Psychology and my business

While learning the basics of Unity, I took some advice from Leo at Actualized.org and did a premortem on my business by listing all the different ways my company could fail, basically some negative visualization. Out of 23 reasons my business could fail, 21 of them where related to my mental health and psychology! So it was clear from the beginning that deep down I knew, if the company failed, it was going to be because I couldn’t grow into the best version of myself.

Thinking Kitty Paradise 24hrs a Day

Early on in the business I set out to learn Unity, C# and VR development by making a game called Office Baller and started recording the journey on my YouTube channel. This was by far the high point of the journey, I was learning quickly and building a huge respect for my ability to troubleshoot creatively and think logically, then came Kitty Paradise.

Vlog About Making Office Baller

By the time Office Baller was 80% done, ARKit was made available to developers and based on a few articles like this one, I saw an opportunity to make a little AR game for the iPhone and have Apple promote my game for free as a by-product of promoting their new technology. Knowing I couldn’t get a game done in 2 months with my huge 3 months of Unity experience, I hired a lead developer with the tiny amount of seed money I had. So programming took a back seat, the thing that had helped my self confidence to much, and I helped where I could with Kitty Paradise, mostly on art and game promotion.

For a few months, the game is all I thought and dreamt about, literally. My mind was a prisoner to the little, fun kitten game I was working on. To the point of obsession, Kitty Paradise was all I talked about which put stress on my relationship with my girlfriend of 5 years. At this point I started meditating every morning in bed before I got up to give my mind a break, a practice that I still keep up.

Meditation not only helped calm my mind as it started racing through all the stuff I needed to get done but also helped me become more self-aware. With meditation I started to see my emotions with some distance, some objectivity and became less caught up with strong negative emotions which I also learned to stop feeding with attention. To paraphrase Tim Feriss, instead of being caught up in the chaos of a laundry dryer of thoughts, I could stand outside the dryer and watch the thoughts tumble and fight for air.

The power of daily routine

Running your own business and working on technical problems requires a commitment to self discipline because the freedom of making your own hours can be a curse. Based on the insights of The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson, I have realized the insane power of a productive and planned daily routine. The slight edge is a concept which stresses that doing small things right, every day, compounds into massive accomplishments.

When I was younger and working on a project from home, I remember waking up at noon and starting work at 2pm then taking a big break at dinner and maybe working a bit more depending on my motivation, getting 3 to 6 hours of work in. Now I consistently get 7 to 10 hours of work done six days a week because I wake up to an alarm and get moving on work shortly after, a practice I would have considered impossible a decade ago, I was a victim of my desires because I had no discipline. Not to mention the fact I was going to bed with a liter or two of beer in my stomach every night. I’ll save that topic for another day.

A written list of daily tasks helps me focus my day, gives me purpose everyday and the feeling of checking all of them off is great and helps support self-esteem. I leave the macro planning on Trello, where each task has many, many smaller tasks in a checklist which I update as things are accomplished.

Dealing with obstacles

Since taking over the development of the game from the lead developer, I have been working on an update which has tested my sanity like never before. Installing an updated Unity to fix an issue broke things, updating the Unity ARKit plugin has caused nothing but headaches so with these examples and many, many others, it seems like everything that is fixed, creates a new problem or two. It’s been such a challenge to stay focused and calm that I have been starting to look into Stoicism philosophy.

Learning to see obstacles and inevitable and neutral events (no one is trying to make my life harder) has helped quite a bit. Each morning I come up with a plan to troubleshoot issues and when the strategies don’t work or cause other problems I’m trying to see the obstacles differently. “The obstacle is the way,” is a stoic philosophy I’m trying to take to heart. Who knew it was a kitty game which would have me changing my perception of the world and how I will live life moving forward? I certainly didn’t.