Today I Messed Up
It’s almost midnight and I’m troubleshooting Squarespace, and Mailchimp. Well, I’m writing this article, but I spent most of my evening submitting and re-submitting emails through our website’s forms, and closing my eyes, hard, in frustration.
I had another article planned. It’s mostly written. I think it’s pretty decent. It’s inspired by a designer’s tweet saying it takes an average of 28 months from signed contract to seeing his games on a shelf. The article is a contextualization of the process and why it takes years to bring a game to life.
But that can wait.
I need a little mental space, and to step back, and to center myself.
Today, I screwed up. Or at least I learned about a mistake that I made a few months ago, that caused some portion of e-mail submissions on our site to, disappear into the ether.
It has something to do with tech stacks, which I don’t quite understand. But, the issue has some scotch tape and glue stick glue holding it together. So, if you thought you signed up for our mailing list, but it’s been radio silence, I promise you that we do have a monthly mailer, and that I do spend a good amount of time trying to make it engaging and insightful.
The point is, today I messed up, and it isn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last. And it is times like this that I am grateful that I am a gamer, because we’re used to screwing up, punting away our wins, and coming back to do it all again.
The Epic Storm
There’s a deck in Magic Cards called The Epic Storm. It’s a combo deck that operates on a knife’s edge. I used to play it at levels, that for me, felt like high stakes.
I lost a lot. And most of those times it was because I screwed up. It wasn’t variance. It wasn’t rotten luck. It was me.
And that’s empowering. It means that we can get better, and that we can change, and that even if we lose a game or a match, there’s always tomorrow. And tomorrow we’ll play tighter.
Vindication
I was in the lead and had a nice little thing going fighting monsters in Gaping Maw. My friend, Leon assembled an engine of relics. I could have ended the game. I didn’t. I was so focused on my own strategy that I didn’t realize that he would quickly outstrip my lead.
I lost perspective on the game, because I didn’t have the mental bandwidth to focus not only on my game, but on his as well. I tunnel visioned and didn’t step back to look at the bigger picture.
This kind of tunnel vision happens in all kinds of context: fixation on a game mechanic, working to fix a misguided graphic design element instead of scrapping it.
There’s a poker pro named Tommy Angelo who talks a lot about mindfulness, or more so living in the moment. Have you ever been thinking so hard about your response to someone that you missed half of what they were saying? That’s living out of the moment. Center yourself. Step back. Take a breath, and let this moment become you.
Silver Lining
Since June 30th this website has seen 12 thousand unique visitors. A handful of those were me logging on from my parents’, and from GenCon, and our friend Keenan’s couch in California. But most of those were people who we connected with on the blog, on forums, Facebook, or even Steve’s twitch.
It was people who find value in what we are trying to create.
That’s why making a mistake on something like our mailing list is so frustrating, but that’s also why it’s ok. Because this community rocks and will still be here tomorrow (or now today) when this post goes live.
Beyond that, we caught our mistake, and we put a Band Aid on it, and you can be sure we’ll stich up something more permanent, and won’t make the same mistake again.
Maybe even more important, our mistake was relatively cheap. We haven’t started our review campaign; we haven’t laid out cash for Facebook ads. And, we have plenty of runway to make it up.
I know this post is a little different than what I normally write. And, thank you for humoring me. Running a business is fun, and sometimes scary. You have to be hard on yourself, and I know that sometimes I can be a little too hard on myself. It’s important to get things right, and to sweat the details, and to always believe that we can be better tomorrow than we are today.
But, it’s also ok to take a deep breath.
