The Annual View 2019 - Part I: Lessons and Goals

What a year it has been. What a year it always is.

As with every year, there have been many ups and downs. Some excitement and some drudgery. Below is a collection of my thoughts as I look back over 2019 and look ahead to 2020.

Some highlights:

• My wife found a job she loves. She is doing something she is excellent at somewhere that appreciates and values what she brings to the table. It’s true what they say: happy wife, happy life!

• We moved much closer to downtown Columbus this summer which has been a huge standard of life improvement. Shorter commutes. Better apartment. Closer to friends. Big thumbs up.

• We have made a ton of great friends in Columbus this year and have really enjoyed being more social with them!

• We have found a church that we love and have grown a lot in our faith in 2019. Still a lot of room to grow, but this has been an extremely positive part of the last year. We even joined a small group of other young married couples which has been a great place to find fellowship.

• I feel like I am in a good exercise routine for the first time since college. Getting back on the horse isn’t easy, but now making it to the gym feels like my ‘default’ as opposed to some big effort, which feels like a really good place to be.

• I had the opportunity to attend the first Capital Camp event in Columbia, Missouri this summer. It was an incredible experience where I made some great friends. Check out this post to read about my thoughts and takeaways.

Some Lowlights:

• We’ve had to deal with some family health issues this year which has been hard.

• Despite getting into a good exercise routine, I am not very happy with where I am at weight/general fitness wise. Maintaining a healthier diet is a big focus of 2020 for me.

• Work has been somewhat of a mixed bag. I love so much of what I do, but feel like my learning curve has slowed down over the last few months. We are undergoing some organizational changes and I am hoping the shake up steepens my learning curve again.

A major positive this year has been a redoubled focus on learning. I have read (listened to) more non-fiction books this year than ever before and have had a few major lessons that have risen to the top of my educational journey.

Lessons:

• The importance of structure to organizations and people

  • Structure defines incentives => incentives define behaviors. I have written previously about how my study of structure has been a major theme over the past year. It is a topic that keeps on coming up for me and I have seen it crop up in both my personal and professional lives. Structures and the incentives they lead to is definitely something I have a newfound appreciation for and will continue to pay attention to in the future.

• Quality over quantity

  • I have gained an appreciation for the importance of quality over quantity. Time. Actions. Effort. Thought. Relationships. It’s easy to spin your wheels and not make progress. I think the idea that quality and quantity are always inversely related is perhaps a bit too simplistic, but I have found that focusing on moving the needle for one or two pursuits that I really care about has had a much more beneficial effect than amassing a high quantity of something of more middling quality.

• Clear communication

  • Something I continue to work on. I have tried to become much more direct and clear in my communication with others. What my stance or point of view on a topic or opportunity is. In the past, I have spent too much time and energy worried about how others may react to my beliefs and have tempered them. I have been worried about hurting someone’s feelings so I have pulled my punches and I have found it almost always comes back to bite me. My brother is a master at this and I have always respected him for it. If he doesn’t want to do something, he will say so in a direct and (usually) respectful way. Before I would find myself dragged into situations I didn’t want to be in because I was worried about what the effects would be of my saying no. I have learned that is much better for me and everyone else involved if I can be clear and upfront about where I stand and then we can grapple with the fallout accordingly. I now believe that introducing ambiguity into a situation in the hope of protecting others’ feelings will almost always lead to more damage in the long run than clearly communicating upfront.

• Optimize for people

  • Something I have not necessarily done a great job of being intentional about is optimizing the quality of people I have spent my time with. I have been lucky I have accomplished this organically more often than not, but in situations where I have not focused on optimizing for spending time with the best and brightest, it has really come back to bite me. Time is so valuable and who I choose to spend my time with has clearly become on of the more important decisions I make on a regular basis. While it has been an ancillary consideration in the past, for future opportunities the caliber of people I will be around will be rising to a primary concern.

• Culture is what you do, not what you say

  • One of my favorite books I read this year was Powerful by Patty McCord. It’s a book whose central premises are that A) workers want to be treated like adults while working on tough problems with smart people and B) culture is what you do, not what you say. This mindset has really resonated with me over the last year and informed much of how I now view organizations. It seems like to me for all the focus on culture building there is in the modern workplace, these two simple axioms are too often missing.

Some areas of focus for me as I look ahead to 2020:

• Purposeful learnings

  • An offshoot of my learnings on quality versus quantity, I want to be much more purposeful about my learning. To me this means investing into programs that really will make a positive impact on my growth, versus simply passively consuming content. Less free newsletters, more paid. Less free content, more classes. Less podcasts, more books. One preemptive step I have taken on this front is purchasing the No-Code MVP class from Bram Kanstein. I am really excited about this program and hope it will add some powerful tools to my toolkit. I am also working on another project in this vein, but that is double top secret at the moment. More to hopefully come soon.

• Healthy lifestyle

  • As previously mentioned, 2019 has been a bit of a mixed bag from a personal health front. I am really happy about where I am at on an exercise front, but really need to make improvements to other aspects of my lifestyle like eating healthier and getting more sleep. I believe that health is largely a momentum game and I hope my success on the exercise front can provide a powerful incentive to make improvements in other areas if I structure it correctly. This is something I am really excited to jump into headfirst in the new year.

• Focus

  • Deep focus for long periods of time does not really come naturally to me. I like to buzz about and make progress on a variety of things instead of just one. Unfortunately, I have found this constant switching can have costs in efficiency. A focus area for me this year is to be more, well, focused. I really want to try to get things done in a focused and efficient manner so I can then move onto other things instead of letting them drag out. I am still thinking through what exactly is the best way to enact this change and I would love to hear any tips you might have about achieving focused work!

This post was originally supposed to be a look back at my predictions from last year as well as a place for me to make some predictions about the year to come. Obviously, the intro got a bit away from me here. I am breaking this post into two parts so I can give each the time it’s due. Check in next week for Part II: Predictions.

The Veil of Reality: What's so special about Esports anyways?

The king of Esports analysis, Blake Robbins, had a great tweet a few days ago about how esports needs to stop trying to copy what worked in traditional sports and instead embrace what makes it unique. I chimed in with a few of my thoughts and wanted to use this post to go into a bit more detail.

The Veil of Reality

Esports is a bit of a misnomer. The best comparison we have to gaming is traditional sports, but the reality is that esports are as different from traditional sports as email is from paper stuffed into envelopes. If you look at the growth of traditional sports vs. esports it’s pretty hard to make the argument that esports will not shortly eclipse many of the powerhouse traditional sports leagues in a meaningful way. It probably has a long way to go before it eclipses ALL of traditional sports, but the writing is on the wall.

So why is this?

I believe the reason that esports are so compelling is a concept I call the Veil of Reality and just how thin it is compared to traditional sports.

What exactly is this “Veil of Reality”, Erik?

So glad you asked.

It’s a concept I have been playing around with for a while but it was lacking a really cool and mysterious sounding name until this post.

The theory is this: With any sort of spectator entertainment, the quality of the experience directly correlates to how close watching the event is to actually doing it yourself.

When I watch football sitting on my couch Sunday afternoons, I am about as far as physically possible from playing in the games. These guys are modern gladiators that are 6 foot 17 inches of pure speed and athleticism. They perform superhuman feats of strength and agility while playing as pawns in what amounts to the world’s most violent game of chess. The gap between playing and watching is massive. The Veil of Reality is extremely thick.

Esports is different. My favorite game to watch is the digital card game Hearthstone. The difference between watching a game of Hearthstone and playing a game of Hearthstone is so little it rounds down to zero. In fact, with hearthstone (and many other games), the viewing experience is actually SUPERIOR to the playing experience. You often have increased visibility vs. what the players themselves can see, you have expert commentators breaking down each play, and for any turn-based game, you can speed up the action immensely. In esports, the Veil of Reality is extremely thin.

Now, as you know, I love traditional sports. I ride or die with Arsenal (admittedly been doing more dying than riding recently) and I’m a big Broncos fan as well (Drew Lock is the greatest football player of all time don’t @ me). But even I can’t argue that anyone watches sports for the viewing experience itself. Instead, we watch because of the pageantry, the nostalgia, and the emotion that being part of a tribe bigger than yourself creates.

Esports is different. For anyone who likes to play games (which I would argue is everyone, some people just haven’t found the right game yet), the viewing experience, in and of itself, is compelling. Layer on top of this the usual drama, rivalries, and personalities of sport and it’s not hard to see why esports are growing the way they are.

Bug or Feature

As esports and gaming have started to gain mainstream momentum, the obvious first place to look for ideas on how to structure and monetize this new form of entertainment was traditional sports. It’s not something we should complain about, it just was simply the case of humans pattern matching as best they could to something that seemed, on the surface, to be similar. I agree with Blake, esports’ differences compared to traditional sports are not a bug, but a feature. If esports is going to sustain the growth I know that it is capable of, it will need to stop trying to mimic what worked for traditional sports and to instead lean on what makes it unique.

Here are a few ideas:

Unique rules for individual tournaments

The benefit of being largely tournament-focused instead of league-focused means that esports have a level of flexibility that traditional sports simply don’t. There is a lot of opportunity to use this flexibility creatively. Each tournament could include different rules, requirements, and formats. This would lead to an added level of freshness in a medium that already has the benefit of regularly adding new content such as characters or maps. Anytime a game’s meta starts to smell stale at all, tournament organizers can, and should, play around with creative rules to liven things up. Players will love it. Fans will love it.

Co-Ed Teams

Another thing that esports has going for it is a level of accessibility that traditional sports simply cannot match. Most traditional sports require athletes to have won the genetic lottery and then commit years to mastering their craft. Esports still requires incredible amounts of hard work and skill, but the physical requirements alone make it far more accessible. I hope this leads to an increased level of diversity among professional players that we don’t see in traditional sports. Someone who knows more about the space could probably give you ten structural reasons why this may or may not happen, but from the outside looking it, esports definitely has an advantage when it comes to accessibility.

Audience Impacting Live Games

Ok, I got some flak for this one on twitter. Just because something CAN be done, doesn’t necessarily mean that it SHOULD be done. No one wants sports of any kind to devolve into popularity contests. But I do think there is potential to do audience participation in live games in a compelling way. So long as the effects are symmetric in impact, this could be a great way to drive additional spectator engagement and make people feel like they are part of the action. Let spectators choose maps, ban heroes, or activate unique events that impact everyone equally. Audience members in traditional sports make an impact based on yelling or jeering the loudest. Audience members in esports have the potential to be actual participants in the games themselves.

Asynchronous Matches

Now, this is an idea that would not be a fit for most games, but I do think it has potential in niche circumstances. In esports, there really wouldn’t be a technical barrier to having two people participate in the same game at different times. I currently can’t think of a game where this would work super well, but I think that it could be an interesting design white space to explore in the future. I foresee a match could play out between two players over the course of a week and then it could be broadcast to fans in one seamless segment. Where would this work? Why would this be superior to having a game take place live? No clue. But the fact that you could do this is kinda cool is it not?

Remote Tournaments

This is already such an ingrained part of the esports and gaming experience I questioned even including it, but I do think that it merits mention. Due to the constraints of physical sports, you need to have all contestants somewhere in the same place at the same time. Even for more individual sports, weather and other factors mean contestants need to compete within a relatively tight window of time and definitely in the same place. This constraint simply does not exist in the same way for many games. There are definitely some where lag is such a serious consideration that you need to have players in the same (or at least a consistent) proximity to each other, but for other games, this may not be necessary at all. Not only can this lead to better viewing experiences and lower the bar for tournaments, but it is another contributing factor towards the increased access of esports compared to traditional sports. If you have an internet connection, you can play. This is a total game-changer compared to many sports. Does access like this matter? Ask soccer. Why is soccer the world’s game? Because it is the best sport? I’d argue yes, but that is because when it comes to soccer I am not a rational actor. It’s really because anyone with a circular object anywhere in the world can play. Access matters and the potential for remote gameplay blows access wide open.

Gaming Triathlons

Ok, this one is admittedly a little bit goofy and probably my weakest differentiator since this is very much a thing in real sports too, but come on! How cool would it be to see people go head to head in League, before watching them duke it out in Overwatch, before having them finish with a game of Rocket League?!? I don’t know how realistic this is or if it will ever happen, but I think it would be pretty cool. Similar to traditional sports, specialists would probably be better 1v1 than a more generalist gamer, but it is relatively normal for gamers to bounce from game to game throughout their career. Even between different genres of games! I think it would be awesome for esports to open up avenues where people can showcase this skillset which is different, but in my opinion no less impressive, than the ability to become a master at one single game.

Keeping the ‘Games’ in Video Games

The things that make esports unique should be celebrated not derided. Video games are fun. Even as they become serious business, we can’t forget that fact. There is so much potential to do cool things with a medium that does not have many of the same constraints that traditional sports do. We know that whatever ideas people dream up in the future, viewers will keep coming because the Veil of Reality is so thin and the viewing experience is so compelling.

So go crazy.

You can always go back to level 1.

The Pluto Paradox

You know which cartoon character I have always thought was a little weird? Pluto.

Pluto is Mickey Mouse’s pet dog first introduced in the 1930s. Mickey and all of his friends are anthropomorphic cartoon characters that walk and talk and think like humans.

But not Pluto. Pluto is a pet dog.

This relationship is especially weird in light of Goofy.

Goofy is theoretically also a dog. But he is an anthropomorphic character who wears clothes, talks, and walks upright like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.

Is he a dog? Is he a human? What’s the difference between Goofy and Pluto?

You start to see where I am coming from when I said it was all a bit weird.

So what does this matter?

I think the characterizations of Pluto and Goofy especially give us a great metaphor to explore.

Hear me out.

The most straightforward interpretation is that we all, at one point or another, find ourselves in the role of Goofy.

We all at some point have looked down on someone else as somehow less than. We build out our identity along cultural, political, ideological, and even sports team lines. Anyone on our side of the aisle is superior to anyone on the other side. We view ourselves as superior to someone else who is not nearly so different as we tell ourselves (except for Tottenham fans, they really do have some pretty big character red flags).

If there is one overlying theme of human history, you would struggle to find one more prevalent than the story of two peoples who seem to the outside to be almost identical fighting over nuanced ideological differences.

The solution to being a Goofy is to keep your identity small. Paul Graham has a great essay on this. He argues, and I agree, that issues are divisive, not because answers are opaque, but because people attribute parts of their personal identity to one side or the other of the debate. People hold too many things as part of their identity in this day and age, and because of that there are infinitely many ideological hills they are willing to die on. You keep your identity small, and all the sudden you don’t have a bone in many of the fights you see play across the news and social media. You can look at people like people instead of Pluto.

Now, what if we turned the metaphor around a bit?

What if we aren’t just Goofy sometimes?

What if we are Pluto?

How often do we attribute false significance and importance to someone else while belittling ourselves?

I don’t know about you but this is something that happens to me, if I had to guess, only about all the time.

We build others and their accomplishments up in our head while simultaneously minimizing our own.

This is a serious issue in the age of Instagram.

We get these tiny windows into the top 5% of someone’s life. We extrapolate that 5% and then we compare this unrealistic perspective to our own life.

Our faults, our struggles, our challenges, and our failures.

How can we measure up?

We can’t.

But that is only because we are stacking the deck against ourselves.

We perceive that others have power over us and in doing so give them power over us. We live inside prisons of our own creation.

I know I do this. Especially professionally.

I compare my achievements to what others achieve without even knowing 1% of the picture of their lives.

If you find yourself falling into this trap, it’s important to remember that comparison is the death of joy. Don’t compare yourself to someone else whose life you don’t really know anything about. Instead compare yourself to where you were three years ago. I bet viewed through this lense things look quite different indeed.

Whether you are a Pluto or a Goofy, it’s important to remember that, at the end of the day, we are all just dogs.

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The Wookiee Has No Pants: On Thinking Big in a World of Small

One of my all-time favorite quotes is by Daniel Burnham, the architect responsible for rebuilding Chicago after the great Chicago fire.

"Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency."

Do we still think like that? Do we make big plans or are we too busy making small plans that won’t be realized?

On December 21, 1968, the Apollo 8 mission launched itself towards the moon. Only 135 days after it was decided it would go to the moon. Mission Project Constellation was initiated by NASA in 2003 to bring men back to the moon. 7 years later it had launched a total of zero crews before being canceled.

The New York subway was opened on October 27, 1904, less than 5 years after the contract was first awarded. In April 2000, the MTA decided to build the second avenue subway. The first phase, consisting of only 3 stations opened 17 years later.

These are just a couple of examples where the dichotomy is stark between what we used to be able to accomplish and the pace of accomplishment today.

Maybe our accomplishments are less tangible and therefore harder to point to.

Or maybe we simply don’t dream big enough anymore.

You want to know who did dream big? George Lucas.

A long time ago in a galaxy far away

I took a week off from blogging for Thanksgiving. I had this post half-finished and had been pondering over it all week. After watching The Mandalorian last night (Baby Yoda is my spirit animal), I was poking around Disney+ and decided to put on Empire of Dreams, a documentary about the making of the original Star Wars trilogy. I was glued to the TV for the next couple of hours watching all the drama behind the drama unfold before my eyes. All the untold stories behind the stories we all know and love and I was struck by just how unlikely the success of my all-time favorite movies really was.

Like, let me tell you, Star Wars was by no means a sure thing when filming began in 1975. Despite his recent success with American Graffiti, Lucas had been turned down from multiple studios to finance the film and the outlook was bleak until he got 20th Century Fox to take a flier on him. Even once he had the backing he needed the movies were beset with problems. The film was shot on difficult sets, the visual effects team had to create technology that had never been dreamt of before, and even the actors raised serious questions about the quality of the film.

And yet I write this almost 50 years later as Star Wars looms as the most important cultural work of the last century.

How was this accomplished?

Because the only thing bigger than Lucas’ dreams was his willingness to fight for them.

Here are a few lessons we can all take from what it took to make Star Wars the success it is today.

Start with something universal

The secret to Star Wars’ success is that at its core, it was familiar. George Lucas was heavily influenced by Joseph Campbell and his study of the underlying commonalities between the myths of different people groups throughout history. In fact, Campbell once called Lucas his “greatest ever student”. (side note: if you want an excellent way to kill some time, there are a lot worse ways than watching Joseph Campbell videos on youtube)

Star Wars’ success is as much due to its play on common themes that resonate within us all as it is due to its visual effects. The young hero embarking on a journey to save the world. The wise wizard providing guidance. The damsel in distress. The witty scoundrel. The inhuman villain.

All these recognizable tropes allow us to immediately connect with the story in a way that we wouldn’t be able to otherwise. Star Wars isn’t a story with nations or people groups. It’s a story about all of us. And that is a big reason why it was so successful.

Give people an ideal to strive towards

They say timing is everything. It’s true in life and business and it sure as hell is true with Star Wars. Star Wars was released at the absolute perfect time to maximize its impact. The Vietnam war had ended and American cynicism was at an all-time high (a time not too different from today). The popular movies of the day reflected this with their portrayals of morally grey anti-heroes and doomsday disasters. The nation was poised for the clouds to break and Star Wars was a ray of sunshine.

Star Wars presented a portrayal of heroism and justice that people were so desperate for. I have written before about how fiction can more easily convey powerful messages than non-fiction and Star Wars is a prime example of that. It’s optimistic tone and higher ideals were universally relatable while remaining poignantly salient. Its message of good triumphing over evil against all odds inspired millions. Without that inspirational spark, Star Wars would not have had nearly the same cultural lasting power.

The lesson here is the power of being aspirational. Provide people the opportunity to rise to the occasion and they will exceed your wildest expectations. Expect the worst and you will surely find it.

Ignore the critics

An especially hilarious anecdote from the documentary was a piece of feedback Lucas received early in the production of the original movie. One of the biggest points of contention studio executives had with the movie was the Chewbacca wasn’t wearing any pants. That’s right. The greatest cultural phenomenon of the last century was almost stymied based on a debate about whether an 8 foot tall monkey bear should be wearing pants or not.

I think this anecdote does a wonderful job of portraying a phenomenon that anyone trying to create something important will have to deal with. The vast majority of people are not capable of this level of creativity. Through either a lack of talent or a lack of desire, they are unable to grasp the most important aspects of a project and therefore nit pick on inconsequential items around the edges. It is much easier to sound smart coming up with ways that something will fail. The true genius however lies in being able to see just how something could be able to succeed beyond your wildest imagination. This is a skillset that I very consciously try to foster as a venture capital investor, but it applies to all of us.

Ignore the critics. They will always try to tear you down because they can’t do what you can.

Optimize for upside

Another fascinating key to Star Wars’ success was that Lucas optimized for long-term upside. He forwent up-front compensation in order to have ownership over a greater portion of the merchandising and licensing rights than would be normal for a movie at the time. To the studio’s credit, Star Wars really was the movie that opened people’s eyes to the power of merchandise, but this was still a masterstroke on Lucas’ part. He generated such an incredible fortune on merchandise, he was able to fund the following films himself, without the need to go through the usual studio financing process. (I bet you didn’t know Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi are “indy” films!) This allowed him to retain absolute creative control of the movies. Had Lucas needed to appease studio executives the way most directors do, it is hard to imagine the movies would have been anywhere near as good.

The lesson here is always optimize for the upside. Play your cards so that you take advantage of the big payout. Focus your energies on winning the war instead of winning each individual battle.

Most people don’t think this way. They are risk averse and will maximise for the short-term. If you can think differently, you will find that you have a sustainable source of edge in whatever you do.

The fact an accomplishment is important by definition means that it is not commonplace. To accomplish what is not commonplace means that you must think and act in a way that is not commonplace. George Lucas did this. He dreamt big and the payoff was massive.

Both for him and for the rest of us.

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