Jon Samsel

It’s been said that the key to sales success is learning how to budget your time. But the term “time-management” seems to create a false impression of what a person is able to do. Time-management is actually self-management. Time can’t be managed. Time is uncontrollable; we can only manage ourselves, and our use of time.

It’s interesting that the skills we need to manage others are the same skills that we need to manage ourselves: the ability to plan, delegate, organize, direct and control. Part of this includes being able to recognize what wastes your time.

Here is a list of common time-wasters:

1. Shifting priorities and crisis management
2. Lack of priorities/objectives
3. Procrastination
4. Too much clutter
5. Attempting too much

Ideas for Effective Self Management

1. Define your objectives as clearly as possible. Do you find you are not doing what you want because your goals have not been set? One attribute of successful people is their ability to work out what they want to achieve using written goals, which they review constantly. Your long term goals should impact your daily activities and be included on your “to do” list. Without a goal or objective people tend to just drift personally and professionally
2. Analyze your use of time. Are you spending enough time on the important things? If you are constantly asking yourself “What is the most important use of my time, right now?” it will help you to focus on ‘important tasks’ and stop reacting to tasks which seem urgent (or pleasant to do) but carry no importance towards your goals.
3. Have a plan. How can you achieve your goals without a plan? Most people know what they want but have no plan to achieve it except through hard work. Your monthly plan should be reviewed daily and reset as your achievements are met. Successful people make lists constantly. It enables them to stay on top of priorities and enable them to remain flexible to changing priorities. This should be done for both personal and business goals. The value of a good plan is to identify trouble spots early and seek out solutions. “I don’t let a single day go by without knowing why I didn’t capture a sale. Be sure to measure the progress you make toward your goals because what you can measure you can control.

Self-management is not a hard subject to understand, but unless you are committed to integrating time-management techniques into your daily routine you’ll only achieve partial results. The lesson to learn is that the more time we spend planning our time and activities the more time we will have for those activities.

Whether or not you are aware of it, our world is structured into a series of shapes and patterns and sounds that trigger pleasure in us. This systematic organization is part of our intuitive nature—it allows us to structure sensory information into consciousness, thought, and language. It’s the way we humans are designed.

In the interactive world, design structure is more than just notes scribbled on a napkin or a complex flowchart depicting sequential scenes of an application in rich detail. Interactive design structure fulfills two important duties: it defines the navigational boundaries of the user experience and it is the framework that holds all the creative elements of an interactive work together.

You are now ready to make some pretty important decisions that will have a serious impact on the ability of the user to navigate your interactive application. As an interactive writer, it is your job to identify the user’s perceived range of action—keeping in mind that “what the user can do” directly corresponds with the “rules and pathways you create.”

For example, an interactive environment such as Myst [the groundbreaking first-person point of view adventure game created by Robyn and Rand Miller], which has a wide range and depth of choice, may be perceived as more interactive than a conditional branching system with limited choices. This is true, in part, because of the navigation methodology built into the system—a methodology that emphasizes the program’s “critical objective” over a “critical path” mentality. A critical objective is a centralized aim, goal, or action whereby the end user’s overall path of discovery stresses a “means to an end,” rather than fulfilling an immediate task. Key elements within such an application are revealed over time as the user navigates through the application. A critical path is a single correct path a user must follow to successfully complete an application. This is a procedural approach to completing a task.

The distinction between a critical objective and a critical path is significant. Many players confess that what they like best about playing Myst is “exploring the environment.” Finishing the game is much less important.

In her essay “The Garden of Merging Paths,” Rebecca Solnit writes, “Much recent attention to interactive media proposes that it makes the passive viewer become actively engaged. What is interesting about these products is that they map out a number of choices, but the choices are all pre-selected…that is, the user cannot do anything or go anywhere that the creator has not planned; as usual with computer programs, one must stay on the path and off the grass (by which analogy hackers do get off the path, a subversive success that keeps them in the park). We could chart the game as a series of forks in the road, in which each choice sets up another array of choices, but the sum total of choices has already been made. Thus the audience becomes the user, a figure who resembles a rat in a conceptual version of a laboratory maze. The audience-user is not literally passive; he is engaged in making choices, but the choices do not necessarily represent freedom, nor does his activity represent thinking.”

Douglas Gayeton, who has worked on high-profile projects such as Plug In (AOL), Waking Hours (Boxtop/IXL), Johnny Mnemonic (Sony ImageSoft), and Vanishing Point (MSN/Sunshine Digital), claims, “The geography of an interactive space is an illusion…it’s a directed experience. You only need to art direct (or write) what the viewer will see. If a location is too richly composed and features too many objects, the viewer will expect to be able to interact with everything. When she finds that she can’t, she will realize she’s hit a ‘wall’ in the interactive world.”

In his book The Complete Wargames Handbook, author James F. Dunnigan cautions, “Keep in mind that a computer does what you tell it to do, not what you want it to do. Unlike people (some people, anyway), you can’t just tell a computer what you want done and expect your request to be carried out. Computers require explicit instructions. These are called computer programs, or computer software. The terms ‘program’ and ‘software’ are often used interchangeably.”

The opening pages of a novel are vitally important. They must grab the reader’s attention quickly and hold it. Many browsers in bookstores turn to the first page or introduction of the book. If they like what they read they may decide to buy it then and there. If they’re bored by what they read, or the material has little interest or promise of being a good read, they will replace the book on the shelf and reach for another one.

Here are some useful questions to ask yourself when planning the introduction for your novel:

• What is the first thing I can open with in my book that will hook the reader’s attention?
• Is there some dramatic or surprise beginning I could use?
• Would a key question get attention?
• How can I make my introduction for this book different and especially appealing?

Study and read carefully the introductions used by other writers for their books. Here are a few classics worth noting:

• It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. - Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963)
• Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. - Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)
• You better not never tell nobody but God. - Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982)
• Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. - William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)
• All this happened, more or less. - Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
• In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. - F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
• They shoot the white girl first. - Toni Morrison, Paradise (1998)
• The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. - Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1922)
• He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. - Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
• Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person. - Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups (2001)
• When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon. - James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss (1978)

If you have a daily job, it’s clear that the only time you will have for your writing is either early in the morning or in the evening. You may be too exhausted in the evening, so that leaves the morning as probably your best time.

You need some time for recreation and plain relaxation. Many authors find their best time for work by experimenting with different schedules. You can do the same.

You could, for example, get in two hours of writing in the early morning hours before going to your job. Many authors have turned out fine books using such a schedule. A plus about morning work is that your mind is fresh.

Another option is working from eight or nine at night to midnight. A worthy and realistic goal is about three hours a day at least for your writing. If there is no way you can devote three hours a day to it, then you will have to settle for an hour or so in the morning and evening. You should try both. You could of course do an hour in the morning and one or two at night.

It is vitally important that you work in the same place and at the same time each day. At least most authors believe this is important. Your mind will learn that you mean to work at that time and in that place. Training your mind in good work techniques is very helpful.

The mind becomes used to a routine and cooperates better than it would if you wrote at a different time and place each day. Some lucky authors can write no matter where they are or what time of day or night it is. John O’Hara, who was very successful, wrote all night.

Some authors work hard Monday through Friday and then totally relax during the weekend. Others work the same hours at their writing desk seven days a week.

Some authors don’t go on clock time; they set a certain number of pages to do per day as a goal. Some days they may get their pages early, but on others it may take them more than three hours. Three or four pages a day is a realistic goal for many authors. Others go for more. George Sand’s thirty pages a night was incredible, but one wonders how many pages of that output had to be thrown out.

A long break from your writing routine may cause difficulty in getting started again. There are natural rhythms in writing. This is one reason why many authors like to work every day when doing a book. A week or two away from writing, or even a weekend, may interrupt your normal rhythm or cycle.

The right place to write will also come by experimenting. Some authors rent hotel rooms without windows so there are no distractions. They even remove the telephones. You can try your kitchen table, a desk in a study, a formal office, the seashore, a cabin in the mountains, or wherever. Go with wherever the words seem to flow best. Again, remember that Mario Puzo wrote The Godfather on his kitchen table. Other authors have written on coffee tables while sitting on the carpet, on airplanes, boats, trains, and other places. Try some of them and go with the place you like best.

It may sound obvious, but try to keep one fact about writing books in mind at all times: Chapters make your book. This basic truth can help you finish any number of projects.

Chapters are the framework of your book. You can sustain your enthusiasm by realizing that you draw ever nearer to its completion with every new chapter you finish.

Don’t underestimate this truth. Many people who consider writing a book never do it. An important reason why they never do is that the thought of all the work involved scares them. It can be frightening to think of the work required for a book, regardless of the length.
So don’t let your book project leer at you with its length, scope, or amount of work needed to become a reality. Seeing all that work—in one massive dose—can depress even the most prolific of authors.

Your salvation lies in chapters. By breaking the total project down, you’re not overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of it. You may not see how your book will end, or even see its middle part. Don’t worry about it. Just concentrate on doing one chapter at a time.

Give your attention to the chapter at hand. When you’re satisfied with it, move on to the next. Chapters have a marvelous way of adding up, just as pages do.

Focus on the bits and pieces of your project—the words, sentences, paragraphs, pages, and chapters. These will all work together to produce the beginning, middle, and end of your book.

Look at it this way. If you wrote just one page a day for the next year, you would have a book of 365 pages. Or you could do the same by writing two pages a day for six months. The work schedule you set and stick to is up to you.

Some authors develop various ways to keep making progress on their books. One, for example, plans his next chapter whenever he finds himself bogged down with a current one. This way, he doesn’t lose valuable time.

A lot of writers work hard on the advance planning of chapters. Such work pays off when they are ready to begin the actual writing of the book. After you complete chapter one, you already have a script for chapter two and know where you’re heading with the material. That’s the result of advance planning. It keeps your progress moving forward smoothly and continually.

Advance planning of chapters can be another source of enthusiasm. You’re eager to get into the next chapter because the plan for it is ready and waiting. The total effort results in increased confidence as your book comes to life.

While some novels don’t have any chapter headings, most nonfiction books make use of them.

Chapter headings can increase the sales of your book. Watch how many browsers and customers in bookstores skim through books, glancing at the chapter headings. Many will decide to buy a particular book if the chapter headings offer promise of good reading.

What is more important is the fact that well-written chapter headings stimulate your writing all through your book. Some will interest you more than others, but all of them act as signals. They tell what each chapter is about and what the reader is likely to find there.

Next time you are at a bookstore, thumb through some books to see for yourself which chapter headings stand out. You can then go home and think about a few possible chapter headings you might use for your new book. Don’t be afraid of stimulating your creative neurons– you may be pleasantly surprised by the results!

Michael Joyce is a prize-winning novelist and a professor of English at Vassar College. Joyce’s works include the hypertext fiction novel Twilight, A Symphony, and the much celebrated afternoon, a story. Joyce has been active in the interactive and collaborative arts communities for many years. I had the pleasure of interviewing Michael via phone some years ago. Here is an except of that conversation.

Q: How do you define hypertext fiction?

Joyce: From the beginning, I referred to hypertext fictions as multiple fictions. Not because I wanted to steer attention away from the technology or the modality of the telling, but because my own experience reading and teaching these fictions is that they are, in some sense, almost lifelike structures. I say this because a good deal of my recent writing life has been devoted to steering people away from the notion that these things are branching fictions and to try to elucidate what, in fact, they are if they are not branches. For me, the term “multiple fiction” gathers much more the sense of what these things have (which my students tend to call an “oddly lifelike quality”).

Carolyn Guyer, the hypertext writer, says “the thing about hyperfictions is that, for art, they tend to be extremely lifelike.”

Hypertext fiction tends to be closer to our normal experiences—the narratives that make up our lives. Closure is a matter of rhythms and of transient episodes…where we find the story of our lives and the story of the things that are important to us in successions and recurrences. The term “multiple fictions” or “multiple stories” seems to capture that for me. [Laughs] Of course, after using it for a decade and not seeing it catch on, I leap at any opportunity to mention it.

Q: What are the common misconceptions about hypertext fiction?

Joyce: Sometimes when I give a reading someone will say, “Isn’t this every writer’s dream? You can throw in all your back story—you don’t have to cut anything. It’s so undisciplined.” Usually, those comments are from people who haven’t read really good hypertext fiction. Many writers fail to realize that there is a great deal of composition in this format.

Another misconception is thinking of hypertext as branching. Hypertext is not about a story and its variations, but, rather, the inner possibilities of the story. A better term is multiplicity. We don’t go about our lives like branches.

We choose our lives instead by inclination, by urges, by happenstance, or seductions. A third misconception is to think that links are notes or annotations. As soon as the reader clicks a hyperlink, one must ask, How much more does the reader understand about the way this story is unfolding? It shouldn’t be simply that you are getting another episode; it should be that you are coming to understand the way the characters think or see their lives. Too often, you see a poorly crafted narrative Web site where you see the word “sex” and you know that if you follow that link, you will go to a sex scene. If you click on “soccer,” you will get a sporting contest. Language and storytelling rarely work that way. The things that are sexy to us sometimes are soccer matches—sex can sometimes seem like a contest. You want to evoke for your reader a sense of discovering story. The link doesn’t just get you to another part of the story, the link is part of the story.

Q: How does Twilight, A Symphony differ from afternoon, a story?

Joyce: I am willing to claim that some things I did in creating afternoon, a story were original. In fact, I’ve been deemed the originator of some art form, or at least, a first something. But when you are a first, you come to a certain humility. You become aware that what you set in motion is not under your control.

If somebody deems your creation a literary art form, they will create works which test your understanding of what it was you thought you were doing. In Twilight, there were a lot of obvious changes. Unlike afternoon, I included graphics, sounds, and QuickTime movies in Twilight. I tried to be very careful not to just seed things throughout the work because it was possible. I tried to define the relationships between the sounds, images, and the text. There were also hypertextual changes. In afternoon, there aren’t any long screens. Part of that was due to the fact that Storyspace, the hypertext system Jay Bolter and I created, was designed for the Macintosh classic and its little ice block–size screen. We only had so much textual space to work with. Partly though, it was due to the fact that we wanted to move the story along in bite-sized, pulsing rhythms. When I came to write Twilight, I bridled under my own discipline and went back to very long scrolling windows in some cases. I love the sense of the text sort of taking you beyond the point were you can hold onto it.

Another change is the overview or libretto. For over a decade now, I’ve been interested in whether there is such a thing as true interactivity. Because true interactivity, to me, means that the story would change as a result of my reading it. I don’t know of any stories or systems as yet that are truly interactive according to my definition. It strikes me that a fundamental aspect to creating true interactivity is that the reader in some sense, has to share a conceptual map with you. To share an idea of what the scope of the work is so that she can, at various turns, test her sense of how this landscape is evolving against what she perceives to be your sense of it.

In Twilight, it starts with a screen I like to think of as a libretto, something that says, Here’s what was going on before you got here. However, it is written quite consciously in the prose of something like the Texaco Saturday Opera. At a time when Texaco used to sponsor radio operas, they would have these librettos where there was this odd third person telling of the story to come. It sets in motion a set of expectations and rhythms and thematics that are not met by the opera.

Where afternoon gave you few cues of its wholeness (and the user had to discover the big picture through its linking), in Twilight, there is an overview of sorts. An overview, which is, in itself, part of the work. It’s not really front matter. It’s not direction. It turns out to be an active part of the story too. The question I pose in Twilight is, who is this voice here?

Q: Tell me about your most recent project, Twelve Blue.

Joyce: Twelve Blue is the first project I’ve written directly for the Web. It was co-published online by Eastgate Systems and Postmodern Culture.

In Twelve Blue, as in all of my interactive fictions, voices come and go. It’s a pronominal sense of English—the fact that language allows you to have one character merge into another. Not in a morphing way, but in a way that, viewing the same screen or similar screens in different sequences, it can seem to be one or another of the characters.

For example, one scene in Twelve Blue finds two drowning men. One is a very bad man and one is a good and very innocent man. At different times, they share the same language on the same screens. The technique allows my themes and variations to become almost musical. When readers come upon these voices, they see the text differently.

Twelve Blue (excerpt) “a white witness”

He settled like the tide, then sank eventually, floating aimlessly and softly, not at all like a log but languishing and plump, a white witness to the darkness.

After the first spike of pain and the panic there was a settling sense of inevitability, the body pitted against itself, both longing for breath and at the same time snuffing it with each gulping inhalation of the frigid, pungent water. The first swallow tore against his lungs but successive ones softened them and made him heavy. Soon he was beyond panic.

There was a pinging echo as if someone hammered against a nearly empty air tank with a wrench.

A sense of someone swimming nearby in dark water.

A woman came to visit him bearing a garland of dried vines strung with flowers of various shades of blue and a few stray blossoms of pink and yellow. She sang a strange song of a Portuguese sailor and a witch. Above him water lilies floated like green clouds. They were tethered to the muck on swaying cords of soft green. Another girl signed his name over the water, singing as she formed the letters.

Q: Is multiple fiction a new art form?

Joyce: There is an absolute newness to it, but before I even talk about that, it seems important to point out that newnesses don’t spring out of nothing. Newnesses are, in fact, a result of successive attempts and experiments. It seems obvious that throughout the twentieth century, there has been an attempt on the part of various writers to open up the ability of the story to talk to itself, to talk to its readers, to contain multitudes. For instance, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf. The computer has not created these media as much as enabled them. There has been this longing for multiplicity and complexity throughout the twentieth century.

That said, the absolute newness that I think exists here is that—here let me digress a minute. . . . There is an odd backlash going on now in the mainline culture where, with the advent of the Web, hypertextuality is establishing itself as a cultural reality. I find colleagues and literary critics saying, “Well look, the book did all this. The book can do all this. The book sustains multiple stories and can reflect consciousness and do all the things that you want to claim as unique to hypertext.” What the book doesn’t do—and that is the newness here—is change every time you read it. I mean literally change the presentation of the text in a way that a very complex disk-based hypertext fiction does. Even Web fictions, which have less complexity yet have the advantage of being increasingly universally available; any reader on two successive occasions reading the “same hypertext” will discover that the work presents itself differently. So that when you come to discuss your experience of reading a hypertext work such as afternoon, a story or the Web fiction Twelve Blue, with someone who has read it, one of the things you inevitably have to do is discuss with one another what your experience with the text was. What is it that you saw? What is it that you read?

Now I realize that if you put a few students together and ask them to read and discuss Madame Bovery, each of them will have had a different interpretation of the text too. If you ask them to explain their thoughts, they will point to different pages in a way that someone could argue that the reading changes depending on the reader. But, you wouldn’t say to the group of readers, “Did you read page fifty-seven after reading page fifty-six?” In hypertext, you find yourself in that position. Did you see this screen? Did this happen? In my reading, this scene followed this, which made me think she was afraid. Someone else might say, “No, in my reading, the second scene came first and I found that she was much more confident.”

These conversations sound vaguely game-like when you first hear them, but they are actually very old literary questions—how we see character and how we see event. They are, in fact, the satisfactions of the form. What is it that sustains the form? What sustains them is the psychological reliability of knowing that as we view the events of our lives from multiple perspectives, they seem to show up differently.

Many Luddites and others in the academic community argue that our ever increasing reliance on visual communication will kill the word. I don’t think that’s going to happen. The word now takes on a very interesting power. Words can do some things that images can’t. Words in conjunction with images can do some things that neither can do alone.

Hypertext, like life, is subjunctive—as in, “it could have been otherwise.” Had I only made this turn, my life would have been different. Our lives take on a certain sadness and a certain glory because when you choose one path, that means you haven’t chosen another hundred.

Q: That reminds me of the famous stanza from Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken”: I shall be telling this with a sigh, Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

Joyce: That is true. There could be someone down the other path who could be saying those same or similar words. That’s what makes great stories. It’s what keeps an audience coming back.

1. Differentiate yourself from every other Tom, Dick, and Mary struggling to carve out their writing career. If you can’t, you are only selling an alternative. Be a frontiersman. Don’t be afraid of standing out in the crowd. Make a name for yourself by putting your unique stamp on everything you create.
2. Show passion in everything you do (it’s instantly recognizable and highly contagious). Learn how to express that passion in your writing, your design, and in your verbal presentations.
3. Hyperlink socially. Whether you know it or not, we all live six degrees away from somebody who can assist our career. Network. Join a new media organization, mingle with the crowd at a trade show event, join an online discussion group). And don’t be afraid to utilize your friends and acquaintances to help you along the way. You never know when an old buddy will be in a position to lend you a helping hand. Just make sure that when you do call in a favor, you’re smart about it. Be prepared. Be gracious.
4. Give something back to your community (good deeds are always rewarded).
5. Stuff your brain with knowledge. It is ridiculous to assume that you can be a writer without knowing the history and craft of writing. Imagine marketing a feature film without ever having watched a movie! Don’t be such an eager beaver. Enroll in a creative writing course. Get XBox Live and play games for an entire day. Explore web sites you’d normally never visit. Ask your friends to save all their junk mail for a week and then spend an afternoon studying the marketing messages. Visit a museum and interactive with every kiosk. Sit in on an investment seminar. Open up an old computer and examine its guts. Seek out knowledge.
6. Don’t lie, cheat, or sleep your way up the ladder of success. The world is full of Sammy Glicks—guys and gals who are all-too willing to climb over someone else on their way to the land of sweet success. Honesty, integrity, talent, and hard work are a writer’s greatest assets. Never underestimate their importance.
7. Rid yourself of financial baggage. It is impossible to think clearly when you are worried about financial concerns (such as paying the rent). When you find ways to free your mind of financial headaches, you may just open yourself to new creative and business possibilities.
8. Don’t become enamored by technology. Technological advances have provided businesspeople and artists with exciting new tools to help them tailor their crafts. But technology alone is useless without human input and creativity.
9. Be fearless in the face of overwhelming odds. Writing and publishing are tough career paths brimming with talented people who are all vying for the same opportunities. As in any competitive industry, you can succeed by adhering to a few basic principles:

• Know yourself
• Practice your craft
• Recognize your limitations
• Be a good listener
• Be open to new opportunities
• Trust your instincts

Writing assignments are commonly rewarded to people who are not best for the job. How can this be?

I am reminded of a phrase from Budd Schulberg’s endearing novel What Makes Sammy Run? When asked about the secret to achieving a successful career in Hollywood, one of the characters answers, ‘Take elocution and singing lessons.’ The implication being that in certain industries, the act of selling yourself may be more important than your core writing skills.

I tend to think that a successful writer owes homage to both. The quality of your ideas and the way your express those ideas to others can often make or break you. Success is never easy, but writers often hurt themselves by not learning how to pitch and sell like the best of them.

So next time you are up for a writing assignment, do me a favor. Throw on a black top hat, grab a wooden cane, jump up on the nearest table and sing– Hello, my baby / hello, my honey / hello, my ragtime gal….

Interactive writer/designer/producer Jeffrey Sullivan answered this question after carefully reflecting on the mistakes he himself made early in his career.

1. Too little interaction. Don’t get carried away with your great storytelling skills. The “clicks per minute” in a game must be high; you must give the player something to do.
2. Unrealistic goals. Creating the greatest game ever made (or subsets thereof) is a common mistake. If you don’t know what is possible, you are very likely to create a game that cannot possibly be made.
3. Missing important detail. If you ever think to yourself, “Ah, they won’t care about x—it’s only a game,” then you’ve failed.
4. Adding unimportant details. Make sure that everything you put into the game is really interesting to people (and not just there to show off how much you know about something). Games, like drama and other forms of entertainment, are not about reality, they’re about the dramatic simulation of reality—a game that feels real, but eliminates the boring stuff that fills 90 percent of any job.
5. Lack of game experience. Know games. Play a lot of them. Love them. If you aren’t a real fan, you’re not going to know all of the things that have gone before. What failed, what succeeded, and why. Without that knowledge, you’re going to be learning lessons already learned by others—and that’s a costly route back to the unemployment line.