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

“And I forgot to make anything that you track. How do you track how many points you get? How many honor you get? And I was like, oh, man, what do we do? And I went to a like a Michael store, you know, like a little...”
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 going to call him up. And I called him up and said, Hey, would you want to make art for my game? And I built the IP and the story around his style because I knew I could get this batch of art without having to pay for like a whole new artist and new things because he'd already made it so I could pay him less and he was a good friend and he hooked it up. And so now I start bringing art into the game and figuring out how you can use what's around and build the lore and build a style around what's available. Okay, now we've made some art. Now we've got some cool looking cards. So I'm investing a little bit more. And then I take it to a convention called Gamma, which is a game manufacturers association event. It's like an industry insider tabletop game thing. So the publishers and retailers and distributors are all there. Sorry, not a public show. And I get a little booth and I bring my little fake prototype there. And I realized actually, as I was going to the show that I didn't have in the game, you get what's called honor, which like victory points, basically.”
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
“Door room, I just had to transport it into an apartment, and then the guy comes back over 20 minutes later with like bag of weed. Pretty sure you want to smoke this, right? It's like, okay, cool. So we hang out. We become great friends. And he actually, as it turns out, is an incredible artist. His name is Eric Saby. And, you know, whatever, we became friends. I have one of his art pieces on my, well, not on my wall anymore, but in storage now. But it's actually my dad's place. I didn't put that one in storage. Anyway, so 10 years later, when I'm making a game, I'm like, oh, man, his art was really cool.”
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 through, you're getting like a wider and wider sphere of feedback that's helping you move forward. And if your game is targeted at a different target audience, right? So I make a game called Bakugan, which is a toy-based game for kids. Obviously, like how much fun I have playing it is not nearly as important as a five-year-old or an eight-year-old, right? So you have to test with your target market in that sense. So I don't say that, you know, target market and testing is not important. It is, but don't try to chase a trend, make something that you know is fun and that you enjoy and then get the feedback and iterate as you go. And so as you get that positive feedback, now I'm willing to invest more and more into the product. So now I actually am going to go and start putting some real art on it. And the story behind the art is, I guess it's at this stage I can tell. So back when I was living in Boston, I met the guy that lived down the hall and he comes and knocks on the door and says, hello. And I have like at this time, I just moved out of college. So I'm like black light posters on the wall, like, you know, kind of like it's still basically a college.”
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 three things, right? One, absolutely, it has to scratch my own itch, and I have to love it. I loved it. I wanted to see it exist. All of my most successful projects by far are the things that I make for me and that I really want. And then I know they're going to be great. So that's, I think, really important. Two, I do not chase trends. I hate chasing trends. In fact, every time I've tried to chase a trend, it's been unsuccessful. The idea of like, I'm trying to build something for some hypothetical, I think this is hot right now has never worked. However, there's a third point here, which is important, which is it can't be just about you. And so the rule I like to use is I will show the game to people and I'll prototype it and test it. And when people start asking me to play again without me prompting them, that's when I know I've got something. So it's not just me. That's why like Rob, who I respect a lot, he was like, no, no, no, this is great. Like play again. And I would show it to some other game designer friends and show it to some other people. And they're like, no, no, this is great. So as you're”
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
“Key show notes, but I mean, so what it is is, I mean, the more broader point is anytime you allow people to customize, you have to think what are they going to do with it and how does that share and how does that build your community? But TTP is the shorthand for that. So it is an unfortunate reality of our society that that is just going to happen.”
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
“Which is time to penis Any opportunity that you give people to create their own thing, at some point someone's gonna make a dick. That's gonna happen.”
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
“Was actually with Ascension, where I didn't make Ascension specifically to think, oh, I'm going to start a company with this game. I made it because I really wanted that game to exist. I played enough of Dominion and I was missing something. I really, really wanted. And then I showed it to a friend of mine, Rob Doherty, and he has his own, he actually was the guy that owned Your Move Games, the store where I used to play when I was younger. And I show him the game. And he's like, dude, you have the ball, like run with it. This is great. Make this a thing. And he had been, you know, an entrepreneur for a while. And so he helped me kind of like, okay, no, let's do this. And that started down the road. And so this is going to be my project now. And I started my early prototypes were ugly and I will find a way to share them with you. I mean, some of them are like horribly inappropriate. Like we had just really, just rude pictures, and I won't share those, but just ridiculous because it's just for fun.”
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 I got a team and the people, it's like okay, I feel like I got a business, but it's not an easy distinction. And when you're trying to create something where you don't necessarily know what it is, it's even harder. So what I would do is I would in between doing this work for hire. I would work on just projects that I thought would be fun. And so I would just make prototypes, try them out, try them out on friends.”
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
“Until you start really kind of getting income coming in and start making things happen, right? So there's definitely a window of uncertain”
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 I'm using my kind of spare cycles. And there's this really interesting thing, right? The difference between an entrepreneur who has no employees or anything and some dude just sitting on his couch can be very subtle.”
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
“Wait a second. I'm undercharging. I'm undercharging. So the next time, you know, I still try to over deliver, do a great job. Next time I get another opportunity, okay, what do you quote? I doubled my number. They still laughed at me. Okay, great. All right. Doubled it again. My strategy was I kept doubling what I asked for until I met resistance, until someone was like, I'm not sure. And I'm like, okay, that's what I need to be charging.”
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
“At this point. And so I'm like, yep, definitely. I can do that. Okay, well, give us a quote. I'm like, okay, quote. How do I quote? I've never quoted anything before. So I'm like, okay, I will, let me just think about, all right, how many hours do I think this is going to be? And then like, what's my minimum hourly rate that I think I should be paid? And I'm like, okay, that's what I'll charge, you know, make it easy. And I send them the quote and he literally laughs in my face. She's like, yeah, okay, sure, sure, man. No problem.”
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
“Obviously, card games were kind of my specialty. And so I knew that that was a space I wanted to be in, but I really wanted to create that open space to figure things out. And so as you mentioned, of course, the core design loop was part of it. I didn't have it as clearly defined as I do now, but this idea that I'm going to try things and prototype them and test them. And so I would, during the day, I would work on some designs, make up some prototypes, and then I would go find my friends who were still working at the company or elsewhere to like try it out, give me some feedback and come back. And, you know, I didn't have any ideas. I hadn't designed a game ahead of time. I didn't know what I was going to do ahead of time. But I had enough space that I could figure that out. And then it worked out that another person from another company contacted me to see if I could do some contract work for them. And so I started working on some kids toy-based games, which was great. And so here's another fun story. So they knew me because they used to work at Upper Deck where I used to work and then they started working at this other company. And he's like, hey, we need someone to help us design a game. Can you do that? And I'm just like, again, no job, no plan. Like I'm just figuring it out. It's like.”
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
“Hungry on the streets, or if live on a friend's couch for a little while, that's not that big a deal either. So I really went through all of those things. I go bankrupt, my house catches on fire. Hilariously like you did in the book, right? So that's where it highlights the same kind of lesson as before, which was when I quit law school, it sounds scary. Everybody thinks, oh my God, you're such a risk taker. Like, I'm not. I mitigate risk at every turn. Like, you know, when you're playing magic and you're trying to like set up so you can't get outdrawn on a game, I'm just mitigating the number of ways my opponent could beat me over time. And in this one, I could always go back to law school when I quit law school. I could always go back to a job when I started as entrepreneurship. And same thing later on when I became a digital nomad, sold all my stuff. I could always buy more stuff. I could always get a house again. And so I strongly encourage people to just go through that. Like if you really, really think about the worst case scenarios 99 times out of 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
“So I got very concrete, right? So, what is my actual minimal living expenses? What do I need to be okay and have what I need? And I figured out what that number was. And then I said, okay, how much time am I willing to give myself to run this experiment to see if I can figure it out and make entrepreneurship work? And I decided a year of savings was what I wanted. And so I focused on saving up. So I have that cushion, right? Because if you're in the red, if you're like, I don't know how to make my next paycheck, I don't know how to make rent next month. You can't be creative and be free, you know, do the things you're making decisions for the short term and I want to be able to make decisions for the long term. So step one was have enough of a cushion that I could feel comfortable. Now, other people can do this as a side project or, you know, after hours, whatever, but for me, I wanted space to just focus on this. And then the other piece was like, okay, well, what let's assume it doesn't happen. And after a year, I've got nothing and it's not working. I had done enough in my career at that point. I could just get another job. I could either be hired back at the same place or hired at another company. Like it's not like I was going to go.”
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
“That's it. That's the difference. And so then I finally clicked for me the other parts of your book, not just this efficiency and automation, but this idea of defining what you want and then creating the freedom for yourself to do it. And so that's where I suddenly started doing the fear setting exercise and going through, okay, what's the worst case scenario for me if I quit and I do my own thing and the dreamlining exercise, which is basically, you know, what is it that you really want? How do you define what you want? How do you make that very concrete? And so then that transformed is like, okay, I'm going to get this game out the door. I'm going to save up enough money so I have a year of savings and I quit. And that's exactly what I did. And it was a life-changing moment for me because it was exactly that taking ownership of my future. I'm so grateful for you as a key part of it. And I'm so grateful for those executives.”
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
“This idea that the difference between a leader and somebody else is not that they know something or that they have some special access. It's that you're just willing to make some assertions and own the consequences.”
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
“This is a company that makes hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Of course they know what's happening. And now all of a sudden that illusion is shattered. And I started out terrified. I'm terrified. I mean, we're literally this project, you know, it's going to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to hopefully make millions or it could lose millions. Who knows? And nobody knows what they're doing. And so I'm like, oh my God, like what do we do? And then I walk out of that room, my heart's beaten, and I'm just like, what's going to happen? How do we do this? And then all of a sudden, like a cold splash of water in my face. Nobody knows what they're doing. I cannot know what I'm doing at least as well as anybody else.”
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 then they start like pontificating and they start talking, oh, well, there may be this problem with this thing or this thing. And it took me a minute to realize this. But as they were talking, I realized that they had no idea what they were talking about. I had finally done enough research that I knew they didn't know what they were doing. And I just said up to that point in my life, I feel like I had just assumed that the adults in the room knew what they were doing.”
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 I get up there. The owner is like sitting in his leather chair and staring me down. And I'm like, okay, I give my presentation and I'm stammering through it, but I've done my research. I've done my homework. And I go through the presentation and heartbeat and finally I stop. And there's this like pause at the end. I'm looking around like, what do they think, right? It's like COO, CFO, all the big wigs, right? And they start talking about the idea and they start josh around and I start to think, oh my God, I think they like it. I think this is really going to happen.”
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 details are super stuck in my mind. And I'm like, you know, go down this long corridor and my palms are sweating. You know, you open these huge oak doors. And this is, you know, it's a huge sports member company. So there's like a babe sign bad on the wall and a Michael Jordan jersey and like a Tiger Woods golf club and the rich mahogany conference table. I mean, this is boardroom cliche, right? But it's like very intimidating for me at this time.”
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
“That's exactly right. Financially, how do you make it work, right? Because Blizzard, who makes World of Warcraft, had very exacting standards about their miniatures. They have to have spiky cauldrons this high and these amounts of colors and nobody had ever done anything quite like that before. And it needs to be financially viable to make this product for the company I was working for. So there's a partnership. And so I have to go figure out all these logistics, set all this stuff up. Finally, and this is where I had first read the four-hour work week. So this is actually super impactful for me in being very efficient using 80-20 principles. And I've learned to set up auto email replies so people didn't bother me. So I'm already getting my efficiencies in it, but I'm in this zone of just I'm going to finish this mission. And then I have the opportunity to speak to the executive team. I'm going to make my presentation. I'm going to make my case. Is this project going to live or is this project going to die? And I'm just some kid who wants to make a game and I've got to convince. So I'm there and I will never forget.”
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 know, I talked to Jeremy Cranford, who's an incredible art director, and I talked to the guy that made the Dungeons and Dragons minister lines. I just work months and months and months try to figure out how to make this work, fly to China, fly to the factory, figure out how the plastics and paints and all this crazy stuff.”
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 we had the company that I worked for was called Upper Deck. They had made trading cards forever, most known for baseball cards, and they made Yu-Gi-Oh! and this Marvel game I'd been working on, but they didn't know how to make miniatures games. And so they eventually, if we're going to kill the project, the executives come and they tell us, after 18 months of working on it, and I, this is pretty common in games, but I had never had a project I had worked on get killed like that. And I was like devastated, right? When my dream project, I'm going to change the world with this game. It's going to be incredible. Now all of a sudden ashes. And so I didn't want to let it happen. And so I said, listen, I don't know what I'm doing here either. But if you're going to kill the project, give me six months. Let me see if I could figure it out. You got nothing to lose. And I was able to convince them to let me become a project manager and try to figure out how to make games, how to make a miniatures game specifically. And so same kind of process like I did when I first started to design. I was like, all right, let me talk to people who know what they're doing. I've already got a very clear deadline.”
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
“Is a fun story, and this is you actually come into this story, Tim. So I'll share it. So, I moved from working on pure card games to I had an opportunity to lead a project that was the World of Warcraft miniatures game. And this is a very exciting project for me. I get to build something that's super cool with an IP everybody knows. I had worked on it for about 18 months.”
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 have a card that I've messed up. I'm just going to cross out something on it with a marker and write something else. And then, okay, now it's this. Go. And I'm making a little note, right? The resistance to change is so much lower. So it's actually net negative for you to invest in making something pretty early on in the process.”
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
“In fact, it's better. In fact, I'll go even further, right? Because not only is it faster, you don't get hung up on making it really pretty, it's faster prototype. It's actually better to change. It's easy because you need to iterate, right? So if you've put a lot of time into making a beautiful board and beautiful cards and then you realize you've got to change a card, you're going to feel weird about 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
“One of the reasons why I started my podcast is to sort of unlock a lot of that stuff for other designers, right? Talk about their origin stories, talk about where their, you know, the things that inevitably fail. You can also go, there are a variety of places where people will have prototype testing. So let's say you have a favorite game company or game designers. We do this at Stoneblade at my company. You can join our Discord and then we will periodically put playtest requests out because we want to get feedback, right? We want to get feedback from people. And they could see how terrible those games are. Now, we've already gone through a few iteration loops before we put it out into the public. So to see the most raw forms, I think there's not enough of it out there. I think it's something I really want to encourage more of because it's really helpful. Like I've been doing this for 20 years and my first prototypes are hideous. So if you want, I can share some. I'll put some up on the think like gameshare.com slash or in the show notes. Yeah, whatever because I want to demystify that process. It is okay.”
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
“To think about imagine you're building a house, right? And before you've even laid the foundation, you're worrying about the paint color on the walls and where the furniture goes. You're not going to get very far. You're wasting a lot of time. Make sure you got a solid foundation first. Worry about the paint color later. And so I think a lot of designers start by worrying about the paint color being wrong and they're never going to finish a house that way.”
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
“Exactly right. So if you can prototype using something like a deck of cards around the house or take a monopoly set, I know I keep using Monopoly as an example, but whatever, most people know it. So, you know, Jay, oh hey, what would this look like if instead of going around go, you actually had like dinosaurs that would like try to eat each other as you're moving around the board? What would that be like? Okay, that sounds kind of fun. Let's see what happens. So it's literally that simple. So for my prototyping tools, my first round of prototyping is just I have a bunch of stuff. I have a bunch of dice and, you know, my D&D dice with all the random signs. I've got a dex of cards. I've got random pen and paper. I will draw things. In fact, yeah, like when you and I work together a little bit, I showed you some things. I showed you what my early sketch prototypes look like. And they are ugly. I talk about like the phases of design. And so every time you go through the core design loop, your questions go from bigger to smaller and smaller. And as you go through it, you're going to care about polish more. So if you're just trying to figure out like where is the fun, what is the idea? What's the theme? What am I doing here?”
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 was like, you know, there's some really some things I would like to see differently. I want to see the cards are too static. There's too many rules and resources. I wish I could change it. And so my first prototype of Ascension was literally just instead of having Dominion cards, which are all kind of laid out at the beginning of the game takes like 20 minutes to set up, I just shuffle them all together and dealt them out and said, what would a game look like if it was randomized? And I played that way. And the game was not good, but it gave me enough of a proof of concept that like, oh, you know what? There's something fun here. And if I spend the time to do this, I can now move forward.”
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, and you've already hit on the core of this, but I'll just leave it, keep it simple, stupid, the KISS principle. It is the tendency to overdevelop and make your prototype super nice or not feel like you can show it to somebody or test it without it being super nice is the graveyard of the most games probably of anything on the planet. And the most ideas, frankly, in general. So let's make this very concrete. Probably one of the games I'm most well known for is a deck building game called Ascension. first prototyped that game. There was another deck building game and a deck building game for those that don't know is it's unlike magic, which is a trading card game where you're buying packs of cards and trying to build a deck. In a deck building game, you have a fixed box of cards. You buy it like a box like you would monopoly, but like during the game, you're acquiring cards for your deck. So it's like you get to play the game of building a deck, deck building. So there was another deck building game called Dominion, which was released. It was the first of its category. And I fell in love with that game. I started playing it a bunch. But then as I played it, like a”
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 not going to grow anymore. Yeah, so I like workflow because it's got that infinite kind of growth, and I can like shrink or grow nodes or like, okay, I want to dive deeper into this idea and link ideas together. It's been my favorite.”
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
“Space and see ideas form that I think is great, but a small sheet of paper for me, like my brain, when it sees a page start to get full, my brain just subconsciously thinks, okay, well, you don't need any more ideas. Your page is full. You're good.”
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 am a huge fan of, in particular an app called Workflowy, and it's a totally free app, and it's basically a series of nested lists. And the nice thing about it is it's infinite. So I can continue to make lists in sub lists and sublist and sublists. And I can link pieces to pieces. And so I found over the years, now I've been using that for seven or eight years, that is like my personal favorite tool. The important advice for people is not to copy the tool, but whatever works for you, whatever's the easiest flow, like the least resistance, right? So a lot of people like Notion is a similar type of tool, but it's like bulkier and a little bit slower in my experience. And that speed is everything. I don't want anything that's going to slow me down. So that's where pen and paper is great, but I don't like, unless I have a giant sheet of paper, which I do enjoy, if it's a big, big, like poster board and like you have markers and bigger things, especially if I'm working with a team. So either a giant whiteboard or a large poster board on the table, because you can all share the same.”
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 then the last step, which is also 20 minutes, is elimination. And that's where you went from starting with as many ideas as you can. And now you want to get to as few ideas as possible so that you can start moving to testing them. And so that's where you go and you'll try to like, okay, what's the minimum amount that I can prototype? Which is the next step, to test my idea, right? To test my assumption, to test the core of what I'm doing. And so prototyping is exactly what it sounds like. Talk about an MVP or this minimum viable product. What's the smallest thing I can do to test my idea? What's the easiest way I can do this? And then step five is testing where you actually show it to somebody. You get some feedback. You actually figure out what's going on there. And then step six is iterating where you take what you've learned and then you cycle back through the process. And what I've learned is that the skill of creativity specifically with game design, but really with anything, is how well you can kind of flow through that process and get the most out of each loop and go through as many loops as possible.”
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
“Something specific, you start to kind of think through okay, if I'm trying to make a game, what's the victory condition? How do people figure out what are their moves? How do they interact? You start trying to kind of put some structure around it. Or if it's a book, okay, what's the opening of the book? How is it going to help people? Who's my audience? Whatever it is, right? As you start making these connections, you're naturally going to see gaps and you're going to fill those gaps in.”
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, you know, constraints with your components, constraints with time, what's the space I'm playing in? Step three is brainstorming. And brainstorming is where you ideate and come up with your ideas. And I'm very particular about how I recommend people brainstorm. And this comes from research from the Wharton School of Business and work I've done with them. But the basics are three phases. And to get really granular, because I know that your audience likes that, I break it into three steps, 20 minutes each. First is where your open exploring. You write as many things as you can, as many ideas as you can, and don't stop. There's always this like critic part of our brain that's like, no, that's stupid, no, that won't work. Turn that off. Just write down as many things as you can if your pen stops moving for more than 10 seconds. You're doing it wrong, as many ideas you can on the platework. Then the second stage, also recommend 20 minutes is organizing, where you take this massive, ridiculous, some cool ideas, some ridiculous ideas, and you start to try to find patterns between them. And if you're trying 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
“Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You love miniatures. You know you want to make a miniatures game, right? It could be a component, could be a theme, could be a mechanic, could be, you want to make a game about dog walking, whatever it is, right? You're excited. What is it the heart of what you're doing? And in general, that heart is going to be an experience you want to create for your audience. But you start at something whatever high level thing, it gets you excited. Then framing is a lot what we talked about, right? We want to put a box around it. We want to put constraints around it. And so that constraint should always include a deadline, ideally a short deadline to whatever your next step is. So I'm going to have a prototype to test in two weeks. It could be one of the most common mistakes I see game designers make. They come to me, okay, I want to make a game. It's like Halo and World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto, but like all rolled into one with like a bunch of cool stuff happening, right? And these are massive games that take millions and millions of dollars and teams of people. It's like, well, you've never made a game before. Maybe let's start with like a simple card game, right?”
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 a perfect segue because exactly what we're talking about with assumptions is going to come into play in the core design. So the core design loop is how games are made. It's how creative projects are done. But we're going to focus on games. That's the kind of main topic I teach it in. So the core design loop is six steps. It's inspiring, framing, brainstorming, prototyping, testing, and iterating. So step one is inspiring. What is it that's driving you? What's the core of what you're excited about? So it could be you want to make a game for this IP, this world that you love. Could be you want to make a cockpunch game? Could be you want to make a game about fantasy warriors, right? Hypothetically speaking.”
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 made this game called Soul Forge with Richard Garfield, the guy that created Magic, and we did this over a decade ago. And we made it as a digital trading card game. And so purely you play it on your phone, no physical objects at all. The game was successful. We ran it for a few years, and eventually we took it down. And we were talking about we wanted to bring it back because we loved the game. We wanted to bring it back. And one of the exercises we did is, okay, SoulForge is a digital game. And then we're like, wait, what if it's not? Like, what would that look like? And we had built it to be a digital game, but then all of a sudden we're like, well, now it's seven years later digital printing technology is way better than it was. You can actually algorithmically create one of a kind card cards and bring things. And that started us down this road of investigating this new technology. And so the new version of Soulforge called Soulforge Fusion is now a physical card game that has this new technology built into it, which never would have happened if we had just gone with our assumptions of, oh, okay, we're going to remake the same game again. So it's like one example that was recently impacted.”
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
“That all of a sudden changes everything. And that ability to just take what you assume to be true, one, making it explicit in the first place is super powerful, just so you know really what you're doing. And then two, is this inversion process is incredibly 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
“Before we jump into the core design loop, I'm going to give one more thing. It's not from a whack on the side of the head, but it's something I've actually developed more recently as a process that I find super valuable. One of the things that we try to do in our company is always surface our assumptions. There's a lot of things where you're assuming a game is going to be fun because of this. We assume people are looking for that. We assume we're making this category of game, et cetera. And a really great exercise to do that's in this spirit is once a quarter, we'll do an assumptions challenging exercise. And what that means is you surface every assumption you can. You can do this by yourself, or if you're on a team, everybody writes down on their own all their assumptions. You put them all up on a shared board or a shared Google Doc if you're doing remote like we are. And then you one by one, okay, what if that weren't true? Or to use your terminology, what if I did the opposite? And it's so powerful because sometimes it doesn't mean anything. Sometimes it's like, okay, that doesn't make any sense. You move on. But without fail, by the time we finish that exercise, we find some core assumption.”
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
“To a random word, right? Some substantive word. Now figure out how that word relates to whatever your problem is and journal on that for like five minutes, ten minutes. And you'll be amazed at how all of a sudden it can crack open something because we get so linearly focused on the problem in front of us and even a completely random constraint can open up the door for you. We'll give one more to just move past the quote unquote right answer that you may have an answer and say, okay, that's fine. And you stop. Most people stop. Instead, say, okay, I'm going to look for the third right answer, the fourth right answer, the fifth right. I'm going to look beyond that to go deeper and find more things. So there's these little exercises, and you could just do those exercises would suddenly see like, oh, wow, okay, I'm already seeing myself be more creative, already seeing myself do more than I was. The book was impactful because it could just like, by the time I was done reading it, I had already seen myself do creative things I didn't think I could do in ways that sound pretty stupid. I'm sure to me saying it, like pick a random page in a book, be more creative, trust me, try it. You know, it works.”
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's nice in that it helps, in a sense, demystify creativity and just bring it down to like a very simple granular level. I'll give some examples. So, you know, one of the principles in it is that I've used all the time is basically, and I forget how they word it in the book, but basically like turn the object around in your mind, right? If you take something that you normally think of one way, how many different ways can you look at that same thing? So if you have a pen, you can say, all right, well, what do you do with a pen? Well, you can write with it. Okay, well, no, all right, I could use it to help force me to smile by biting it. I could use it to prop up my microphone. I could use it, right? You could trying exercises that give you different frames were very powerful and ways to like break you out of your thinking. The idea of using random constraints. So one of the exercises that I encourage anybody to do, if they want to, is like if you're having a problem, some creative challenge, some block, go to a random book on your shelf, open it to a random page, and pull 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
“It's just So that was, I think, a real powerful tool about why. So one, really short deadlines, and my job was on the line, so I had stakes, right? And I didn't want to go back to law school. And two, that I had other people that I could ask and talk to who were smarter than I was, who had done it before, and I could get some insight into. So being able to kind of find either books or mentors or other people that you can talk to has also helped accelerate it. That eventually turned into this kind of step-by-step process. So if you'd like, I can go into that now or can jump to other stuff.”
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 are good at that. Just to immerse the experience of it, right? I was lucky in a sense in that, you know, I went to go work at a company where I had a lot of friends that were already there. And I had immediate deadlines. This game is going to release. You have to turn over the file with the cards and the things like within two months. And so there was no choice but to act. What I say is a deadline.”
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 how do you create not just games, but I think every creative field it applies to. And so learning that, and I was very lucky, I'll talk about the details of it, but I won't leave you hanging on that piece.”
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
“A really fun question because people just make this assumption that because I was good at playing games, then that means I would be good at making games. And they are 100% different skills. I did not think of myself as a creative person. I thought there was just some kind of like magic special secret sauce that other people had. And I was just going to fake it and go out there and see what happened. So when I go there, I'm having serious imposter syndrome. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know how to make this come to life. I researched a ton. I read some great books on creativity, a whack on the side of the head is one I'd recommend. And I started to talk to other people who I did respect as designers and kind of break it down. And over time, I realized that there is no thing that differentiates like a creative person from a not creative person other than process. And so as an analytically minded person, I was able to break it down into what I call the core design loop, which is a six-step process.”
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