“The barriers are self-imposed. If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don’t need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on, and the dedication to go through with it. We slept on floors. We waded across rivers.”
John Carmack – Masters of Doom
When someone asks me why I read books from a wide range of disciplines, I answer: “You never know where your next idea is going to come from”. David Kushner’s Masters of Doom tells the story of John Carmack and John Romero as they developed games in the 1990s. I was unimpressed with the stories about buying brand-new Ferraris or vandalizing offices, but I fell in love with the narrative because it’s a great tale of entrepreneurship. Many people will read this book and find themselves dazzled with the money and prestige that came with revolutionizing the gaming industry. Nevertheless, I liked the idea that anyone can lose themselves in something they love and find success as a side effect.
A couple of quotes caught my eye as I was reading the book and they all have something in common: they revolve around minimalism. Here’s author David Kushner as he describes John Carmack’s work philosophy: “Making a game, writing code for Carmack, was increasingly becoming an exercise in elegance: how to write something that achieved the desired effect in the cleanest way possible.” That quote hits hard because it applies to anything. It happens to be about writing code, but it could be about painting, writing, or repairing something. This idea of simplicity is almost universal. Antoine de Saint-Exupery once said: “Perfection is not when there is no more to add, but no more to take away.” It’s weird to talk about the video game Doom in that context, but it’s certainly how Kushner describes Carmack as a programmer.
“Carmack expressed a minimalist point of view with regard to running their business. As he often told the guys, all he cared about was being able to work on his programs and afford enough pizza and Diet Coke to keep him alive. He had no interest in running a big company. The more business responsibilities they had, (…) the more they would lose their focus: making great games”, Kushner added. It seems there was one guiding principle behind everything Carmack did back in the 90s and it wasn’t money. He didn’t want to expand, he didn’t want fame, and he didn’t want attention. He just wanted to write code and anything else seemed like a distraction.
If there’s such a thing as a superpower, it’s the ability to focus on a singular thing for a long time. Famous Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki once said: “We’re born with infinite possibilities only to give up on one after another. To choose one thing means to give up on another. That’s inevitable. But what can you do? That’s what it is to live.” This reminds me of the popular phrase, “You can have anything you want, but not everything you want.” Sadly, modern marketing has convinced us that we can have everything, but that illusion doesn’t last long.
Productivity shouldn’t be about getting more things done but about choosing the few things that matter the most to us. We have limited time and energy so it only makes sense that we devote those precious resources to what matters. It is up to you to define what essential means. It doesn’t have to be writing code, but whatever you choose, do it intentionally. Like Carl Jung once said: “The world will ask who you are, and if you do not know, the world will tell you.” So it’s about time we come up with an answer.