Thursday, August 24, 2017

It's About Making Expectations Conform to Reality

For the last two days, I've talked about the necessity of setting and fulfilling expectations when you're doing business. EA and DICE have screwed the pooch more than once, and did again the other day, which is a fundamental factor contributing to their trouble making the sort of Star Wars games that BioWare and LucasArts formerly did. Blizzard Entertainment are far better about this, but they are not perfect and you will see missteps from them.

It doesn't matter what you do. If you're writing a book (regardless of genre), making a movie, cutting a podcast, manufacturing the next great safari rifle, coming up with a better soda than anything ever done, or running for office you're going to have to figure out how to ensure that the expectations that you set for your endeavor matches up with what you actually deliver upon.

Like the folks at Blizzard, I've had--and am having--to learn this by doing, fortunately through observing others' mistakes more than my own. (Another vital skill and habit you must cultivate; you don't have enough time to learn-by-doing all on your own.) This is why I don't talk up my stuff that much; I learned to wait until I have substance before I bring the hype train out of the yard.

I'll return to this as a recurring topic in the future, both the successes and the failures, so that everyone can learn from the examples, but for now it's enough to hammer the point one more time:

Success requiring ensuring that you fulfill the expectations that you set.

The rest is details.

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