A lot of people pride themselves on being efficient. And this is not bad. Unless you’re efficient about the wrong things. Which means you’re not being effective.

Take this: you have a business selling a hat. And you devise the most efficient marketing plan for selling the hat. But truth is, the hat is bad. SO BAD! And you just spent 3 months creating the best and smoothest marketing plan. And you don’t sell anything. Because people can see that your hat is bad.

Effective = successful in producing a desired or intended result.

Obviously, what you need to do is make a better hat and THEN create the best marketing plan. And, I know, sometimes it’s not that clear.

Basically, what you need to do is to become effective instead of efficient. You’re being effective once you move things forward, once you put your energy in the RIGHT things. Like improving your product. Or creating a great marketing plan ONCE you have the right product.

To sum up, effectiveness is the combination of good efficiency and good prioritizing.
It’s being efficient about the right things.. Once you have these, all you need to do is put in the work.

Anytime you hear someone saying “I’m very efficient” ask “what about?”. Because you want effective people around you. Those that are efficient about the right things.

n example from my own history was when we tested if people wanted to play Solitaire Arena in a very efficient way – time and money wise.

Image from Canva

This post was previously published on my personal blog.

I liked Prince when I first played it, when I was a kid, but I never had a great affinity for it. I enjoyed adventure games more than action or arcade games and I only finished the game later in life.

Anyway, I LOVED the re-imagining of the franchise by Ubisoft, especially the Warrior Within. I think this is the game that made me play the action/adventure games so popular now, like the Uncharted series, God of War series or The Last of Us.

About 2 weeks ago I saw that Jordan Mechner, the creator of Prince, published an illustrated version of his book: The Making of Price of Persia: Journals 1985 – 1993 — Illustrated Edition. I love these kind of books, so I ordered immediately, in hard copy.

The reason I ordered it in hard copy and not on Kindle, as I usually read, is that Jordan Mechner added notes on the edges of his journals, updating the information and explaining the “cast of characters”. As an aside, he tells a story of meeting Halle Berry at a shoot in NYC, in 1991-1992. And he says something like “Halle, the lead actress in this low budget rom-com, told us what the story was about”. And the present note, on the side: “Yes, that was Halle Berry”.

But aside from celebrity meetings (which weren’t that many, unless you’re a gaming history fan), the story of the 4 years it took him to make the game is more than interesting. At times, it sounds like the story of a freelancer trying to create his first product. Which, if I think about it, he was. A sort of a freelancer, that is.

Anyway, if you have the time, read the book. Not a lot has changed in the gaming world: from the crunch before the launch, to the ups and downs of the creative side and the despair of your product not being good enough.

The second half of the book is more dedicated to the author’s quest to get a screenplay made into a movie, so I skipped some bits, but the first half is really worth it.

Some years ago I started to have some issues with my wrist from writing too much (and playing) on the computer. It was an early symptom of RSI and I wanted to tackle the problem as early as possible. I solved some issues by moving my gaming sessions on consoles, but I still needed to sort out writing.

Best Keyboard to Avoid RSI:
Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic Keyboard

While I was searching for a good external keyboard for my laptop (to use while at home, at least), I found this article from Marco Arment. He was really happy with his Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic keyboard, so I had to try it.

My experience with Microsoft Sculpt keyboard

4-5 years later, I just bought my second one. The first one still works quite well, but another member of my family decided she needs it. So here I am, with a new keyboard on my desk, albeit with a UK layout, unfortunately, since I’m really used to the US one. The reason? No Amazon in Europe would sell a US layout Sculpt keyboard. Well… I bought it from Amazon UK.

Later update: in the end, I cracked. I ordered one more expensive (for us, in Europe) from the United States. And my fiancée uses one now, as well. This makes 4 keyboards in total in the last 7 years. And we have one with UK layout in case anything happens.

The shape of the keyboard takes a little bit of time to get used to it. Your writing speed will likely suffer, initially, so you need to put in the effort. The keyboard is basically split in the middle, so if you’re a fast two hands typist, you will adjust pretty fast, but otherwise it might be a little weird.

One thing that makes the keyboard good for RSI prevention is the palm rest. It’s big enough and, more important, it’s higher than the keyboard, so your fingers are, actually, a bit lower than your wrist. This helps a lot, because you’re not forcing your wrist up, as it happens with normal, straight keyboards. The keyboard is also facing downwards on both sides, from the middle, so that you keep the natural position of your wrists during writing.

MacOS solutions: CMD/Option keys

Because I use it on the Mac, I needed to do one change, though. Since CMD and ALT/Option keys on Macs are in different positions than Windows key and Alt on Windows, I switched the keys in System Preferences/Keyboard, as you see below. Now the Alt key on the keyboard is CMD and the Windows key on the keyboard is ALT/Option.

Finally, the mouse. It also helps with RSI, but it’s actually a little bit weirder than the keyboard, if you can believe it: it’s round, like a half of a tennis ball and it actually works quite well. When you use it, your hand stays in its natural position, a little bit on the side, not with the wrist forced in the awkward position to the left (if you’re a righty). Btw, I’ve only seen right hand mice for this keyboard, so keep it in mind.

Weird things about the keyboard

• it’s not bluetooth, it has a small USB dongle for both keyboard and mouse (and numpad). It is better in some ways, worse in others. YMMV.
• it doesn’t have a CAPS LOCK led. You never know if it’s on or off. It can be annoying sometimes.
• the space bar is split. Might feel weird
• the top row of keys (functions/media keys) are smaller and have a different feel when typing. This includes Escape, which is quite important if you’re coding. It’s not a dealbreaker, you should just know about it
• the NumPad is separate from the keyboard. I don’t use it, so I’m happy with this solution, because it makes for a smaller footprint on my desk, but your needs might be different.
• it has a different type of batteries in the mouse than in the keyboard and numpad.

If you want the keyboard, you can find it on Amazon (US, UK, DE), with local layouts. I assume there are other providers, as well, but I didn’t look for them. You can, also, buy just the keyboard, or just the mouse, based on your needs.

Below you can watch a video (not mine) with a review after one year of using the keyboard. It’s not the best image quality, but it’s the best video I’ve seen in terms of an actual user telling you what’s good and not. My experience is a little bit different, since I didn’t have the problem with the rubber strip at the bottom (you’ll see).

Oddly enough, I found it really difficult to explain to other people just what Mavenhut did. :)

What was the most difficult question I got during a pitch?

The truth is, there are no easy questions during a pitch, especially when you don’t know the answer.

As a consequence, the most difficult questions I got during a pitch were the ones I didn’t know the answers to.

The thing is, as you go from pitch to pitch, you shouldn’t have issues with the previous difficult questions, because from one pitch to the other, you should know the answers.

A difficult question I received during raising money from Mavenhut was:

What does Mavenhut do?

And I wasn’t really able to explain in a concise way what Mavenhut does and it took me about one or two days to formulate the answer in a way that people would understand.

Since Mavenhut built Solitaire games, one of the questions was:

Do you really think that people would buy an application that’s already free on their computer?

And it took us a little bit of time to find a way to explain why people would spend money on an application that’s already free in their computer.

Another question I got was:

Are you really going to spend 80% of the seed money that we give you on advertising?

And, actually, the answer is simple: it’s “yes”. Explaining it is not as easy so it took us a little bit of time to find a way to explain why gaming companies use so much of their investment on advertising. All I had to do was explain the “Unit Economics: of our users aaaand… it was ok :)

There are no difficult questions; there are just questions that you don’t know the answer. Yet.

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From pitch to pitch, the “difficult questions” should change; you should have different difficult questions and, in time, there shouldn’t be any.

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