Reality Panic

Ugh, my reading this past year was way down. Despite all the long flights (hmm, I think I was mostly catching up on sleep), I was nowhere close to my preferred pace of two books per month, barely managing to get in one read per month.

Here’s what I did manage to read:

• Adapt - Why Success Always Starts with Failure
• Evil Plans - Having Fun on the Road to World Domination
• Mastering the VC Game - A Venture Capital Insider Reveals How to Get from Start-up to IPO on YOUR Terms
• Maverick - The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace
• Poke the Box - When was the last time you did something for the first time?
• The Art of the Start - The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything
• The Democratic Enterprise - Liberating Your Business with Freedom, Flexibility and Commitment
• The Element - How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything
• The Great Reset - How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity
• The Lean Startup - How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
• The Three Laws of Performance - Rewriting the Future of Your Organization and Your Life
• Where Good Ideas Come From - The Natural History of Innovation

Given my efforts to start up an indie game incubator and raise some venture capital, you can notice the startup/VC trend in the reading list. The classic Art of the Start is an especially good book to, uh, start with. And, Lean Startup is amazingly good, and not just about starting a company but really much more broadly about “validated learning” in an iterative process under conditions of uncertainty. Nice to see it is already catching on in game dev circles.

Maverick was oddly inspiring: a much older book on a democratic workplace in Brazil, where factory workers decide on their own hours and pay. And, Where Good Ideas Come From was especially informative and fun to read. I’m just finishing up Adapt, which plays in nice to my usual “fail to succeed” lectures, but it is much more real-world (eg, Iraq war, banking crash, etc) than management process type stuff I was expecting.

Of the bunch, Democratic Enterprise was pretty meh. Some good info, but just too densely written and super boring. Conversely, was very happy with Element after being inspired by Ken Robinson’s beautiful (and funny!) TED Talk on the need to nurture creativity. And, thanks to Susan Gold for Poke the Box, a fun little book that I now need to hand off to someone else…

I finally signed up for a Twitter account: @JasonDellaRocca

For whatever reason, I snapped and couldn’t resist any longer. Of course, I got thoroughly teased for being so late to the party. The very next day, I got an email from the chairman of LinkedIn thanking me for being an early adopter (profile #6028) and helping them reach the 100million user milestone.

Guess you can’t be a pioneer/early-adopter for everything…

BTW, still figuring out Twitter posting, etc. Anyone have pointers to good Facebook/Twitter dual posting tools, both desktop and Android?

As is tradition, here is my list of books I read over the past year. Shame on me as I came way under my self-imposed two books per month “quota”. I blame video games!

Business/Economics

• Remix - Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy
• SuperFreakonomics - Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance
• The Innovator’s Solution - Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth

Leadership/Management

• Drive - The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
• Switch - How to Change Things When Change is Hard

Culture/Etc

• American Nerd - The Story of My People
• Ethics for Dummies
• John Woo’s 7 Brothers
• The Fighter’s Mind - Inside the Mental Game
• The Language of New Media
• What the Dog Saw - And Other Adventures

Self-Help

• Getting Things Done - The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
• How to Establish a Unique Brand in the Consulting Profession
• The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Branding Yourself

Of the bunch, I found Drive and Switch to be particularly good books with lots of applicability to my day-to-day efforts. It was also great to finally read The Innovator’s Solution, as I have often lectured about the dilemma side of the equation… On cultural front, I thoroughly enjoyed both American Nerd and The Fighter’s Mind, as oddly enough I belong both to the nerd/geek and fighter tribes.

In the self-help department, I was mainly looking for marketing and promotion related guidance to help with my consulting efforts. Of the bunch, the only one that fell flat for me was The Language of New Media. Despite being a significant book on media theory, I found it too academically opaque to get much out of it. Oh, and I read a book on ethics since I taught a university communications course on media ethics last fall.

When I visited IO Interactive back in September, Thomas Howalt was kind enough to give me some swag, including a copy of mini ninjas. For a kids oriented game, it is surprisingly well designed, with polish and depth. I finished the game, playing alongside and swapping the controller with my kids… Fun times.

For Christmas my 8-year-old son gave me the below interpretation of Futo, Hiro and an evil samurai from the game.

This piece joins my ongoing collection of video game inspired artworks by my son: Assassin’s Creed, Castle Crashers, Borderlands. Though he’s since done a much better Castle Crashers scene, and I need to dig an old Far Cry 2 piece…

I got a brief glimpse of Limbo at GDC, but didn’t get a chance to try it out. Similarly, at the Nordic Game Conference, I had the pleasure of hanging out with ever-dapper Dino Patti (Playdead’s CEO) and others from the Limbo team, but still, no hands on time with the game.

Finally, over the weekend, I downloaded and played through Limbo to much delight. Despite a 1000+ deaths, it was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. The satisfaction and sense of accomplishment in solving some of those dastardly difficult puzzles was real brain candy. And, the aesthetics were quite engaging/enthralling, despite their simplicity.

Great to see the universal acclaim for the game, and the commercial success (300k downloads and counting).

I always had to track my time while working at the IGDA. Both as a way to better understand where my limited time was being spent, and for tax reporting reasons (ie, my salary was allocated across different line items (admin vs. programs vs. marketing, etc)).

This habit has come in handy now that I’m a freelance consultant. I not only track time spent on specific projects/clients, but also my overall work related activities. This chart graphs time percentages since I became freelance in April 2009 to the end of the year.

A few comments:

• Wow, so little time is actually spent on client work (aka “billable hours”). Not sure what the norm is…
• A lot of things overlap, like speaking at a conference and writing an article could also count towards business development and/or marketing.
• Feels like I don’t spend enough time doing business development, and way too little time on marketing/communications…
• Happy that “email” is not too high. My email time at IGDA was nearly 50%. FYI, this is random email and time spent clearing my inbox. Any project specific email would count as consulting time, for example.
• Sad to lose 13% of my time to travel, though that is when I do most of my reading…
• I still co-chair the IGDA-Montreal chapter. I always treated that as volunteer effort, even when I was working for IGDA proper. 5% feels right/realistic to me…
• Good to see “admin” stuff is not distracting me much.

Alright, will be interesting to see how the numbers play out in 2010 as I attempt to do more bizdev+marcom.