Happy Hour #9 - The Will to Win (Patreon)

About six weeks ago, I wrote a Happy Hour post about the sins of over-preparation. Mostly through the lens of Game Mastery, but I definitely touched on the importance of remaining flexible in business. To summarize: over-planning and digging your feet in can lead to diminishing returns. I do believe that, but as I reflect on these last two weeks, I find myself really analyzing our content creation practices, and I find another perspective rearing its ugly head. 

Not sure how many of you know this, or to what extent it’s been broadcast on our programs, but I’m a speech geek. A debate nerd. I started in high school because I naturally found arguing about the rules of just about anything to be a sport (no surprise there, I’m sure), but then I actually had some success with it and I ended up being recruited by a university that was a top-ten school in the activity at the college level. The scholarship paid my tuition at a school my family could never afford, and the day we got the call, both of my parents cried. I didn’t know then that the four years of training I would get on that team would shape my entire college experience and the way I approach every communication endeavor even long after I graduated—from job interviews to industry seminars to my best man toast at Troy’s wedding. The blessings of that training are too numerous to list here, so I’ll just pick one. I learned firsthand that, as Vince Lombardi said, “The will to win isn’t nearly as important as the will to prepare to win.” Today I want to talk about what I think Lombardi meant by that and how it relates to the Glass Cannon Network.

If you’ve listened to Cannon Fodder, you know that we’re not fans of players and/or GMs that legitimately come to the Pathfinder table believing that the game is a competition: the GM vs. the players, the players vs. the GM, or (the worst offenders of all) players vs. other players. While the GCP and A&A put forth a playful—some may even say “sporting”—vibe of players vs. GM, the truth is that most of that is in good fun and really by design to add a layer of entertainment to the show. In reality, we are working together to make the best story we can. Once we leave the imagination copter, however, all bets are off. This is a business and business is a competition. To succeed at business without really trying is not in the cards for me. If I want to succeed, I’ll need to work my ass off. Thinking back to my senior year of college, after my last season was over and I had accomplished many of my goals in speech, I remember my coach had a beer with me and opened up. “Even when you walked in the door as a freshman, we knew that you didn’t have the talent of the best of the best, but you had the work ethic; and after all this time, you’ve worked and worked and worked and despite your utter lack of outstanding talent, you willed yourself to the top.” Does it get more backhanded than that? I definitely dressed up his words a bit to make it sound more harsh, but it did really strike me. I’d thought I was talented. “No,” he said, “you’re not. You just worked harder than anyone else.” I was like, “WTF, man!?” But he was right.

Anyway, I digress, the point is that we as a Network never assume that this business will grow and we will reach our competitive goals by taking for granted the fun we have at the table and the connection we have to the community. There is an enormous amount of preparation and time and energy and thought that goes into every piece of content that we publish. The shows that you hear (or see) are a fraction of the content that’s been pitched, worked on, sometimes even shot or recorded, and just never saw the light of day because it wasn’t good enough. Troy has made it clear to the Naish that he’s obsessive about quality and that he won’t put anything out there than he personally doesn’t think is great content. He sets a high bar for all of us. But what Lombardi is saying is that everyone wants to make great content, just as everyone wants to win. Of course everyone does. No one seeks to put mediocre content out there. The difference is that some people are not willing to put in the preparation required to make something the best it can be. Grab any budding playwright in New York City and ask them if they want to get paid to go to Juilliard. Of course they do. But did they set an alarm for 5am every single day of the week to wake up and write for two hours before going to their day job like Matthew Capodicasa? Getting up at the crack of dawn to write things that might never be read by anyone, just to write and write and write? Even on vacation, even when an Androids recording went until 1:30am the night before? Oh, and I almost forgot, how many of them would continue to set that alarm for 5am every day even after they got into Juilliard? You guessed it.

We know that in order to reach that next level as a company we have to continually challenge ourselves to be better. To never be satisfied with what we’ve already done. To take what has “worked” in the past and challenge ourselves to change it, to improve it, to never get lazy and never, ever, settle. When it comes to content creation we can’t take a short rest and just let the machine crank a few eps out. We can’t! That’s not who we are.

What does that mean in a practical sense? What does it actually look like from my perspective at the office over these past two weeks? It means returning the proof of our next t-shirt back to the vendor five times because it’s just not right, sending back another new piece of merch we wanted to bring to Seattle because it’s just not right, it means spending hours work-shopping the concepts that will make our Emerald Spire run different from every show we’ve published so far, it means working with Jason Bulmahn to make sure our 2E adventure at PaizoCon shows off a plethora of new mechanics. It means Troy meticulously going through the first edit of the Brooklyn show and making changes to split seconds: cut away a split second earlier, zoom in a split second later, change the color a bit here, change the lighting a bit there. It means Grant spending the time and energy recording a full tutorial on his PC at home for me so that I can learn some new audio sweetening techniques to improve the sound of our shows. It means me taking long phone calls with other small business owners, tax professionals, liability insurance agents, theater professionals, comedy groups, and dice companies—to name a few—just so I can be ready to attack the next stage of the Glass Cannon Network, LLC. And that’s all in the last two weeks (most of it just this week alone). When you boil it down, most of what we do day in and day out is brought on by the ugly side of never settling. It means more work, more stress, more frustration, but in the end—a greater reward. I wonder why I like Dark Souls so much?

On a personal note, one of the reasons that this post came about the way it did is that a friend of mine passed away this week. A client at my old job. He was one of the most fascinating, brilliant, and badass people I ever met. He was maybe one year older than me. Things like that make you stop and assess why the f**k you are doing what you are doing. Well, it took writing this post to remind me that it's not simply the will to prepare to win that gets me up every day. The the true mission that motivates me to put all I’ve got into this...is Glass Cannon Nation. I can see the dominoes laid out before me as they fall, one after another: working our asses off means winning, winning means growing this business, growing this business means growing this community, which in turn means reaching more people, and bringing them all into the Glass Cannon Family. In the end, that’s the why.

Thanks for listening, Naish. 

See you in Seattle!

Joe