Sometimes I'm amazed the dev team lets him talk to the outside world anymore :P
And now I want to play Populous II again. :/
You can listen to what he has to say, but in my mind, he is a liar and uses his costumers gullibility to his advantage. That is the only secret to his success, and really it is not repeatable in most industries. And if it were, I wouldn't recommend using it because it is insanely immoral, not to mention that living on lies is just a horrible way to go through life.
Source: He gave the commencement speech at RIT and told this story.
He had been working in steel mills for all of his teens, and after high school went into the Marines. After getting out of the marines, he went to get a job at GM on the assembly line.
He was well dressed and presented an air of confidence (thanks to the Marines), and so the receptionist assumed he was there for a managerial position instead of an assembly line position, and gave him the managerial application form.
He got the job, learned management and then moved on to other companies as a manager before finally starting his own company.
One chance is all you need to prove your worth.
I loved this quote of his: "I’ve made so many countless mistakes...being as someone who isn’t particularly bright, I have to make them several times before I learn." That quote coming from someone so accomplished puts things into perspective for me.
I sometimes struggle with the capacity of my own intelligence. I am trying to change my mentality that intelligence is something that can gradually grow through experience/practice instead of it being an innate quality. I do believe geniuses such as Terrence Tao, etc. are exceptions and are born with the innate ability. For the rest of us, I believe we should emphasize hard work and just getting things done.
I also believe that this is a source of my procrastination. Sometimes I struggle to work on some of my side projects because of my limiting belief that the task at hand is so huge/complex that I am just not smart enough to complete something like that.
Does anyone else have similar thoughts or comments along these lines?
It's not true to say that one creates one's own luck, but it is true to say that one creates the success from a lucky incident.
This is why you can't say that someone who succeeds, say, in their early 20s is necessarily more talented than someone who succeeds in their late 50s (although I suppose one could say that if someone in their early 20s has already developed the skills to deal with their lucky incident successfully may be more talented; however sometimes the fact they've had the opportunity to develop those talents can be luck/good fortune).
The secret: stay ready and throw your hat into the ring. The worst you're risking is embarrassment.
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014633/Classic-Game-Postmortem
The GDC classic postmortem talks are well worth watching.
It's bad enough that the current crop of what I would call consoles have no keyboard, and you need to break the law to write code for them unless you have megabucks.
