Understanding Tech Marketing By Understanding Velcro

When I was a kid, I saw my first pair of velcro shoes in the local shop. I was pretty fascinated, because I thought to myself, "They've done it! They've finally gotten rid of laces! No longer will the world be held back by an inferior technology! Millions of minutes will be saved by not having to tie up your shoes!"

Or so I thought.

Turns out no one wanted velcro laces. Companies stopped making them as much because they weren't selling. Since then, I've realized that the so-called "best" technology is often the loser.

Lesson? Nobody wants your logically superior shit.

The Fine Line Between Seeing Problems and Solutions

There's a fine line that I often find myself running up against, and that is the one between looking for problems and looking for solutions.

Because of the nature of computer development, I have spent a lot of time with software. Whenever possible or convenient, it tells you the that things are wrong and that should be fixed. This is inevitable. (When the system is broken, it WILL tell you.)

But there is an issue when you start looking at life as a developer would. Many things start to appear like problems waiting to be fixed. You get into a habit of viewing everything in the 'negative', even though that's not your intent.

With code, you know that you are building a much better system, and that when you are done, the system will have benefitted from your positive change.

With life, things get emotional. People start enacting power plays. They assume you are trying to be better than them. The world fights back. Humility is outshined by hubris. It's a phenomenon I don't completely understand.

Most times, I just want to create a better environment and debug the issues.

New Website Is Live. Now I Need An "Under Construction" Gif

Alright. I have been avoiding this for a long time, but I said that in 2019 I was going to be making some changes, so a new website is in the works. I am a firm believer that websites are still relevant. People used to say they didn't need a website because they had "A Facebook". Now it's "An Instagram" or "A Twitter".

Fact is, those outlets are just outlets for those corporations.

I'm going with the white-walled look like this some of those art galleries use. I think this should work out just fine. More as it develops. I'll be dumping all sorts of good shit there.

www.mrbenja.com/site

Splitting My Focus Into Three Projects for 2019

I have three projects that I plan on getting worked on this year. I know that sounds like crazy talk, but I'm trying something out, here.

The common idea is that you should focus everything you are doing into laser-light precision and get that one thing done. I get it, and I believe that to be true in a general sense. In fact, The ONE Thing (by Jay Papasan and Gary Keller) is a great book that really got me to a good place with my productivity.

I know that I waste a lot of time, but when I'm most productive, I've found that I have a few things that I can roll onto. Basically, when one task is completing, I can roll onto another one without losing momentum. If I have to keep doing the same thing, I can sometimes burn myself out. I'll have to work on embracing the monotony, but that's how it happens right now.

Also, when I pour a lot of energy into something, it seems like people back away from the energy instead of responding positively to it. I don't know what that's about, but I've often been told to "calm down" on social media and in life. I've been told that I'm "too much". So pffft...I have to spread things out a bit or create new outlets.

Project 1 - The Trap Vector

The Trap Vector is my fine art print project. It's my lead-off effort for the year. It's a follow-up of sorts to a lot of the personal thoughts and feelings I was having for the past seven years. The genesis probably started well before that, but that's what it's about right now.

This outlet gets out my artsy fartsy concepts.

Project 2 - Transcendent Press

Transcendent Press is my writing project. If I could, I would probably just write for about a month, and then come out with some stone tablets full of god-like text. Then I'd realize it needs editing and I'd go away for another month. This doesn't fit in my plans right now, so writing is going to have to take the long and laborious route.

This outlet gets out my most heady creative ideas, and is currently my biggest long-range goal. I have a book planned for sometime this year, and I've gotten to work on it.

Project 3 - The 8BitCubist

Oh boy. A lot of people have been wondering what happened to the 8BitCubist from a while ago, and simply put, the band broke up. I mean, we didn't break up, but we went our separate ways, and the venture was never meant to be a solo one. So over time, I needed to put the brakes on it to figure out what the next iteration was going to be about. I am not going to be putting this in full force for the near term, but it's coming.

I think a podcast and apparel will do good to start with.

I'll do some other posts outlining what's coming I'm learning in 2019 in greater detail.
Let me know what you think of the plan so far.

A Case for Multi-Tasking (aka Creative Rollover)

In 2019, I am going to try running three projects simultaneously: The Trap Vector (art), The 8BitCubist (merch), and Transcendent Press (writing). Seems to be going well so far.

Let me know how this sounds, because I know the studies on focusing and multi-tasking. The common logic is that you go with one topic and stick with it. That's a simplified version, and it makes sense. But there's room for some experimentation. What I'm thinking about is the sort of balance people do naturally, but with a more productive intention. So I don't see it as multi-tasking, but more like a change of pace in order to keep the system humming. I'll call it Creative Rollover until I come up with a better term.

While working on large and small projects in the game industry, I noticed that it's almost impossible to stay hyper focused on one narrow slice for too long. After a few days or several days, attention needs to be turned to something else. If that doesn't happen, then people are just spinning their wheels without making significant movement forward. If they don't get a mental change of pace, then their productivity falls off and they start to wander.

So what if we could keep ourselves engaged by jumping to different aspects of a project? That sounds more productive than going into a complete state of disconnect. Completely shutting down means that you have to take significant energy to re-engage and do a cold boot all over again.

What I've done is started cutting off unnecessary feelings of fatigue by jumping from one creative/productive mind to another. This way, I can get into modes faster and get more net work done.

What tends to happen with me is that I get bored out mentally doing one thing over and over again without getting any new perspective. With different projects, I can relax one mind while the other one takes over. Maybe it's like cooking a complete meal.

Take games for example, after a few of plowing into the animation system, we'd go work on the combat system, then on to the pathfinding system, then on to the character backstories, etc. Rolling from one creative focus to another was the only way the large picture could be effectively realized. In fact, we got large gains when we pulled people out of their caves to get a little involved with what was going on with other parts of the project.

One reason I think this this worked was because creative rollover avoided the problem of people running out of fuel during a given task. When that happened, they became completely disengaged. When that happened everyone got thrown off. Another reason is that we let the environment adjust to the changes.

I've been playing around with this type of development for a couple months now, and I think I've found a way to cook up a marvelous meal of creativity.

I'll explore this more later.
And I need a better name than Creative Rollover.

Any thoughts?
Let me know in the comments.