Get It Out Of Your Brain
“Why are we always preparing? Just go.” -Dark Helmet, as played by Rick Moranis, Spaceballs
I’m always looking for ways to create crossovers between my two jobs as a coach and a game designer. Sometimes the two can be very different but other times they fall into place together in ways that surprise me. And I find that the deeper I dive into these two arguably very different fields, I continue to find more and more similarities that make me very excited to be working in both mediums simultaneously.
I had a moment this week, while interviewing my friend, Jon Gilmour on my game design podcast, Building The Game where he taught me some great principles around failing faster in game design that perfectly correlate to anything you might be doing in life or business.
Having worked with a team of software developers in my former job I am already familiar with the idea of failing faster but Jon managed to pose it in a way specially tuned for game design that never occurred to me before that. I asked him to be guest on the podcast because I was having trouble making games come together as fast I wanted. Typically, when I design a game, I think through a million ideas, then write some rules, then make a prototype of the game and then I test it.
The first playtest is generally rough and sometimes can show me that the game isn’t worth pursuing any further. When I was doing game design for fun, that wasn’t a big deal. Now, with it being part of my job, I need it to be much more efficient. That means that spending weeks writing rules and making a fancy prototype is a really dumb idea for a first draft.
Jon explained to me that his plan is always to get the game out of his head as fast as possible. Even if it’s just a super rough version that can see if the game is worthwhile at all. If it turns out that it’s not going to work or take drastic changes, then he found that out with putting in the minimum effort.
That seems totally logically to me and I am trying to embrace it going forward. In fact, just before writing this article, I was working on a super rough idea that I can turn into a rough prototype and test it out. This is going to save me hours and hours of time.
This seems like a good fit for most jobs if used in the right circumstances. I know that not every job allows you to throw your ideas against the wall and see what sticks but I think there are ways to allow yourself to get your ideas out even when they aren’t fully formed.
Specifically, it requires that you find someone at your job that you can bounce ideas off and get candid feedback. I use this in both design and coaching as it allows me to not spend too much time working on an idea that might be bad. For coaching, I usually talk to a fellow coach friend of mine or my wife. Both of them give me honest feedback.
For game design, I talk to my design partner, Neil to see if an idea at least makes sense to him. Of course, as I mentioned, historically I would then steam forward doing all the heavy lifting. But that ends now. Going forward it’s quick iterations for me with my designs.
There’s one other piece that Jon taught me that I waited to tell you until now. That’s because it’s so epic that it’s going to take over your thoughts in regards to this article. You see, there’s a huge danger in keeping the ideas locked in our heads instead of getting them out there. And that danger is that they get too big and too precious.
Jon told me that the longer you keep an idea in your head, the better it seems to get. And the fact is that no idea will ever be as good in reality as it is in your head. So the longer you keep it there, the better it seems to get but that very well may not be the case. Instead, you might just think it’s getting better. Then when you go to execute the idea, it turns out to be nowhere near as cool as you’d hoped.
This applies perfectly to my coaching role. A lot of my coaching work is based around creating ideas for workshops, speaking events, coaching events, among other things. Because of that, ideas can seem bigger and cooler than they are in reality. That means I need to get them out there quickly before they grow into precious monsters that I refuse to kill. Even when they are bad.
If you take away one lesson from this article, I hope it’s that. Get the idea of your brain and turn it into something rough. Don’t let perfectionism get in the way either. For the record, perfection has always been my go to excuse for front loading so much work on projects.
In fact, it’s been such a problem, that I am going to write about it next week. Until then, get those out ideas of your brain, my friends.
-Jason