I love my job

A few days ago I appended "I LOVE MY JOB!" to my MSN nick, and someone messaged me asking me if I was being sarcastic. But I wasn't. I love what I'm doing. What prompted this "outburst" was being able to meet some of the top game developers from the U.S over 3 days - 17, 18 and 19 Nov. Basically, Media Development Authority (MDA) organised a games workshop, and invited guest speakers from the U.S , and these were guys that had been involved in pretty big projects:

1) American McGee. That really is his name. American, probably the most famous name there, having developed "Alice". Before that he worked for John Carmack (they were neighbours!!!) , of idSoft, famous for the Doom series.
2) Matt Costello. Writer of Doom 3. He wrote the script and story of the game, but most famous for writing 7th Guest.
3) Mark Meadows. Worked at Xerox-Parc, Stanford Research Institute, Lucasfilm...
4) Xin Chung. The Lord of the Rings game for Xbox was outsourced to his company.
5) Noah Falstein. One of the first few employees in LucasArts.
6) Katie Salen. Designer and academic at Parsons School of Design, New York.
7) Tracey Fullerton. Worked for Microsoft and Sony, now Director of EA Innovation Lab at University of Southern California.

Listening to these guys was really inspiring, not only for what they had done before, and the kind of projects they are currently working on, but because of the passion that they had for their work. I was particularly inspired by:

1) American McGee and Xin Chung. These guys look like they are in their early 30's. They look like regular dudes, in their T-shirt, jeans and tattoos, and you wouldn't be able to tell that they are running highly successful companies. And I'm pretty sure they are having a good time at it.

2) Katie Salen. She researches on the social impact of games, and creates experimental games that mix the virtual world and real life (mixed reality games). What she talked about reminded me again of why I know what I'm doing is right - in the past, games were a way of social interaction, but computer and video games made it anti-social, but now technology has made social interaction through gaming possible again. In my opinion, games will slowly but surely be seen in the positive light again.

3) Mark Meadows. This guy is basically quite a genius. He calls himself a painter - he says his full time job is travelling the world painting and photographing people. Oh, but in his free time he does research on Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing and interactivity in games, and has written a couple of books on those subjects too.

I had a fun time talking to them, getting them to comment on my games, and also got to meet all the people in our local games industry. Its still a small community, but MDA is trying hard to push it, and I am glad to be part of it, doing what I like to do, and hopefully be able to make lots of money from it.

The clean city

Is Singapore too clean? This question arose while I was on the KL trip with the guys, and Ben lamented that Singapore, being too clean, was losing its good hawker food. Whether KL food is better than Singapore food is debateble, but I do find that food along the streets, hawker centers is indeed tastier than food found in foodcourts.

Hawker food	Jalan Alor - Rows of Hawker food

The city center, KLCC, is a really nice place. The buildings are beautiful,and with a monorail running nearby, I would say it is more modern-looking that Downtown Singapore. Nearby our hotels were clubs and pubs, all adding to the vibrant city feeling. But just a 10 minute taxi ride away, would be Jalan Alor, with its smelly drains and street-side stalls. We were there on the Friday night, and the streets were packed with hawkers selling fake goods, pirated cds, fruits etc. Ironically, the food here along the streets, where basically you don't want to know how the food was prepared, was much better than the food at the foodcourts.

Club we visited on Sat	Another club down the street

So why is food along the streets better than food at the cleaner foodcourts? My theory is that because the foodcourt stalls will always have business because people like cleaner places, while streetside hawkers, have to attract people with the quality of their food. Which led me to thinking about this: Has Singapore's cleaner and more secure environment led to the decline in quality of our people? Singapore's economy has stagnated for a while now, and unemployment still remains relatively high. Our ministers blame Singaporeans for being too picky, unwillingness to take glamourous jobs. While I do think that given Singapore's status as a developed nation we should have higher job expectations, I also believe that Singaporeans have become to comfortable, unwilling to experience hardships or take risks. And then there is the absolute dearth of creativity as well. Take the advertisements for example. When was the last time a TV ad or poster ad could be called innovative or funny? I receive a lot of funny and interesting Thai ads through email, and not a single one I've seen in Singapore can match them.

A lot of reasons have been put forward to explain this. The 'One party system', the lack of tolerance for dissent, our education system, our clean and secure ways. I believe its a combination of all these factors. But our society cannot develop like this. Artists and writers tend to emerge from poor neighbourhoods. Why? I think its because through experiencing a life of hardship one can get a better reflection on life and society. My suggestion: Controlled Disordered.

I can understand why certain things have to be done - Singapore, being a small country, cannot allow disorder or it would affect our whole economy. So Controlled Disorder means letting a particular neighbourhood fall into disrepair. Don't upgrade the buildings. Don't maintain the parks or the trees. Allow people to vandalize the walls of buildings. One suitable place would be Geylang. Geyland is an old neighbourhood famous for its red-light district, so it already has a reputation for being bad. Let it get worse. Of course there will downsides. Gangs may develop. More crimes may be committed in the area. But such environments also toughen people up, and allow people to express themselves. We only find diamonds in dirt and rock, and I believe that is the same for people, that the most creative and motivated people emerge from experiencing hardship.

Kuala Lumpur Trip Photos

Dean, Barry, Ban, Ben and I went to KL from 3rd to 6th November. But instead of doing a travelogue, describing day 1 to day 4, I'll write a couple of posts describing and reflecting on the entire experience. But first I'll start by posting some nice photos from the trip.

The Petronas Towers

A Close up View

Hindu Rice Art, on display at Times Square Shopping Center.

KL Zouk

Beautiful Sunset on the way back from KL

Religious Conservatives taking over the U.S?

I was planning to blog about my thoughts about the Kuala Lumpur trip, which I will eventually, but after reading this article in CNN titled "Kansas School Board redefines science", I had to blog about it.

Let me quote the first few lines from the article - "At the risk of re-igniting the same heated nationwide debate it sparked six years ago, the Kansas Board of Education approved new public school science standards Tuesday that cast doubt on the theory of evolution." To quickly summarize, basically the Kansas BOE allows students to challenge the age-old Darwin's Theory of Evolution with the 'Intelligent Design' theory. The 'Intelligent Design' theory basically states that the Universe and humans are too perfect and could not have been created through evolution, but by an intelligent cause (ie God or aliens).

"Critics of the [standard] charged that it was an attempt to inject God and creationism into public schools in violation of the separation of church and state." I fully agree with this statement. I'm no Bio PhD, so I probably can't go into an in depth thesis about Darwinism vs Intelligent Design, but the simple fact is that Darwin's Theory of Evolution was based on years of study of animals, and has been backed up by evidence from in archaeology and DNA evidence, while the Intelligent Design theory is derived from religious texts.

I think that this is another example of a disturbing trend in the U.S - religious conservatives are gaining more power. And this isn't just an observation of an outsider. While travelling back from Mexico, I was chatting with a couple of college students from Fresno, California travelling to Japan on exchange, and 1 guy mentioned that he couldn't wait to get away because "the country was being taken over by the Christians". At times religious conservatism may be good, the outcry against gay marriage being the prime example (actually, they should ban gays altogther, but that's another story :P ), but there's also the extreme example where protesters bombed an abortion clinic, killing a doctor and injuring pregant women. Other examples include recent comments by a U.S Army General about Islam in front of a TV audience (nothing happened to him btw), the stepping down of the Supreme Court Judge candidate due to conservative pressure, and the protests against stem cell research by the same group of people.

History has shown that theocracies don't work. The day that a state rules by religious law instead of judicial law, and has its science governed by religious theorists instead of scientists is the day it will fall. If the trend continues, I believe the decline of the U.S as a world power will be inevitable, if it hasn't already started under George Bush.

Apple the phenomenon

I wanted to do a piece about Apple vs Creative, but basically there was no comparison. Everyone knows that Apple is kicking Creative's butt in MP3 player sales, and I hope they go on to dominate the PC market as well. In the iPod, Apple has not just created a product, but a lifestyle. It was Apple who changed the music industry by having 99 cent song downloads, encouraged the trend of Podcasting, and now they've changed the video industry by introducing 1.99 video downloads. The video iPod itself, is nothing special. Creative came out with the portable video player a year (or was it 2 years?) ago, but the contrast in fortunes between the 2 companies is amazing. And the man behind it all? Steve Jobs. Like many successful companies, the initial success is based totally on the strength of personality and vision of its founder. And in case anyone forgot, Apple was a failing company, going downhill before Steve Jobs returned to the company in 1997, and in 1999, the first iMac (picture courtesy of www.apple-history.com) was released, and the Apple phenomenon was reborn. Needless to say, Steve Job's story is an inspiration for me, and below I have pasted a email that I got some time back - a transcript of an address he gave at Stanford in 2005, which I still find pretty inspirational:


Transcript of Commencement address by Steve Jobs, delivered at Stanford 2005
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example: Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky - I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me - I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept: No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.