Teams Move at the Speed of Trust

Most products are designed and built by a team. Small, big, dysfunctional or high-functioning teams, but some form of team nonetheless. Having built products for over 20 years I have found the single biggest factor in a product’s success is how much collective trust there is within a team.

This does not mean that great teams automatically make great products and services. Plenty of ideas out there are too early, too complicated, lack general infrastructure, or are just downright terrible, even though high-performing teams are working on them as we speak. These things will most likely fail in the marketplace regardless of the team. From my own experience with failed projects, I can list the Sega Dreamcast (too early), and Nokia N-Gage (too early, terrible execution, lack of general infrastructure, etc.). But, the teams of these products were some of the best I have worked with and many people from those teams have gone on to do amazing things in their line of work.   

What then makes a good team great? You need a group of high intellectual horsepower, strong emotional intelligence, and the correct distribution of skills necessary for the challenges you are tackling. I would argue all of that is very nice but even with all that in place, the primary limiting factor of a team’s performance is trust.

This is not a new idea; you can read many current articles about this such as Google’s study on effective teams or the article on Medium - The Future Of Labor is Working With People You Trust. Shoot, Stephen Covey wrote about this back in 2006 in The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything. What I find so amazing is that so many people seem to be aware of this, but at the same time, they don’t take systematic steps to do anything about it.

Let’s break it down a bit. 

When I say teams move at the speed of trust, I don’t mean that in a metaphorical way, but in a real function of time and action. Think of the relationship between a manager to an individual contributor. If the manager does not trust the person to do good work, finish on time, meet specifications, etc., then the manager will invariably become a micromanaging boss, literally slowing things down from a lack of trust.

Let’s look at it from the opposite side, the poor person working for a boss they don’t trust. If you don’t trust your boss, you often hedge your work, not knowing what is needed or expected. Even worse, maybe you don’t believe your boss to represent your work or give you credit for your accomplishments, then you make sure that you don’t produce your best work, knowing they will take all the credit. 

How about something less personal? A team that doesn’t trust in the mission of the project. A healthy reaction would be to question why. Why adhere to the vision? Why is this path going to lead to success? Why don’t we change course? That, of course, costs time and lots of it, especially on larger teams, and that is the healthy reaction to the problem. The unhealthy response is leadership that stifles dissent and ignores challenges to the vision, creating even higher costs in time as people disengage, go off on their own or leave, in pursuit of something better.

So if trust is so important, why are these examples of lack of trust so prevalent? Why don’t companies work hard to put in systematic processes to engender trust within and across teams? Because it is easier to believe in the fallacy that making a great product happens because of a single individual creative visionary. This ignores the undeniable reality that a great product is made by people, people who need to trust one another, trust the vision, and trust they can actually get there if they are to perform at their best.

Ok, so what are some ways we can systematically build trust in our teams? There are lots of ways to go about this, from Stephen Covey’s, 13 Behaviors of High Trust to Forbes 12 Leadership Behaviors That Build Team Trust, but here I will outline my version of these based on specific examples during my career.

Transparency

At a very base level, humans are animals that have evolved to believe what we see and distrust or fear what we can not see. Without transparency, the unknowns (gossip) expand and fill the void that should have been filled by near-full transparency of information. I say, “near full” because there are things like payroll, performance reviews, etc., that should not be made public across a team. Ways to implement transparency:

• Reporting up and out. While on The Sims Mobile team, we had a bi-weekly executive review of the performance of the game, key metrics, roadmap, velocity, etc. Usually, these sorts of decks were created by the leadership team and only shared with executive-level stakeholders. Instead, we shared these decks with the entire team making sure the full team had access to not only all the information that was presented upward but all the feedback we received on this material. This way the team was never guessing what was shown or where we stood on matters of metrics, priorities, milestones, etc., instead there was a single source of truth to which they had equal access.  

• Out in the open. Sit out in the open, in the largest grouping of team members, and sit in such a way that anyone can see your computer screen. It may sound simple, and it is, but I have found many team members respect and value this action. One, it is always clear what you are working on and encourages people to walk up and ask you a question about anything they see. Now clearly there are times when you need to work on things in private, and for those rare times, merely find a conference room, but spend the vast majority of your time out in the open available to your team. This is also part of leading by example. People trust others who are consistent in their actions and statements.

Communication

I hate speaking in absolutes, but pretty much, no matter how much you communicate, it is probably not enough. Nearly every problem on a project, within a team, or in a relationship, can be walked back to a breakdown in communication. Something was not communicated, it was communicated wrong, things were assumed, etc. I like to say communication needs the three C’s - Constant, consistent, and constructive. Missing any one of those turns good communication into useless chatter.

• Constant. Two typical examples that lack the principle of Constant, are only communicating good news, in a weak attempt to keep morale high, or just communicating bad news, often because you failed to communicate anything at all and now you are forced to say something. It takes discipline, but find a frequency, (no less than weekly), to communicate with your whole team. It can be via email, Slack, team meetings, agile standups, or even better, all of the above. Never fail to miss one of these communication updates.  

• Consistent. After setting up the frequency, be consistent in time (for example always on Monday morning), place (email, face-to-face, etc.), and structure. From my experience, I like a weekly format, over email, first thing Monday morning to the full team. The structure will always include the following - critical announcements, top priorities for the project, key milestones/dates, agenda for the leads meeting (and expected outcomes), open requests for feedback, and finally an image of awesome.  This last part is similar to a prize in a box of cereal, encouraging anyone viewing the email to open it and ideally read the full thing.

• Constructive. This one is the toughest because it requires the most judgment. The best heuristic I have found for meeting the criteria of constructive is to make my communication actionable. If it is good news, don’t just say, “nice work” instead, communicate how to apply the success again in the future or how to use that success to address other problems. If it is bad news or more often critical feedback needed for a team member, again, make it actionable. What is the behavior that is required or expected? Build your communication around how a person or team can take action toward improvement.  

Calibration

This one is so key to building trust on a team I am surprised it is not discussed more often. It is the simple act of taking the implicit and making it explicit. On any given project, multiple times a day you will be confronted by the opportunity to calibrate with your team, building trust each time you apply this rule. Examples:

• Approvals. As a leader, you are often asked for your approval on something. It could be a process, designs, budgets, etc., but instead of merely giving yes or no answers, (if possible), take the time to make an explicit calibration. This means saying something to the effect of, “This looks great and in the future any cost expenditures in this range, related to this aspect, you can go ahead and automatically approve.” This one simple change can dramatically improve a team’s operational speed. It is not always as clear-cut as my example, but take the time to ask yourself, can I calibrate on this or not?

• Opinions. Similar to approvals, but more subjective, take the time to set a calibration marker for your team. For example, if you are shown a wireframe mock-up of a new UI, instead of just offering your subjective opinion, try to find pieces that you can isolate and set calibration on. It can be based on existing UX patterns, brand colors, key art or characters that should be used, etc. The point is to set a loose standard or heuristic, that a team member can use to make future decisions about without checking in every time.

 

Humility

This can encompass all sorts of things that are often brought up when discussing building trust. Things like, “Listen First,” “Admit your mistakes and acknowledge your limitations,” “Ask for feedback,” “Put the success of the team before your own,” etc. For me, I wrap all of the above into the umbrella of humility.

In the short term, it is easy to trust a braggart who claims to know all the answers and attempts to remove all doubt about direction or purpose, but never have I seen people like this create a sustainable future. The world is way too complex and ever-changing for any singular person to be right 100% of the time. Building trust in your team is also trusting them that they may know something you don’t or have a better way of doing something. You are building trust twice as fast when you allow the team an open opportunity to shape the future of the project, process, or vision. 

In summary

In no way do I believe the above is an exhaustive or fully comprehensive list, but it should be a good start, with real actions you can take today to improve trust in your teams. Implementing just a few of these practices will go a long way toward improving your team’s speed and productivity regardless of the type of work you are doing. As Matthew Inman from The Oatmeal sums up, ...

The Oatmeal

Great Customer Service in a Transactional Economy

I can recall a time when customer service meant a smiling individual who looked you in the eye and attentively listened to the issues you were having and went the “extra mile” to help you out. Today, in our highly transactional economy, it is funny to imagine ever dealing with such an individual and the whole concept seems anachronistic.

More and more industries have continued to drive towards self-serve solutions as the price of labor, skilled or otherwise, continues to rise. Retailers, such as Home Depot and Target, have added self-checkout, you can expect this trend to spread. Once driverless cars become ubiquitous we will even lose the (hopefully) friendly conversation with our taxi or Uber drivers. Rating your robot driver on, “Above and Beyond” or “Great Conversation” seems silly.

This doesn’t mean that good customer service is dead, only that it is now both highly targeted and often not face-to-face. This, of course, holds true for bad customer service as well. We only need to look at the somewhat recent fiasco with Comcast, or United Airlines, etc., etc.

I bring all of this up, as I recently had a couple of very interesting examples of the wide variability of customer service experiences and how it can dramatically impact our view of a service/product, as well as our future actions towards or away from such a business. Let’s look at one recent example that happened to me. 

Bombas Socks

Over the last year, I have bought a number of socks from Bombas as I liked their mission and product. Overall I have been very happy with my new foot coverings and even told a couple of friends they should get some of their own. Recently though, one pair had developed a small hole in the toe, which surprised me since I had not owned them that long. I kept meaning to email Bombas, but because of my expected (negative experience) around customer service, I was hesitant to do so, fearing I would be more frustrated than happy, which is kind of the opposite of what one would want. After a while, a second pair developed a small hole and I decided my frustration with defective socks exceeded my fear of bad customer service. Prepping for frustration and incompetence I muttered to myself, “let’s do this”

In our modern era of visual digital communications, I pulled out my phone, took two pictures of my defective socks on my feet, and emailed them off to customer service fully expecting my message to then be lost in the ether of futile communications and that I would be taunted by an automatic response of, “we got your message and we will get right on that for you”, never to be heard from again. In less than a minute after I sent my message, I was proven totally right! I indeed got the email I expected.

At the bottom of their email, I read saw this little gem, and thought, “yeah right”

Then something totally unexpected happened. I got another message. This one literally four mins later and from Caroline Sweeney.

After shaking my head in disbelief I got right back to her with my selections and she responded in kind. Literally in less time than it took me to finish drinking my coffee she had a tracking number sent to me. Mind. Fucking. Blown.

Now here is the interesting part. I went from being happy about my previous sock purchases to telling everyone and their mother about how awesome Bombas is and how everyone should get their socks from them. When my new socks came in, hell, I think they even felt cozier than the previous pairs. It is like my amazing customer service experience literally made the physical product better. That is the power of good customer service.

This is my ultimate point, it doesn’t matter what your business is - if you want to create fans,  not just customers, what Kevin Kelly calls a thousand true fans, you need to find your own specific solution to your customer service challenges. For me and my industry of video games, it is a mixture of solutions, from working closely with hardcore fans to help shape future products, to fixing the frustration of your highest monetizing customers while they are potentially screaming at you.  

The good news is that your opportunity to be highly successful is only limited by your willingness to put forth the effort. You have so many tools available to you, from robust data about user spending, retention, usage, churn probability, and even social graph, you can be highly targeted in your efforts and calculate ROI for your action. And remember, never underestimate the power a great customer experience can have on someone, it can have long-lasting results, including getting fans to write long blog posts about it.

In the end, there was only one way I could respond after filling out a very positive customer feedback survey. I sent Caroline the only message that summed up my experience:

Ca$h Royal - “Show me the Money” or Monetizing on value.

Since the simple pleasures of Adventure on the Atari 2600 days, I have been a lifelong gamer. Since the uncharted frontier of the first out-of-the-box, internet-connected console - Sega Dreamcast, I have been a 17+ year, (and counting) veteran of game development. I have seen various business models, distribution models, technologies, etc come and go, like the ebb and flow of ocean currents. I have spent most of my career working on, “the" thing, before it became, “the” thing. Connected consoles with 56k modems, mobile games years before an iPhone ever shipped, F2P when it was called, “Social Games”, etc. Sometimes it felt like paddling for hours only to miss the big wave before it had time to develop. After a while though, you see certain patterns emerge that create some basic truths about the video games space and real marketplaces in general. 

After making the transition early on into free-to-play (F2P), I found it to be hugely liberating and exciting. See the previous blog post, “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Free to Play”. Here I wrote about what I saw as the basic order of operations for game development with the two models.

(from the blog post)

Order of operations for F2P

1. Figure out how to make a fun game that engages people.

2. Figure out how to get a reasonable amount of the player base to spend enough to sustain the business.

Order of operations for P2P

1. Figure out how you are going to get people's money.

2. Figure out how to give them entertainment value greater than or equal to the money they just spent.

Five years later and I still believe in that same core concept. Free to play is not evil, the devil, or the beginning of the apocalypse. It has pros and cons which we have seen play out in myriad ways. The problem is that so much of the F2P space, (and even in some ways the premium space), has pretty much become Las Vegas, minus geographical limitations and regulations. Blackjack is a game. Craps is a game. Poker is a game. Slots are games, but Vegas has no desire to make those games any better, they simply want to optimize their KPIs. In other words, get people to monetize more, engage more, retain more, and incentivize people to tell their friends about all the great fun they had losing money in Vegas (i.e. Virality). 

I am not saying there is anything wrong with Vegas, go ahead and get your gamble on, but let's call it what it is - gambling. The two main differences are, one, that in gambling you know, (or should know), that you have a greater than 50% chance of losing your money, and two, you actually have some chance at winning real money, (true value), vs winning virtual goods that have only perceived value.

This is why when I see and play games like League of Legends (LoL), Dota 2, Clash Royal, Hearthstone, Team Fortress, and a number of others, I actually enjoy them vs feel angry at them. They are monetizing on value vs monetizing to remove discomfort. When you buy a Champion in LoL or Dota 2, you are buying something of obvious value, the significant time and effort it took a huge number of artisans (concept artists, modelers, animators, VFX artists, writers, designers, engineers, sound designers, etc). This is not lost not the player when they open up their wallets. When you buy a new skin or champion it is actually a pleasurable experience like opening a brand new Lego set or other recently purchased toy or coveted item. This also holds true for card packs in Hearthstone, or chests in Clash Royal (though, some subtle differences exist there which I will get into).

One of the things that I believe makes Clash Royal so successful, is that it takes an existing monetization mechanic, the Gatcha box, and switches it from effectively a slot machine, to a more straightforward monetization for goods. In so many games, that use the Gatcha mechanic, such as Eternity Warriors, Summoner Wars, Puzzles and Dragons, etc, the player must wade through mountains of crap to find the rare, rare item of any value. In effect, they are playing a slot machine that clearly, "pays out" way less than 50% of the time. Most of these games have secondary systems in them where you effectively, “trash” your crappy drops into very small incremental progress toward useful gear or items. The exchange rate is so terrible, that it is only barely worth more than not doing it at all.

To me, this is the true innovation of Clash Royal, when a player spends a small amount of hard currency to open a chest, they actually feel good that they are getting something of value, instead of removing discomfort (chest timers). Sure you can argue that they are using the standard timers so many other games use to monetize, but what is in the chest is pretty much always valuable, the cost is relatively low and the timers are effectively fixed and don’t scale up over a lifetime play. Additionally, the time cost is proportional to the reward and not in a BS way, such that a higher-tier chest really does have more and better items in it.

I am not saying Clash Royal is perfect, clearly, they are still tuning a bunch of the game, but they have managed to find a sweet spot in terms of taking a tried and true, yet somewhat, “dirty" monetization mechanic and tweaking it toward returning real value to the player for their purchase. It will be interesting to see what happens in the coming months as the game scales and certain units become useless, effectively power deflation. In time we will see if they are back at square one, with many of the items in chests being perceived as useless or functionally useless. Only time will tell.

Now I have to get back to playing some games ...

That is a terrible idea. What time? (HCLS - Recap and insights)

Why do this and what is my why?

“The unexamined life is not worth living”

— Socrates

Now that I have had some time to let the events of the GoRuck HCLS (Heavy, Challenge, Light, and Scavenger) sink in, I want to reflect on what got me (and a few amazing friends) through it all.

For me, it starts with my “Why”. Part of that is the great quote from Socrates, but specifically, it is the unending question of; what am I capable of? What scares me? What is possible? How can I aspire to be closer to those that inspire me? The ongoing and relentless pursuit of self-discovery is a strong motivator for me - to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more. This last bit is part of a John Adams quote that has found a permanent home in my head since the first day I read it.

"If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, you are a leader." --John Quincy Adams

As someone who leads teams and projects as part of my day job, I constantly struggle with how to be a better leader, which usually goes back to self-discovery and learning to be a better follower, something that GoRuck is real good at introducing you to, both quickly and harshly.

So what is a GoRuck HCLS exactly?

First, let me tell you what I call it - “The Stupid”. Why do you ask? Let’s break it down. “Heavy” is brought to you by the letter, “H”. The Heavy is a 24-hour team event, where you strap on 35+ lbs rucks (backpacks) and get led around an unknown area for roughly 30-40 miles. Seems simple until you realize that the 35lb ruck is the lightest thing you will carry all night. For example, we were handed a “pain train” of ten sandbags, ranging from 120lbs to 20lbs, some logs, a 12” diameter PVC pipe, roughly 10 feet long and filled with water (loads of fun to carry up a hill), a 50lb team weight, buckets (soon to be filled with water and sand), and a large sheet cake to celebrate the 240 birthday of the US Marines (more on that later). Also being led around is not really accurate, more like soul-crushing PT sessions run by Cadre who are veterans from special operations in the military (current or former Green Berets, SEALs, or Marines) who have zero fucks to give (ah, ah, ah, ah) because they have already done far worse than you or I can imagine. Interspersed between these are things called, “Time hacks” which are simple, getting all of your asses and your coupons, (all the extra heavy stuff they gave you), to a new location within a limited timeframe or suffering the consequences. Of course something this fun wouldn’t be complete without the extra entertainment of having all your food taken away and doing it on a restricted diet of less than a thousand calories. Oh, but in the end, you do get to eat that cake you carried for over 24 hours, of course, it too is a time hack. The cake had to be gone in less than two minutes. Rabid bears could not have finished it faster than us - it was gone in 23 seconds.

Once you have finished the above party, is when you realize that it is only one out of the four events that comprise HCLS, now you get about an hour to prep for the Challenge, brought to you by the letter, “C”. This time only 12+ hours of more or the same and roughly 12-15 miles. After you stumble in delirium to the end, you get to enjoy what feels like a huge amount of rest over the next hour and a half. Now to get your mind right for the Light. The Light is now just fun, PT is so normal at this point, you don’t care and giggle at it, (no joke), partly from how easy it is in comparison and partly because after so little sleep, even push-ups are funny.

When you finally finish that little party, you get some real rest, nearly eight full hours before you start the Scavenger, which would normally be about running around the city for six hours, trying to beat other teams taking photos of themselves in front of all sorts of random objects, but for you and the soon to be nicknamed, “Stubborn 31”, you all are chilling out in a bar/brunch spot seeing how fast you can eat giant plates of pancakes, (less than two minutes btw). Eventually, you head out and rack up some points in the Scavenger hunt, but you know what you really won was HCLS.

Beyond all of the endurance challenges, what made this particular event special was Veterans Day. Every now and again the cadre would sit us down and open up about their personal stories, or stories of others they have served with. These intimate windows into the lives of those that serve were especially meaningful to me as someone who has not served but respects all those who have. I have always felt limited and frustrated by the generic and nearly meaningless, “support our troops” banners, pins, stickers, etc. Taking the time to experience a fraction of a veteran’s world, felt infinitely more useful in understanding and appreciating those who serve.

So how did we do?

In the immortal words of my teammate Kristina, "we crushed it!" <insert pantomime of her crushing a can>

As a team we were a relentless force of positive leadership, pack mule power, and huddled up penguin heat. From start to finish we put out, helped out, and laughed at the silliness of what we were willing to choose to do, and paid good money to be part of. No doubt this was facilitated by sleep deprivation delirium. Also when I say our team, I mean everyone, including everyone we trained with, and the support team, who were absolutely essential in getting us across the finish line.

For me personally, it was a mixed bag. I started off great with tons of energy and enthusiasm. When they brought out the coupons I tried to find something heavy and share it with my teammate Steve. This strategy proved fantastic as we each put as much effort as possible for the other, stretching our collective energy out further than if only one of us was pushing hard on our own. Something I realized pretty quickly, was that there is a sweet spot of giving near-maximal effort, but not going over is ideal. Give too little effort and the other person has to work that much harder to compensate for your lack of output. But, push too hard and exceed your own limits, then you can't recover enough to be useful again. It doesn't help the team if one person plays a powerlifting superhero, because everyone at some point runs into their limit and you either walk into that wall gracefully or you hit it head first like a battering ram of arrogance.

Around hour 23 of the Heavy, I started to approach that invisible wall and found myself in my own private pity party. We were on a near-endless hill climb doing 13+ miles that we really needed to push hard on and immediately you could see people well past their limits. At this point I started to resent the other people, why were they not more prepared? Why didn't they move faster? Why do we have to carry their packs? This is bullshit! What was bullshit was my attitude, not theirs. It's not about me, it's about the team and the person next to you. Once I was able to snap out of this I looked for the person who was having the hardest time and tried to help them. The person I helped was already being supported by someone, so then it became the two of us helping pull a third up a hill. They say when you are at your worst, find someone worse than you, there is always someone worse than you ... Once you start helping them you forget all about your own suffering. The reality is when you are that fatigued you can only (barely) focus on one thing at a time and once you stop focusing on yourself your pain goes away, you simply don't have the capacity to notice it.

After the Heavy our support team kept the pressure on us just like the cadre, but instead of crushing us, they propped us up with the same fury the cadre used to break us down. They never let us focus on anything but the next thing we needed. Eat food, drink this, get in the van, get to the next start point, lay down, rest feet, sleep, get up, get gear on, and get to the start point. They never gave us a chance to think about quitting. If they had, I am sure my demons would have crept in and told me I had already done enough, that there was no reason to push harder. Instead, the demons never got a chance to show up, chased away by Troy and the gang of demon slayers.

The challenge started with a hell of a welcome party - translation is hours of push-ups, burpees, flutter kicks, etc on the beach in between runs into the water to, "get wet and sandy" again I have to thank my team and our training. Even after the Heavy I never felt like I had nothing to give, especially on the flutter kicks. Our pre-event workouts often ended with 100 four-count flutter kicks for, "durability" which I hated at the time, but now was paying off on event day. I found whenever they asked us for flutter kicks, it was like giving me a free rest period. In my head, I could laugh at the cadre and have my own personal victory lap. Again just shows that it is the team that gets you through this, even your training team matters - choose them wisely.

There is this sense of euphoria once you finish the welcome party and it is on to moving heavy stuff over distance. Plus, now there is a ton of more people, since many people sign up, (there was a total of 91, including us), just to do the Challenge. Those folks have no interest in the Heavy, much less “The Stupid”. Things continued to go well until they didn't. Now the effects of sleep deprivation get added to the mix. To be honest there are large chunks of the night I don’t even remember. The low parts I remember - continuing to be under a massive log with my teammate as we get more and more pissed that all the new, fresh people are not carrying more. Again this is where having an amazing team makes all the difference. Out of the blue, I see Kristina smiling and checking in on everyone, she seems impervious to, “the suck” and just like that you realize pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional. It really is that simple. You can choose to say this is BS and not fair, or you can say, I don’t care what fair is or is not, life is never fair. I am simply going to pick this thing up, carry what I can, and keep moving forward. It was not about DFQ - Don’t Fucking Quit, I was not going to quit, not out of some macho proclamation, it just was not that bad, I and my attitude was just making it worse. If you can realize you are your own enemy at this point in time, then you can just stop doing that to yourself.

At this point I become intimate with the phrase, “It could always be worse …” and kept on trucking. Somewhere in the morning, I realized we have been going for ten or so hours and that we were in Golden Gate Park, not sure how we got there, but I need to buddy carry a fellow teammate and their ruck as we run as fast as we can towards the beach - welcome to the Mogadishu Mile. Once we finished another round of PT on the beach, including getting toppled by a monster wave, we were done with round two.

Again our support crew comes in like the cavalry to whisk us off to the next destination. As always they make sure we are fed, hydrated, and that we rest as much as possible in the hour and a half we have before round three - the Light. From this point on a strange level of confidence sweeps over us. There is no way we are stopping. Maybe it could get worse, but we just don’t care. There is this strange sense of certainty that infects you, where you know at your core you have more you can give and that it is enough to handle anything else that comes next. The Light and Scavenger events are now a breeze, just a matter of putting one foot in front of the other and moving. Now we have the time to get to know the people we have been spending the last 40+ hours with. We get to hear their stories, share ours and connect with people we have been put through the crucible with and are still standing.

What have I learned?

First and foremost, the good - it takes a team. A team to inspire you to take on things outside your comfort zone. A team to train with, keeping you on track and holding you accountable to show up and put in the work. A team to be there with you side by side, so that in a sea of strangers you can find the familiar smile of the filthy, smelly, exhausted moron who signed up to do, “The Stupid” with you. A team to support you when you step over each finish line, filling you up with nutrients of food, water, rest, and encouragement. A team to laugh and hug when it is all over. A team dumb enough to ask, “What’s next?”

Second the bad. I could have done better. Sure I finished and I am proud of that, but my goal was to do HCLS with a smile on my face the whole time and a positive, cheerful attitude. In this goal, I came up short.

"It is not the load that breaks you down, it is the way you carry it." — Lou Holtz.

The above statement could not be more true during the event. As you are constantly burdened under massive loads, I found I was at my lowest, not when I was under the most weight, but when I wasn’t carrying myself internally with the right mindset. It was how I carried the load that was hurting me. That being said, experiencing the feeling of helping others and crawling out of my own funk was a great learning experience, as well as seeing my other teammates thrive, while also facing the same challenge I was. The challenge is to not only keep going, we were really good at that, but to carry yourself with your head up and positive, helping others who benefit from your optimism.

The ugly. My feet were f*cked up. I did not put enough hours and miles in my shoes and with extra heavy weight, (at least 80lbs or more). By the end of the Heavy, my toes were banging against the end of my shoes, because I had not broken my shoes in enough, nor prepped my feet for 24+ hours of load. After the Heavy, when I went to swap shoes to my spares, my feet were too swollen to fit in my alternate shoes. By the end of the Light, I took off my shoes for nearly all of the break time (eight hours) allowing them to swell up more. When the Scavenger started each step was a painful mess. As I look at my poor feet I know I going to lose at least two toenails and maybe a third. That is not an indictment of the event’s difficulty, but of my own lack of preparedness in a very specific area. A mistake I don’t ever plan to repeat.

What’s next?

Now what? Not sure exactly. Time to rest up a bit and get back to the gym, establishing a baseline before deciding on the next goals to tackle. Personally, I want to try to take on the Endeavor Team Challenge, gain the next level of instructor certification in Krav Maga, and improve in a number of my benchmarks in physical training. Oh and gain back the 12+ lbs I lost during HCLS (weight loss further exacerbated by a horrendous bout of food poisoning a week after the event). Other than that. We start back at the top remembering, “The unexamined life is not worth living” How do I get my actions to inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more? Last quote before I go, since it will be the north star that guides the next event.

"Part of the art of choosing difficulties is to select those that are indeed just manageable. If the difficulties chosen are too easy, life is boring; if they are too hard, life is defeating. The trick is to choose trouble for oneself in the direction of what one would like to become at a level of difficulty close to the edge of one’s competence." - Nicholas Hobbs

Down Time = Game Time

Having some downtime on my hands gave me a chance to catch up on a bunch of games I have been wanting to play for a long time now. I feel like when I got home from my grandparents’ house on Christmas eve, busting in the door to dump the contents of my stocking on the floor and tear off wrapping paper like a thresher maw from Mass Effect. 

So what have I been playing?

• FTL Advance Edition on iPad

• Hitman GO

• HearthStone on iPad

• The Collectibles

• Star Trek Trexels

• Isolani

• Eternity Warrior 3

• Smash Hit

• Middle Manager of Justice

• Gunner Z

• Trails Frontier

I could write up a ton of stuff on each, but I actually wanted to call out three games that I thought were really doing some good stuff in the F2P mobile space. 

HearthStone - Fit, finish, and polish
The attention to detail is just fantastic. The art is beautiful, just sifting through cards is a pleasure. The sound is great and doesn’t get old. Everything is animated and feels alive. They “Peggled the shit out of it” (Thanks David Scott for this term), when you win a match and even when you lose there is a sense that you can surely win the next one. What is amazing to me is that for all the visual polish, the game doesn’t feel noisy, or cluttered. In fact, it feels simple and easy to use, with a clear consideration that less is more when it comes to interaction design. In short, all F2P games should be looking at HearthStone and asking themselves, “How can I make my game feel like it has this level of quality”. Unfortunately, the answer is usually to suck it up and make the effort to put the quality in. Don’t shortcut things or trim the details, they matter.

Hitman GO - Tactical shooter becomes turn-based puzzle game. What the what?!?
I love me some stealth games, especially stealth assassin games. Metal Gear, Thief, Rogues in every Bethesda title, Assassin’s Creed, Dishonored, Deus Ex, and of course Hitman. All of these scratch a particular itch for me. At their core though, they are puzzle games. How do I get in without being seen? How can I make it out alive? Etc. Since FPS’s all pretty much play like ass on tablets, I thought Square Enix’s solution to bringing the Hitman franchise to mobile was brilliant. The game is incredibly accessible, and beautifully done and I believe will introduce a number of new players to the franchise, hopefully without alienating existing ones. This last point is, of course, a concern, people who play Hitman, have certain expectations, e.g. running around and either shooting people in the head or stabbing them in the neck. Time will tell if Square made the right call, but good on them for taking the risk to test the hypothesis, that there is a market for the Hitman series that doesn’t have to be more of the same, but can be something new and unique.

Trails Frontier - The complete package
Full disclosure, I have worked with the amazingly talented people at RedLynx before, so of course, I tend to like their work. That begin said, I was never a big fan of the Trails series of games. It’s not that they are bad games, quite the contrary, in fact, it’s just that they are not really my thing. Now here comes Trails Frontier and I can’t put it down. Similar to HearthStone, the attention to detail is superb. Beyond the detail though, they have a fun story, solid humor, accessible controls, short play sessions, RPG mechanics as you level up your bike, and a monetization system that feels fair and not “grindy”. In short, they put it all together extremely well. RedLynx has honed the gameplay to a razor-sharp edge and packaged the whole thing up, serving it to the player like a prix fixe meal from the French Laundry. 

So food for thought.

Consider new ways you can use your IP. In the case of Hitman, even if you are using an existing IP, think about how you can use it in more interesting ways that might appeal to a broader audience. 

Pay attention to the details, fit, finish and polish. Sure, everyone wants to make a quality product, but that doesn’t mean you have to fill it with a ton of stuff. Take what you have and refine it so the attention to detail is unmistakable.

Lastly, make sure you put it all together like a fine meal, from soup to nuts. That each piece of the puzzle works harmoniously together so your players put the game down satisfied to the fullest.

Ok, now I have to get back to feeding my own personal game addiction ...