Self - Discipline: Hard Work
The big secret in life is that there is no big
secret. Whatever your goal, you can get there
if you’re willing to work.
– Oprah Winfrey
Hard work — yet another dirty word.
Hard Work Defined
My definition of hard work is that which
challenges you.
And why is challenge important? Why not
just do what’s easiest?
Most people will do what’s easiest and avoid
hard work — and that’s precisely why you
should do the opposite. The superficial
opportunities of life will be attacked by
hordes of people seeking what’s easy. The
much tougher challenges will usually see a
lot less competition and a lot more
opportunity.
There’s an African gold mine two miles deep.
It cost tens of millions of dollars to
construct, but it’s one of the most lucrative
gold mines ever. These miners tackled a very
challenging problem with a lot of hard work,
but ultimately it’s paying off.
I remember when I was developing the PC
game Dweep in 1999, I spent four months
full-time working to create a design doc that
was only five pages long. It was a logic
puzzle game, and I found it extremely
challenging to get the design just right. After
the design was done, everything else took
only two more months — programming,
artwork, music, sound effects, writing the
installer, and launching the game.
I spent all this time intentionally working on
design because at the time, I believed this
was where I could get the competitive edge I
needed. I knew I couldn’t compete on the
basis of the game’s technical attributes.
Before I started on the game, I surveyed the
competition and found a lot of games that I
considered “low hanging fruit.” Most of the
market was flooded with clones of older
games, the kind of stuff that’s easiest to
make. And most of my early games were
short on design as well, mostly aim-and-
shoot arcade games.
It was much, much harder to design an
original game with unique gameplay. But it
paid off handsomely. Dweep won the
Shareware Industry Award in 2000, and an
improved version of the game (Dweep Gold)
won that same award the following year. As
a result of the success of that game, I was
interviewed by a reporter for the New York
Times, and my interview along with a nice
photo appeared in the June 13, 2001 edition
(business section). First released on June 1,
1999, Dweep is now beginning its 7th year of
sales. It can’t compete with today’s
technology. It couldn’t compete on
technology when it was first released. But it
still competes well on design with the best of
the other competitors in its field. I discovered
there are a lot of players who prefer a well-
designed game with dated graphics than a
shallow light show with the latest
technology. The long-term success of this
game brought home the lesson that hard
work does pay.
There’s no way Dweep would have been able
to hold out this long if I had taken the easy
way out during the design phase. I dug for
gold two miles deep, so it was much harder
for anyone else to unseat the game from its
position in the market. In order to do that,
they’d have to outdig me, and very few
people are willing to do that because creative
game design is excruciatingly difficult.
Everyone says they have a cool game idea,
but to actually turn it into something
workable, fun, and innovative is very hard
work. When I look at other games that are
successful over a period of 5+ years, I
consistently see a willingness to take on hard
work that others aren’t willing to tackle. And
yet today the market is even more
overcrowded with cloned drivel than when I
started.
Strong challenge is commonly connected with
strong results. Sure you can get lucky every
once in a while and find an easy path to
success. But will you be able to maintain
that success, or is it just a fluke? Will you be
able to repeat it? Once other people learn
how you did it, will you find yourself
overloaded with competition?
When you discipline yourself to do what is
hard, you gain access to a realm of results
that are denied everyone else.
