need to be able… And in order to execute, you just got to be willing to put stuff out there. I wish there was an easier way. I wish there was a better way, but I don’t know of it. And so that part really matters.
Justin:
And again, I’m not saying it’s a simple lesson, not necessarily an easy lesson. Even when I move into new domains, that’s hard for me to do. Writing a book was very intimidating for me because I’d never done it before, and I wasn’t really sure what to put it out there. So what I did was I broke it down into smaller chunks and I wrote blog posts every week, and I would get feedback on the blog posts and see how those went and refine from there. And after I had enough confidence after that, then I could put it together and put it all into a book.
Justin:
And so any way you could think of to take your big scary, big hairy audacious goal and break it down into smaller chunks that you can validate and get out there and move forward with, the better. It just makes life a lot easier and makes even the big scary things more approachable. And you don’t always have to know the whole path. This is where Martin Luther King paraphrases, “You don’t have to see the whole staircase. Just take the first step,” is one of my favorites. A bias towards action is another one of the principles I live by. You could think about stuff forever and ruminate ideas and constantly researching and trying to figure it out and trying to make it better and trying to improve it because we want to protect ourself. We don’t want to put something out there that’s embarrassing or that fails.
Justin:
And so the more you… Sometimes you just, “No, look, I’m just going to do this and then do this.” I’m going to get it better every time and it’s okay, the more you’re going to be able to do and the happier you’re going to be in the long run, even if it’s sometimes painful in the short run.
Neville:
I think this is a perfect place to leave it on this advice. Thank you, of course, for your time, for joining, for sharing all of this. For anyone who wants to become a game designer or, as you say, “Think like a game designer,” because again, these principles are universal, what’s the best thing to start with? I know you’ve got a lot of stuff out in the world. Where do you [crosstalk 00:56:47]?
Justin:
[crosstalk] you can go and find the podcast on any of the popular podcast players or the book at any of the places where books get sold. So all that stuff is available. Again, the podcast is totally free, and then we have the course. We’ll be live soon. You can join my mailing list where I put out a lot of different game design tips and things in the back. You can find more of that at justingary.com and I’m also available online at Twitter @Justin_Gary. I’m always happy to help people that are on this path. It’s very hard to get started, but it’s really awesome once you start really moving down and doing that thing that you’re excited about and passionate about.
Justin:
So anybody out there that is passionate about this stuff, I strongly recommend get started, make something, have fun with it, and tag me, let me know how it goes.