Hey everyone,
Well I missed last week’s post because I was on my way back from a wedding in Houston. This week, however, we’re back and we’ve got a topic that has been on my mind a lot recently – my game and my company. I wanted to talk a bit about the doubts and fears I have with everything in this process, and what I do my best to do to get through it all.
Building games has been a dream of mine for at least six years now, and starting my own company was on the list of things I hoped to one day achieve (written down in my last month of college and still in my wallet today). I loved the idea of creating games that I could share with other people because my core driving force is a desire to make other people happy. I routinely go out of my way to help the people around me, even at the expense of my own happiness (this drives my fiancee insane) because I just want the world to be the amazing place I know it can be. By making games, especially ones that are able to reach an enormous number of people, I might be able to make hundreds or even thousands of people smile on any given day. That’s an incredible feeling for me. Additionally, the freedom to control what I do with my life is a contributing factor. I love solving problems – it’s my favorite thing to do and I believe my strongest skill – and so I need to have some element of that in my life or I grow bored. Not only designing games, but running a company where I get the chance to be creative and innovate to make things amazing is absolutely an important factor for me. Those are probably the two biggest factors in why I really wanted to start Cezium Games.
With that said, there is an enormous amount of fear and doubt in everything that I do. I constantly wonder if the things I create are good enough. I struggle to step forward and take a leap of faith, something I wrote about in my personal statement when applying to colleges and something I worked on heavily with my mentor at Riot Games. Because I have such an extreme desire for perfection, I’m sometimes left in a zone where I’m completely inactive – I’m unsure whether or not my ideas are good enough, and, while I can consistently come up with ideas to solve something, I can struggle to believe in and apply those concepts. This showed up constantly as I worked on Pug Life, where my family and friends would express again and again how great the game was and how I didn’t need to make any changes. I, on the other hand, kept telling myself there was so much more to do and the game wasn’t good enough.
However, I’ve learned to channel that fear into something much more positive. While I could spend my time worrying about how something will turn out and how people will respond to it, I instead work towards eliminating any reason to have that doubt in the first place. That fear will probably never go away, but learning to live with it has made me that much stronger of a person. Whether it was asking a girl out to shooting for dreams most wouldn’t even believe possible, I use that fear to motivate the best possible outcome. Using that fear for my betterment makes for not only better products and ideas, but also a healthier mind and life. Doing just that has made me willing to take a chance and go for things that in the past I never would have thought possible.
That’s all I’ve got today! Leave a comment and tell me about a time you’ve been held back by fear or motivated by it! I’d love to hear about it.