ps: Moving an old essay that was on my personal website to Substack.
Summary
Earlier in 2021, I got admitted to Link School of Business, a Brazilian entrepreneurship-focused university that forced me organizing a better work routine as well as deepening my relationships with key people in the country.
Along the way, I left Voldex Games — a project that I joined back in 2019 — to create my own gaming project, once again, with my amazing friend, Gabriel, with who I have the pleasure to be working with since 2016.
As well as that, I joined Wildlife Studios — a mobile gaming unicorn — as a PM Intern, fusing my passion with the gaming space.
I’m not a book-guy, I’d rather read multiple articles of the same author until partially offsetting an inherent enthusiasm to get deep into their books, thus, I ended up reading only 2 books. Yet, I read a lot of articles. I started watching spearfishing videos as a new sport passion and occasionally went for runs and worked out.
I did make a few great friends this year. I also had the opportunity to collaborate with a set of great engineers and kind people, got to know more new people better, and deepened my relationships with close friends.
Introduction
I've largely stopped sharing across social media, so I find this sort of recap to be a great way to share where my life is barreling toward. But it's mostly personal, because I get to use this as an opportunity to reflect on where to push down the brakes, floor the gas pedal, or change lanes. I'm 21 now, and acutely feel the usually healthy pressure I've placed upon myself to make something substantive of my life.
A New Toolkit
I'm much more excited about my capacity to identify and solve important problems now. I have a more robust toolkit at my disposal because I recognized that I didn't know enough but committed to a path that changes that. I felt a tangible sense of growth each month this year as I learned hard new in-depth gaming concepts.
Highlights
“Accumulating Advantages”
This year, I wrote my first proper article after reading dozens of different thoughts on the same subject — thanks Paul Graham, David Perell, and many others.
New project
I designed, built & launched a new gaming project that helped me crystalize and apply all the knowledge acquired during the past few years. In retrospect, we applied different strategies that are not common in the industry, receiving overwhelmingly positive results that put, for instance, our LTV/CAC above 7x.
Personal Website
I’ve finally developed my own personal website. I’m fully onboard that the idea of having a place to show your background and share your thoughts could lead to different experiences where people stumble upon serendipitously. I’ll be constantly updating my website with thoughts bouncing around my head — feel free to check my curated list of readings on it.
Tracking time spent
For the first few weeks of Fall quarter, I recognized that I was consistently spending at least 20-30% more time to complete tasks due to external interferences. I couldn't fix what I couldn't explicitly measure, so I decided to track all the time I spent on the tasks I wanted to complete. By having this information in hand, I could recognize if I was being blocked on a task and avoid spending hours more than I needed to by asking for help or changing my approach. I'll continue doing this for the periods in my life when performance matters and time is limited.
The app is called Rize, for those who are curious (Gotten a few messages about this since sharing!
Time spent on the day I was writing this highlight.
Values and Goals
This section talks about the values I hold and the goals I’ve set for the coming year. I think they inform each other. The values I set inform what goals are worthwhile and how to execute on a task once I’ve figured out what to do. The goals provide scaffolding and a roadmap to know how to get where I’d like to go.
Reviewing My Values
I reflected on and updated my values over the last few days for the coming year. I’ll use these values to evaluate the choices I make and benchmark how far off I am from what I’ve decided is a set of choices to strive towards.
For 2021, I had the following values...
Do the hardest thing
Give more chance to serendipity
Be cautiously optimistic (yes, before no)
Do it, consistently
There's no second chance
For 2022, I've refined these values to...
Do the hardest things right
Find the office hours
Expect no second chance
Emotionally invested
Do the hardest things right
The hardest path is not uniformly the best choice, but it often is. When it is, do I commit to doing the hardest task right? Do I set an unnaturally high standard for the work I do and not call it finished until it's excellent within a time limit? When I do this work, am I focused on the task at hand and trying as hard as I can to achieve it? Is perfection the standard, even if I'm the only one who will benefit from the work I do? Do I articulate this high standard and bring others up along with me in the work that I do? In order to achieve the high standard I set for myself, do I work with others, ask for help, or change the strategy at hand? And do I do this with integrity as a leader?
Find the office hours
Almost everyone who became great had people with more experience than them who showed them the way, shared their knowledge, and brought them up. I won't go very far if I go it alone in any aspect of my life. So, where are the office hours? How can I ask incisive questions to those further along than me to learn and progress faster? It's not enough to leave my door open when others aren't trying to enter my office yet. So, find or force the office hours from the greats that you identify, and learn from them. I do this with my friends and those in my circle, because often a peer has just as much to teach as a great. Be generous about hosting your own office hours when others ask for them. I should rarely be "doing it alone", and seeking to actively collaborate with the best for each project that I work on.
Emotionally invested
Am I unreasonably invested in what I do, the problems I solve, and who I spend my time with? Am I emotionally invested to the point where I feel sad when things go wrong, and elated when I make them go right? Am I excited above the norm to do what I am doing and spend time with the people I choose to spend time with? Do I love what I'm doing when I look at the bigger picture? When I'm not over an extended period of time, do I change my situation decisively? Do I fight personal cynicism and maintain an open mind?
Expect no second chance
Life may be a marathon, but I view my life as a series of sprints. And I'm sprinting now, because I believe that there's no second chance to attain a goal, relationship, friendship or experience. I may get fortunate in the future and be gifted with a second opportunity, but I should never expect to get one. This is antithetical to advice that cautions young people to grow gradually over time, or to build experience before seeking to accomplish a dream. Rather, I should fight to take what I set out for in the present.
Goals for 2022
When I set goals for 2021, I didn't follow them very intentionally over the course of the year. This was because I wrote 11 of them, and each was rather haphazardly placed into the recap. Not this year — I've done my best to make these goals challenging but attainable, specific, and time-bound. In turn, I'm much more committed to achieving them.
Goal 1: Write one, deep gaming article, per month
Goal 2: Learn more than I learned this last year
Set and implement a standard of performance for the work I do.
Collaborate with people who are great at what they do, and don't go it alone throughout the year
Goal 3: Intentionally make time for coming up with ideas
Goal 4: Train myself to take the hardest decisions
Make the hardest decisions when they come, for they are what transform you.
Keeping myself accountable with a quarterly check-in
This year, I’m planning on evaluating the extent to which I achieve the goals above and live by the values I’ve set out. I’m starting by evaluating these each quarter and writing down my progress on achieving them, and potentially publishing them to build accountability too.
What to address next?
There’s a set of outstanding questions that I’ll be spending the first chunk of the year determining
What's my next monetary goal? How much by when?
Where do I want to live for a short-term lease in the near future?
What are some amazing people in my career space with who I could have great conversations?
How can I be more authentic, more vulnerable?
Thank You
As always, thank you to my parents for the unwavering support. And thank you to my circle of friends for supporting and encouraging each others growth over the last year.
Finally, I wanted to say thank you to those who read this who I may not have spoken to in awhile. Please, feel free to say hi, I would love to hear from you — I haven't been as good as I used to be about maintaining relationships, and that's on me.
Final Follow Ups
If you’re working on an interesting problem — especially in the gaming space — (independently or within a company), I’d love to hear about it.
If you think any of the above choices seem non-optimal or want to challenge any of the above, please feel free to go ahead and do so! There’s so much to gain from public scrutiny of the choices you’re thinking of making.
And a Final Quote...
I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important... But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame.
—Richard Hamming, You and Your Research