YouSaid · the spoken record

Justin Gary

lines on the record: 141
first: 2023-08-16
most recent: 2023-08-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, sure. You can come to stoneblade.com is for my games if you want to pick up any of my games or join our Discord. There's a link there. And we, myself and my team are all there chatting so you can chat with me on Twitter and on the Discord. I love talking with people that have design and creativity questions. So always happy to help. This has been so much fun, Tim.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm excited to get this one. I had anticipated it might come up. I've listened to a lot of the podcasts. So I'm going to use one as a mantra for myself, which I say to myself every day, which is cultivate, comfort with uncertainty and impermanence. Cultivate comfort with uncertainty and impermanence. It sounds a little maybe a little woo-woo to people, but in reality it's so much of what we do, we talked about this a little bit earlier, is because we're afraid that we don't know what's going to happen. We're afraid we're going to lose something. And the truth is you never know what's going to happen and you're going to lose everything. We're all going to die, right? And if you can just be okay in that space of not knowing the control freak piece of it, the staying as a lawyer or a safer path and be okay with the fact that things are not going to stay the same all the time, then life gets so much easier. And whether it be your creative path or your relationships or anything like that has been one of the most powerful things for me personally. So I'd hope to share that message.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's something you talk about a lot, and it cannot be underestimated, right? What is it? So you ask the question what would it take for me to let go? What would have to be true for you to be willing to not get into this? It could be some key metric that you care about that they have to report. It could be that they have to stay within a certain budget. It could be that they're in reality, you're just making up stories of, oh, well, I just feel like I need it. Let those things go. Let people grow. And it's really, in my experience, it's just been incredible. I now have a team that can literally run itself. I get in and I focus on the key new projects. I focus on the most important things I think are wrong, but I for the most part, I have stepped away from a lot of the day-to-day and I have watched my team get better and better and better. And again, it's part of that mindset, right? They make mistakes, just like I make mistakes. And sometimes the question is, what do we learn from it? And don't make the same mistake twice. And we've learned a lot along the way, and it's been pretty amazing.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't respond. I didn't do anything. And what magically happened is everybody just stepped up. And they answered the questions that they would have asked me themselves because they were perfectly capable of doing that. And they started taking initiative and building new things and doing stuff that I didn't even think to do. And I realized with some embarrassment that I had been holding them back, that I had by not allowing them to fail or do things that would be different than I would, I had been constraining them from becoming leaders and doing the things that they should be doing. And I had built work for myself. I had made them less effective at their job. And I had made my life less good. So that was one of the best vacations I ever took because it actually really changed the entire way that I managed, changed the entire way I viewed leadership. And I love Thailand.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Plenty of time. What do you need from me? How do we set this up so that you don't need to talk to me? And they, okay, we need access to these things that only give access to. We need to know this, blah, blah, whatever. It was very little, as it turns out. And then I go to Thailand. Now, I am still too much of a control freak. So I really did bring at least my iPad with me so I could check it.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think we're very similar in the sense, Tim, right? It's not, I wouldn't call myself a control freak just because I don't want to say mean things about myself, but I very much want things to be good. And I believe I know how to make them good. And I want to make sure that they are good. So that's what control freaks say. So the point being like, I know I'm good at my job. And for the most part, with the most of the jobs that people are doing, I know how to do them as well as they do. That's how I know if they're doing a job or not, right? This is the story I'm telling myself. And I hired a lot of very smart, very capable people. I ended up every extra person I hired suddenly became more work for me because I had to keep checking to make sure that they were on track or setting up more systems to, you know, have this and if they weren't doing something the way I thought they should be coming in or they would come to me with questions. And at some point, I'm like, listen, this is too much. This has gone kind of crazy. I need to step away. And so I said, look, I'm going to take a three-week trip to Thailand. I'm not bringing my laptop. You know, I'm not reachable. I'm going to do that in six months. So I gave the team play.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fine. I mean, you know, again, so mostly when I'm there, I can check messages, I turn off all notifications for everything. I don't want my phone bothering me or pinging me or distracting me. Like I am using my phone consciously because I want to look at something specific. So it means I have a meeting and I'm not at my desk. I'll go to Discord, go to the meeting thing, check it. Or I have something I want to post at a public channel. This is another key thing about it that's great because you have so many different channels and you can make threaded discussions. One of the things I try to encourage is that we have as much as possible make communications public. A lot of times people will have side chats and side conversations and come up with some great idea and then it will get lost because people are just in a private channel somewhere. And so we'll make sure that people have public discussions as much as possible so people can add comments and can get involved and stay connected if they want to. But to continue with your question, the mobile experience, it's mostly just for some, I will only use it if it's like there's some specific communication or meeting or connection I need to do. That's when I'll use my phone. If I'm going to work.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“90 plus percent laptop for sure. My phone is, I'll occasionally check emails to make sure I'm not missing anything, but I hate working on my phone.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so it's like automatically gives us a sense of like connection to our fans because of the same place where we're doing our work one click away. You can see and interact with fans. So it has a nice bonus effect of making us feel a little bit more connected to the community.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We tried a lot of them. I'm obsessed with productivity tools, sometimes to a fault. But so we tried Slack, we tried a couple of other custom ones. We tried Asana. We tried Monday. We tried a bunch of them. But the nice thing about Discord is, one, it's very easy to use. You could just start up a channel for free. You can have voice chat and text chat. You can also upload bigger files than you can with like Slack restricts that unless you have a paid program that's much easier to load files and share things. And honestly, Discord started as like a gamer focused thing. And so we actually built our fan community in Discord. So you can go to the Stoneblade Discord. It's kind of funny because it's sort of like a front of the shop, back of the shop kind of vibe, right? So it's like the front of the shop is like all the fans are there. They're all chatting about the games. We can jump in and chat with them. And then we're in this sort of private channels that are you can't see, but we're talking about and making the next things that you're going to be talking about six months from now.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then for the weeklies, we do have that. So we have our weekly goals. We have a check in at the end of the week where people will post, hey, here were my goals for last week. Here is how they went. Here are now my goals for the next week. Or, you know, what can I do if I didn't made a goal? What am I doing to fix it? So there is some accountability and I read through those every week for the team.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the daily, there's not much follow up on the daily. It's about staying connected. And I think it just forces you to plan, right? It forces you to assess for yourself, okay, what actually is important to me. A lot of people will just start checking emails and going down rabbit holes. And they're working. They are working, but they're not doing what's important. They're just doing whatever's in front of them. And so this forces just as a habit, it forces you to think things. Great point.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we have a company Discord. We have a channel in our company Discord that everybody posts their three goals for the day. This is a separate one for weekly goals, separate one for monthly goals, and a separate one for quarterly goals. And so you can always look back and see what everybody is doing at any given point if you care to at the main focus. It helps also helps us stay connected, right? Because we're 100% remote team now. So even though I may not talk to a given person or see a given person, I can quickly glance and see what's most important to them right now. So it keeps us all connected and accountable.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By focusing on very few things and making those the priority, it makes a big difference. And then lastly, with the mindset, we set very aggressive goals and it's okay not to hit them. Like a game when you want to win, right? You take winning seriously, but you don't cry when you lose a game, right? You say, okay, what can we learn from this? How do we get better and started to take that attitude and approach it, sometimes easier than others for sure, but like cultivating that mindset and focusing on what's important and making sure that the goals are clear and everybody knows what they are and you're moving day to day, that's how I structure the company and it's again it came from just the principles of design applying them to what we do and I found it to be really powerful.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Category that we're going to have a prototype ready to go in two weeks, right? Clear goals. We have something that is allows us to have daily focus and feedback. What I love is the rule of three. I think I first learned this from Chris Bailey, then his book, The Productivity Project, but I've applied it at every level of my company. So what it is, is you have everybody post their three daily goals. What are the top three things that I want to focus on? And three is really important because we all have an infinite laundry list of stuff to do. We're never going to finish our to-do list. But if you can finish your most important three things, you can make an enormous amount of progress. And we scale that to every level of the company. So every team, we have three weekly goals. We have monthly goals. We have quarterly goals. And so everything kind of scales down. And I even built this into my own like personal life. Like I have a thing, the level up journal, which I've made, which I've got. It just has a journal that just is fits in your pocket and has three goals, three habits, and then a little gratitude practice. And so every piece of it by”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of the things that I've realized is that the same way you design games, right? Designing a great game and designing a great company are not all that different. In a great game, you have clear goals. You know what you're trying to do. It's very clearly defined what you're trying to do. You're getting a lot of feedback and rewards, either that be from points or achievements or experience. You're getting constant feedback loops. The challenge level is appropriate, right? You're focused on learning one thing at a time. The skill level is appropriate where you want to be. And probably the most important thing about games, right, when we play games, we take a certain kind of mindset. If I'm playing a game, I expect to lose. I expect to have challenges. In fact, that's the whole point, right? If you play a game and there's never a challenge, why are we even doing it? And so I have tried to cultivate all four of those things in my company. We set clear goals where it's like, okay, it's not, we're going to try to have this specific metric, like our email subscriber list. We're going to try to increase it by this amount. And here's how we're going to do it over this quarter. Or we're going to try to get a new game in this.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You got to be honest with people, right? I mean, like, that's really what it comes down to act in integrity when you work with partners. Sometimes you have bad news, you tell them bad news. If you have some humility around when your ideas are not working or when you're trying things and say, here's what we're going to do. And I talk about like nobody knows what they're doing. I realize the other executives do it. I don't hide the fact that I don't know what I'm doing. I've learned a lot. I've got good ideas. I've tried things that work, but whenever you're pushing the boundary and trying something new, sometimes it's not going to work. And so when you're working with somebody and, you know, again, fortunately, Richard, he's a professional. He's not only has he made games that were uber successful, but he's also made plenty of games that weren't Uber successful too, right? So.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Being mentally ready with, okay, I've lost it all. I'm talking to bankruptcy attorneys, right? And that gives you a different kind of attitude and approach when you're trying to, you know, you're negotiating with a lender that you owe money to. They're like, you owe me money. You should collect. I'm like, I know, but either I'm going to go bankrupt or you're not going to get anything or we're going to work something out and I'm going to do my best to pay you off. And so fortunately, I was able to turn that around. And not only did I learn the important lessons, like you can go through a lot and you can recover from it, but also to not put myself in that position again, right? Not to overextend to that degree and learn to make smaller bets and grow if you can. It was a very important and powerful thing, which then, of course, I'm now able to come back to with reinvigorating that very same game.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Come to a realization and come to the other side of it where I had to go through this process of accepting. I had to get to the other place like, okay, it happened. I've lost everything. I failed. Now what? Right now, this is a different kind of fear-setting exercise because now I'm on the other side of my worst nightmare. And took me a little while, but I was like, okay, you know what? I will still be alive. I will be able to pay off some of these debts over time with some other things. I can recover from this. It's going to be okay. The people who got laid off, they're going to get another job. It was not easy. Once I accepted that worst case outcome and then I was able to say, okay, now how do I make this less likely? And so I had to lay people off, but I also renegotiated debts and negotiated payment plans and reduced our overhead and took on more contract work and like slowly but surely I was able to dig myself out of the hole and I don't think there's any chance I would have been able to do that if not for”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Course, yeah. People. I mean, I literally had my parents had taken a loan against their house to help me. Like, I mean, this is, I am so overextended. I am so in the thick of it and shame and difficult. It is tough. And I have to.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I get to a point where I have to like finally realize, wow, I'm going to go bankrupt. Like I can't do this anymore. Like I'm going to lose everything. And this was just one of the hardest things that I have ever faced because not only is it like I feel like I owe it to my team who I'm going to have to lay off these people whose livelihoods depend on it. We have fans and people who love the game. And like in a traditional tabletop game, if I stop making Ascension, let's say, right? You still have your copy of Ascension at home and you could play it for as long as you want. It doesn't matter if I don't make anymore. But when I stop making soul for it, it's a digital game. That means the servers turn off. That means your entire collection is gone. That means you can't play it anymore. Everything you spent, it's all gone. So I'm like failing myself. I'm failing my team. I'm failing the fans, like everything. And I have to make some very, very hard decisions.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it starts off with, you know, we just do like a kind of friends and family convertible notes round. So that means like they give me a loan and then in theory it turns into equity. And then after that, then I start taking some of those refactoring loans like you talked about, right? So I'm getting loans against my future income on Ascension to pay for SolForge and then starting to run up credit cards and like all the things really are not supposed to do.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I had to go and try to raise funds again. And we have to launch the game before we're ready. And again, we have followers, we have cash, but the cash burn is over time. I can see the cash burn is higher than the income and it's not working. And I overextend. I start borrowing more money. I know I can make this work. I'm not going to let it go. Like this is my baby. I'm going to keep it going.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“After the talk, we start talking and we get excited. It's clear we're both excited about the same project. And so Soulforge is born. Now, this was a project that was my first digital game I'd ever done. And I was a little cocky at this point. I won't lie. I succeeded my first project, Ascension was a huge success. Everything I touched turns to gold. It's all going to be great. We're doubling in size every year. And we do a crowdfund and I thought it was going to cost like $250,000 to make that game. We crowdfund with that target and we end up crowdfunding double that gold, near almost double that goal, like $500,000. It's like, oh, this is amazing. We're going to crush it. We're so good. And as it turns out, making digital games is very expensive. That cost $3 million to make”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yes, I can. The life of an entrepreneur is definitely one that has a lot of ups and downs, as many of your guests could attest to, you can attest, I'm sure. And so when I mentioned earlier the game SoulForge, we've since relaunched it, but at the time it was a purely digital trading card game, and I partnered with Richard Garfield. This is the guy that created Magic the Gathering. This is a dream come true for me. And I'll tell you the brief story of like, so we meet, we're at a game conference, you know, like I'd seen him around before, but we hadn't really met. We're at a game conference called Pax Dev, which is like a developer conference. And he's giving a talk on design. So of course I'm in the audience listening because I want to learn from the master. And he says at the end, there's a Q&A and then somebody asks him, hey, what's your favorite game right now? And he says, Ascension. And I literally like jump up out of my seat from the back of the audience and go, woohoo, like a stupid kid, right? But everybody laughs. But it gives me the opening. And so I go and I start a conversation with him.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Speaking of putting a spin on the ball, the game Bakugan I mentioned earlier is a game that I work on that's spin masters, a company that owns it. They have toy, plastic balls, and there's a game that I design the game, but they own the rights, they own the game, they own the distribution, they do everything. And that is by far the biggest quote-unquote game I've ever worked on. I mean, it's all over the world. It's in toy stores anywhere you go. There's a cartoon, multiple cartoons. It's enormous. And so that is also fun and also a really cool, exciting thing. And so that path is totally viable. So you can do work for hire, you can create projects and sell them and make a royalty. You can launch and publish your own things. There's an enormous number of ways to go forward. And a lot of it comes down to just getting clear.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, I spend way less of my time just designing games because I'm running a company. I have to manage logistics. I have to manage people. I have to plan out the marketing strategies. There's all these things that come with running a company. And so I think a lot of people would actually be better off. And if all you want to do is make games, then selling to a publisher is a great strategy. I wanted to kind of build worlds and build something bigger. And so here I am.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About where we are now 13 years later, there's over 16 standalone expansions for Ascension. We made Ascension Tactics, which is an Ascension miniatures game, which we did another expansion to that. Ascension's been featured in a major motion picture. We are working on trying to take the IP and make cartoons and make other things, comic books out of it, right? There's all of these things that are fun, right? Like, you know, we've had conversations about this sort of stuff. Like, it's fun to create and grow and expand your storylines. You know, when I first made Ascension, I had sketched out a three-year story arc of like what the world of Ascension would be if I, you know, got the whole thing done. And now, of course, it's 13 years later. So I've had to make some more stories since then. But that's the part I love. Like just like when growing up playing Dungeons and Dragons, like the process of coming up with the stories and making it and bringing that world to life is just, I love it. And so I didn't want to lose that. And I don't, you know, for people that are listening that are trying to make these decisions, like it's not obvious, even though I've been fortunately successful with it. It's not obvious that it's the right decision for.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, you know, it comes down to was a little bit more than just the money and the dollars and the cents of it. It was just, it was a matter of like this was my baby, this was my IP, right? If you've worked with publishers where they now take over the rights of stuff and you can't just do what you want with the book anymore”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like that? Yeah. Now, if you're a game designer, typically if you have an external game designer, you pay a royalty to that designer off whatever you're selling, right? So if you're selling it to distribution, you sell a percentage off the distribution price. If you sell it direct to consumer, you sell it to consumer price. And that can vary depending upon the designer. So in tabletop games, typically it's going to be anywhere between 6 and 12 percent at the high end for more mass market games, big scale games, it can go as low as 2% or 3%.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you're producing games, you typically most of the time you're going to produce them overseas. Now with cardboard stuff, it's starting to become a little bit more economical to do it stateside. We do some of our games stateside, but mostly you're doing it overseas. Whatever the retail price of the game is, the cost of the game has to be about a fifth of that. And the reason is that as a manufacturer, you are going to sell the game to a distributor at about 60% off the price of retail. They're going to sell it to a retailer at 50% off the price of retail. So they've got like a 10% margin for distribution. And then the retailer has that 50% margin for the rest of it.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Back. Burning Man, so I have a little release party out in the middle of the desert on the ply. And when I come back, we'd sold out. Everything was sold out the entire run. And we had to make a reorder. And it was like, okay, now I can actually, the company is, it's working. I can reorder, start making expansion, start, and like the rest of the company's history kind of evolved from that in a way that, well, I'm glad I made the decision I did.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All of it. We'll take it over. It'll be our game. We'll pay you a royalty. You don't have to worry about anything. It'll be all done. Now, this is a very tough moment for me. In a sense, it's a dream come true. They buy all the stocks when my money's off the table. They are a big company. They can push it. They can sell it. And then I can just go back to making games. And I'll have some amount of royalty and it'll be good to go. And I sat with it. At the end of the day, I was like, you know what? This is my baby. I've worked so hard to get it here. And I just I want to see it through. I want to see it through. I want it to stay mine. I didn't want to sell it off. And I said no. And it was like one of those I might regret this one later, right? And then 30 days later, product shows up finally after delays. Funnily enough, the product launch delay was launched such that it actually launched while I was at Burning Man, which is not supposed to be. But there was when I come.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Incredible moment, and so we sold out of everything we brought. So, this is a very rewarding, very cool experience. My team, you know, it's not just me now. We've got other people there working really hard to make this come to life. Team is like four of us. And then I got an offer that was very difficult offer to refuse. So at this point, I had early product that was shipped for Gen Con, but the rest of the stuff was still on the way. So I still haven't sold these 10,000 units with all my life savings tide up into it. And I get a call from another very big gaming company. And I don't think I'll say the name just because I don't know anyway.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It did. And I would start seeing people play it in the halls, and then I would see people carrying boxes around. And so it became this kind of like viral before, you know, we don't know this sort of viral sensation in a way that was very, it was very exciting. It was like a very.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so what I had was I bought 10 by 10 booth, which is the smallest booth you can, 10 foot by 10 foot booth. And then they had like a newbie competition, like a little, submit your marketing plan and we can give you a 10 by 20 booth for the price of a 10 by 10. And I won that contest. So fortunately, got a 10x20 booth, which is still very small in the scheme of what's there. And I set up my stuff. And this was people had started to hear about my game because I showed it off of Gamma before. And I start, you know, I'm just kind of putting it out there in whatever way I can, but this is just posting online and sharing with friends. I don't have any marketing budget or anything like that. And then I get there. And not only do we have like we have some of the early adopters who had heard about it run to the booth, but then they play the game and they loved it so much they would then take it, open up by it, open it up, and then start showing it to their friends. They would like set up. And so we ended up, this is not allowed.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, Gen Con is the tabletop and role playing game mecha of the United States, possibly you could say the world. Jen, from Lake Geneva is where it started. It's why it's called Gen Con. It's not there anymore, but that's what it came from, where the original Dungeons& Dragons people got together and played. It was like the first place where people sort of gathered and it kind of built this core of what gaming became today. And so now it happens in Indianapolis. It's like 60,000 people every year somewhere in that neighborhood. And every type of game you can imagine people are playing all hours of the night. They call it the best four days in gaming, but it's got anything you can dream of is there and many things you can't dream of. So it's like kind of the place to be, if you will, for tabletop and role-playing game nerds like myself.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So then I go and I get a booth at Gen Con, as mentioned, and this was where I'm going to have the unveiling. And now, again, I'm very poor at this point.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know if I'm butchering it, but that is 100% true in games too, right? If you get, you're testing with multiple people in your target audience that are consistently saying that something's not good, you as a designer have to fix it. They definitely do not have the right answer for how to fix it. That's your job. But that's another key part when I'm testing is that, okay, I'm looking for themes, looking for patterns. One person telling me they don't like something, maybe I can dismiss it, but if 20 people that are all in my target audience say that, that's something I got to focus on.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so asking questions to prompt for the specifics being focused on what's important to me right now, looking for nonverbal cues, and then in best case scenario, just like you mentioned, right, you have some more sophisticated readers and you have less sophisticated readers. You have more sophisticated game players and less sophisticated game players. So if you can test with other game designers, they're going to be better at zeroing in. And, okay, yeah, I don't care that the card doesn't have pictures on it or that the numbers aren't balanced. I know what you're looking for and I can give you feedback assigned to it. If you just take it to somebody, just a regular person, they're going to get hung up on a lot of little things. And so you have their feedback's a little bit harder. You have to parse out a little bit more what's important. Of course, as you get more and more focused on the final product, somebody that's in your target audience, their feedback matters a lot. And then the last thing I'll say is a quote that's, I think, is also one of your favorites. It's definitely one of mine from Neil Gaiman. When your reader says that something is wrong, they're almost always right. And when they say how to fix.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The show notes, which has a bunch of specific questions. You can just print it out and use it. So I will ask all right, what are the three things you like the most about the game? What are the three things you like the least about the game? Where did you get confused? And much like your book question, right? You really want to pay attention to where people get lost and confused and nonverbal communication is at least as important as anything they're going to write down and tell you. If you say, give me the three things you like the most, three things you like the least, what would you change? Whatever, people will say something to you just because they feel like they have to say something to you. Doesn't always mean that that's really what they feel, right? You're prompting them to it. So you have to use your intuition to say, okay, where A is this relevant to the hypothesis I'm trying to test and the stage that I'm in B, does this align with what I see visually of what they're doing? My mom tells me she loves all my games even when she really has no idea what's going on in some of them, right? She's very nice. But if I see that somebody's getting lost or leaning back or checking their phone, like watching for those nonverbal cues is so important and you sort of train yourself over time to get better at that.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Going to depend upon the phase that you're in. Every time I go through the core design loop, I like to think of myself like a scientist. I have some hypothesis that I'm trying to test, and that's what I'm focused on in that testing session. So when you're early on, you're like, okay, is this even fun? Is this idea of like rolling dice to try to punch somebody and making combos fun, right? Or whatever it is, right? You want to just see, is it fun? I'm not asking, is it balanced? I'm not asking, is it pretty? I'm not asking, does the game last too long? I'm asking, is this part fun? And that's what I'm focused on. And so I know when I'm testing that if I start getting feedback on these other parts, I'm not worried about that. I can set that aside because that's not what I'm looking for here. And the whole, I want to keep playing. I want to play again, test the Viagra test, as you put it. That's not going to come true until later on in the cycle, right? Your early prototypes are most likely not going to meet that. So you're looking for other things. So I do like you. So I have a questionnaire that I'll use. I have it. It's up for free. I think like a gameer.com slash media or we can link it.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And brings them in. So it can be a cool, unique component. It can be a cool giant visual. It can be, I had a game I launched years later called Bad Beats, B-E-T-S. It's a kind of play on the poker term of Bad Beats, but with actual beats, I had someone dress in a giant beat costume. I put one of my deep bevers into a giant beat costume. Yeah, it's gimmicky, but it worked, right? So if you have a great product, it doesn't matter if nobody ever looks at it. And also all the gimmicks in the world won't help you if you don't have a great product. So step one, have something great. Step two, have a reason for people to pay attention to you.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the principle you're driving at is critical, right? You need to get people's attention. You need to find a way at these booths, even at Gen Con, which is the tabletop, more public-facing tabletop convention where I actually did launch Ascension, and there's a lot more people and a lot more vying for traffic at shows like Gamma, anywhere, or even on a store shelf, right? Why is someone going to stop and pay attention to what you're doing? The great thing about where we are in our modern world is it's easier than ever to make stuff. You can print your own books. You can print your own games on demand. You can make anything you want. The downside is we're flooded with stuff. Not surprising. And so how do you separate from the crowd? How do you draw people's attention? So at Gamma, I mean, I already told you by accident, almost a shiny beads helps. Nobody had those shiny beads. That was a really attractive thing. But I also invested in a video drop. Like I had a TV screen and I made like a little cool rotating loop showing the things and people, most people there didn't do that. And so finding something that draws people's eye.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, no. That's one of the nice things. This kind of game industry is still a little smaller than a New York toy fair is the more big one. It happens and that's got thousands and thousands of booths and you're spending millions of dollars to have a presence there. It's like a much bigger space. This one was a little smaller.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now it's probably not huge. Now it's bigger, maybe two or three times that, but it's not like, you know, it's less than 100.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dude, there's nightmare stories around that for sure. That's a whole different beast. But again, and this is not like I had worked with manufacturers before. I had made games working for another company. So this part wasn't totally new to me. And I wouldn't have put all of that money into the thing. You know, I used to joke if this doesn't work. I'm going to have to build a house out of Ascension boxes. That's pretty much all I got. But I wasn't, again, just Demystify the risk, right? I had gotten so much positive feedback. I had stores and distributors already waiting to order the thing. So now it's like, okay, it's willing to put the money in and take a risk.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that show, the response was so overwhelming, like the people loved it, stores wanted to order it, distributors wanted to order it. So now all of a sudden it's like, okay, now I'm gonna literally, I'm all in, right? I either put my entire life savings now, all the extra that I'd saved up to print at the time was 10,000 units of the game, which is pretty crazy, probably a little. Sounds like a lot of units.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, exactly. They're super shiny and they come over and like, are these, you know, they play the game, they like the game, it's like, oh, this is awesome. These are going to be in the game, right? I was like, yes, yes, they are. This is like the POS example you gave earlier, right? I have no idea how to get these things. I have no idea how to make them. I don't know what's going, but they are definitely in the game.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Craft store. Yes, thank you. And they had these little beads, these little plastic fishbowl beads, you know, and all the oddly shaped. It's like, all right, whatever, let's try these. I'll just use these for the prototype. So grabbed a bunch of those, put them in, and we start demoing the game. And people get drawn to these beads. And like, oh my God, this is awesome.”
2023-08-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #687: Justin Gary — Taking the Path Less Traveled, The Phenomenon of “Magic: The Gathering,” How Analytical People Can Become “Creative” People, Finding the Third Right Answer, and How to Escape Your Need for Control · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT