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hey this is Leo for actualised org and today I want to do a little video blog about the importance of inner game towards developing your career if you are one of those individuals that happens to really care about their career and is developing their career especially if your career is is skill based and it's something that you're approaching as a long-term addition to your life where you're really developing and you're you're striving towards a great position career-wise over the long run and you know that it's gonna take you years maybe even decades to develop that kind of status and and prestige that you need to be at the top of your field in whatever it is you do whether you're you're a design or an artist a programmer an engineer you know if you're doing marketing or public relations or you're in politics whatever it is if you're really building your career and that's something that's important to you then I think inner game is really critical and the way I want to talk about this is talking about my career and how I approach career development for myself because I really ran into some some some real issues inner game issues that I think tanked my first career so you may or may not know but what I wanted to be since I was a kid was I wanted to be a video game designer and that was kind of my dream job in my dream career and so I really worked pretty hard at it I since I was like seven years old I started studying that industry analyzing games really playing about playing them thinking about them thinking about how to create games that would that would sell well that would that would resonate with the market that kind of stuff and I was building up a skillset so becoming a game designer was actually an interesting career choice because it's it was it was kind of nebulous and abstract some of the skills that I needed so you know I needed good writing skills I needed good a good rounded knowledge of history and culture because that just comes into play when you're doing designs I also need a lot of experience playing games I also needed art some sort of a little bit of an art background I didn't need to be good as an artist but I needed to be able to to communicate with artists to understand what is you know how aesthetics work and also understand like art pipelines that kind of stuff and then I also needed to understand a little bit of programming and coding even though as a designer most of your time is not spent coding there are there are parts of the job where you could be doing coding or scripting but also it helps to understand that because you're communicating with programmers that are actually doing the coding in the game and you want to make sure that your designs are feasible that they don't take too much time or too much programming effort to put forward so it helps to have a lot of that knowledge also helps to have like marketing knowledge helps to have business acumen to be a good designer so a lot it's one of those professions that that took a lot of pieces to come together it's not just it's not as narrowly isolated as let's say if you wanted to be a programmer that would be a little bit a little bit less broad a little bit more focused that's more technical field design was more of an abstract field and so you know I spent I spend a good 10 15 years developing some skills in this in this department of design studying all this stuff trying to improve my skills get better and then when I got hired the challenge I found was that I had some inner game challenges that were really preventing me from for moving forward because what I needed to do was I needed to start building my my design my design intuition and my design capacity my design portfolio and my design experience and all of that required that I put in a lot of time doing doing game design and and you know working my job being stable at it and investing myself over the long term that's kind of a concept known as building career capital that means as you gain more experience in your career that helps you to to be able to trade up and have more value to offer to employers or even if you're starting your own business to your customers because your knowledge and your experience base and your skills from that base is basically what you're using to create whatever product is you're using to create so in my case maybe like a game I'm using my skills and turning that into a into a game that I'm then selling to people or into design documents that I'm giving to employers that are ultimately leading to a game that's being sold and so that's how value is being generated so the more skill I have the better that a design I can put forward and the better I'll get rewarded for it in the end ideally that's that's kind of how the system is supposed to work but I had some blocks that really prevented me from from doing game design and ultimately I think it's because of my lack of self awareness and self development that I that I quit that industry whereas if I wanted to and if I had more of that kind of information that I have now since I quit I did a lot of self-help and self development studying and if I had that information you know five years ago or whatever when I was when I was going through that process when I had my game design job it would have been a totally different experience because now I know best practices for developing careers so what are some of those issues I have some notes on it that I'm gonna reference one of the you know one of the problems or one of the ways that are really screwed up my career was a general lack of patience and not seeing not seeing the big picture I was very ambitious and one of the things you know when I first got my job was that I wanted advancement in my career and looking back on it now it was an unrealistic expectation for the amount of advancement that I wanted so you know month I was thinking in terms of months not years not decades I wanted to be able to progress and get raises really fast I wanted to to have impact so the designs of the work that I was doing I wanted to to get that out to the public really fast I wanted to for people in the company to start taking notice of what I was doing and I wanted that to be happening fast but looking back now I understand that the pacing the end the expectations that I had set for myself there we're not very realistic so that's one of the like inner game challenges that I had that could have easily been worked out if I just had more awareness maybe if I spoke to a coach about it or I just had more self-development knowledge at that point so that another another issue that I had was was lack of folk so I think focus is very important when you're talking about developing a career because that it is that your career is happening over the long run right it's happening over years and decades and so in that case you can just consider all the different ways as you're pursuing your path that you can get knocked off of it by circumstances that you know more or less noise that happens in your life so maybe a friend comes to you with a great business idea while you're working on your career and it seems lucrative and it seems great and you're very tempted to jump on it that shows a lack of focus like a commitment to what you're doing not to say that you can never jump on opportunities like that but one of the problems is that if you're always jumping from one thing to the next thing to the next thing and you're not consistent and you're not building that kind of capital that you need that massive amount of capital so that you can be top of the field and you have more experience than all your other competitors or anybody else that is in your industry then you're it's gonna be hard to get the same kind of success it's gonna hard to to be able to produce the kind of products and services that you want because you're not gonna have the experience and knowledge to do it it's kind of hard to be to be competing against people that have way more experience in that kind of industry or field than you do so if you do jump on that new business idea make sure then that that is really what you need to do and then you're gonna stick with that new business idea it's really almost thinking of it as a shift in career track and that that's literally what happened to me is I had some good opportunities to do internet marketing so I jumped on that and ended up taking focus off of my career and I knew at that time that that was a major shift and that most likely I was leaving the industry forever but still if I had more awareness again around that then it would have been big and also I just started noticing you know as I was running my own business it was very easy to lose focus and to jump from project to project to project without wrapping stuff up without it but without finishing it up and being very consistent and dedicated and in terms of the success that you get in your life that dedication is just critical being able to be dedicated and staying on path and staying focused it's very very important so if you don't develop those skills you don't recognize those pitfalls and you want to go into your own business or you go into a career and then you start wondering why you're not getting the success that you want well maybe it's because you're jumping around and you're dabbling and you're not really investing or even if you're putting a lot of time into it you're not investing it very judiciously so you're not using it to really build up the core skills that are providing the most value the core skills that you're using to generate that value that you know that your niche is known for so if you're a designer you know it's just it's making great designs if you're a programmer it's about maybe making complex programming systems or whatever that core value is of what you're offering so that was a big one getting more awareness around that and dialing in my inner game for that I just had to do it through trial and error where it would have been much nicer to have somebody kind of guide me through that stuff or at least to have read some books about it before before before going into into my first career another another problem that I had was just like a feeling of an inadequacy when I when I got to my job because when I was working by myself and I was building up my portfolio I felt I started to develop a confidence in myself because I started creating little games little projects and those projects started getting critical success they started getting some good reception I saw that they they were good you know based on my own standards and then what it end up happening was that when I when I stepped up and I moved up and I got hired by you know by one of the best studios in the world to do design for them all of a sudden I was surrounded by by totally different a class class of players and you know the people that I was working with were really top-notch top-notch people and so it started to really forced me to step up at the same time I started to look around and I'm thinking to myself like wow I still I realize you know I thought that I was the but now I realize that I have a long way to go there's still so much that I have to learn I don't it's like I thought I knew 50% of what I needed to know and then when I moved up and I started associating with people that were top notch in the field I all of a sudden I felt like I only knew five percent of what I needed to know and so I started feeling inadequate and when you start to feel inadequate acting from a position if inadequacy causes all sorts of problems it can cause office politics problems can cause um you know problems with your higher-ups your underlings can cause problems with coworkers it can also just kind of shake you and leave you feeling bad about where you are where in fact if you take a larger scale of view of how you're progressing you might actually be exactly where you need to be you might just be on the right track but if you're very impatient kind of the way that I was and you were expecting to get a lot for a little than what ends up happening is that that inadequacy starts to cause doubts starts to get you thinking like well maybe I should be doing more maybe I should be starting my own business maybe I should be doing side projects maybe I should be staying in the office and working later and all this kind of stuff which can lead to very sorts of problems that can backfire on you if you start working too hard maybe you'll burn out if you start undertaking your own projects maybe those will conflict with the stuff you're doing at work if you start your own business obviously that might conflict with what you're doing at work it'll take time away again that idea of shift it'll shift focus in a different direction so now all of a sudden instead of focusing on pure game design which is what I was doing at work now all of a sudden when I start my own business I just spent a lot of my time focusing on on other aspects of business so now no longer am i spending 90% of my time doing design I'm spending maybe 10% of my time doing design and I mean spending 20% doing programming 20% doing art to another 20% doing marketing and then another 10% doing finance and then the question is what what is the best investment of my time long term if I want to be lets say a designer is it to be spreading out my energy and spreading it out across art and programming in business and marketing all this stuff and maybe it maybe the answer is yes because actually as a designer getting a little bit of your feet wet and getting experience in all those is good but then on the other hand there's also something to be said about just being a really good designer and focusing all your time energy on that because usually when a company hires you or an employee or an employer hires you or even if you're doing a business being very specialized and having a very specialized skill set that nobody else has is a very good way to extract value and to get a lot for you know in exchange for your services so if if you're the top notch programmer that knows how to you know how to program pixel shaders and you're the best in the world at that then some company that needs to to to make awesome pixel shaders will hire you because you're the best in the world and they'll pay you a premium for that because you're better than everybody else they're paying you a premium for your experience because that's that's a scarce commodity whereas if you're just a generalist programmer that dabbled in all sorts of different areas of programming and all the sudden you go applying for a job well how many dabbler programmers are there there's a lot but there's not only a lot of those there's also a lot of programmers that are very good in very specific areas so usually a company has a specific role that they want a programmer to take so maybe it's you know it's a graphics maybe it's a it's AI maybe it's a you know system architecture or whatever it is or gameplay mechanics or networking so usually if they have that role they're gonna prefer to hired expert so if they want you know a networking programmer they're gonna go hire a networking program they're not gonna hire a jack-of-all-trades because that networking programmer is just more specialized and the trend in society is that you know as society gets more and more complexed niches become more and more focused and specialization becomes more more more and more of a valued commodity so so in that sense understanding all these things and getting my my game my inner game dialed in I think would have really helped me looking back now too to be more at peace at where I was when I started my job and to really sustained it and to have invested in it in a very smart way that ultimately the way I see it now like if I went back and I read through the whole thing with the knowledge that I have now of self-development and the inner game that I've built up in the inner game that I could build up if I could build up specific to game design if I wanted to I could really position myself over the next like five or ten years to be to be a highly valued well-paid designer in that industry if that's something that I chose you know I found a better purpose for myself now so they have even more excited about which is which is coaching a self-development but just thinking back I think it is a great example of how if you're if you're somebody who really cares about your career figuring out how to dial in your inner game and take out all the inner blocks that you might have that keep you from being fully engaged in it and from fully investing in it in the long term and stuff that keeps you agitated stuff that is causing you consistent problems maybe with coworkers or with your confidence or your ability to stay on track and keep focused like these kinds of things and just get you more excited to reconnect you with it to make your career path more sustainable maybe you're burning yourself out through how hard you're working at it so maybe more sustainability there so that you're able to invest over a longer period of time more efficiently and that puts you in a very powerful position eventually that will allow you to earn those big bucks to get that big paycheck have that kind of impact that you want to have with your career and and really get the respect that you will automatically reset when you are at the top of your field not because you have some social connections or because you knew the right people but just because you have the skills and the knowledge that are so valuable that very few other people have you