Gaining skills from unexpected sources

I recently read an article on skill stacking.

It focused on the idea that overlapping several skills that are complementary can give you a uniquely effective angle when approaching certain problems. Relative to the effort invested, it's easier to be in the top 10% of 5 complimentary skills than it is to be the best in the world at any one of them in particular.

This made me think about how I arrived at my current situation, and I wanted to share a few experiences through which I picked up skills without seeking them out. Some ended up coming in handy in the daily grind; some are still waiting for a chance to shine.

The lack of planning is a common thread in all of them, and looking back, the lesson learned is to regularly check if there's something that can be taken away even from the most simple of activities.

Corporate email

Deus Ex

Games like Deus Ex featured many sections where you'd run into the perfectly-presented front face of fictional corporations and eventually infiltrate them to read their internal files.

There was a certain tone to them, a seriousness in the official materials mixed with the very raw and unfiltered humanity found in the inter-team discussions; shine and polish shown to the public, strings of nearly-averted disasters revealed in memos and interrogations. 

Also, Nigerian princes made a lot more sense when they started showing up in my inbox.

That manner of speaking is something that often takes a while to get used to when entering the world of the working, but using it had become almost reflexive from that time spent reading emails on unsecured terminals in the offices of Tai Yong Medical. (I also now greatly enjoy writing corporate emails.)

Additionally, the way of thinking of a lot of flashy startups and gigantic corporations became familiar early on and trying to make sense of their moves became something to be approached like a puzzle in an RPG.

PR efforts, in particular, became interesting to dive into - much like in games, they were occasionally being done to divert attention from or gloss over unfortunate incidents. Connecting the dots was a thrill, but the greater gain was a constant reminder to not take ukelele-backed videos at face value.

SCP Foundation

Another universe that contributed to this aspect was that of the SCP Foundation. It's a collection of short horror stories set in the same universe where a global agency with almost limitless resources works to capture all sorts of "anomalous objects", ranging from eldritch monsters to mysterious butlers that can grant almost any wish.

Storytelling value aside, the format in which stories are presented is an extremely clinical one, and you read the stories as if you're a top-level researcher within the Foundation; containment procedures, object descriptions, and incident reports are written in a language befitting a highly formal government agency, maintaining a completely stone-cold style even when dealing with the most unfortunate of circumstances. (And I also now enjoy writing reports.)

Fractional Reserve Banking

I once played an MMO with a friend and we spent a good chunk of time on endgame content. A party of five would complete a difficult dungeon, but only one item would drop, and that item would only be usable by certain player classes, so the in-game convention was to sell it off on the auction house and then evenly split the earnings between each player.

My friend acted as the loot master, picking up items at the end of dungeons and selling them, but since we didn't have a regular group of five people, he'd have to chase down individual players to give them their split. It also took time for items to sell, so it wasn't possible to share on the spot.

Over time, he made a well-automated Excel spreadsheet that kept track of how much everyone was owed and told players at the start of each run to access the sheet and contact them when they wanted to retrieve their money.

The interesting part: a lot of players would only withdraw their balance after a large amount of time had passed, sometimes up to several weeks, and many would never even bother to ask for it at all.

This meant that, at any given time, my friend had a large stash of currency that he could use so long as he would always pay when asked to. Through a bit of experimentation, he discovered that he could invest around 80% of the total amount into his own equipment so that he could clear the dungeons faster, and only had to keep roughly 20% on hand in case anyone wanted to cash out.

He kept this up until he quit the game, at which point he disappeared with a considerable sum that was never to be retrieved again.

Suddenly, some aspects of the 2007-2008 global financial crisis started making a lot more sense to me: how banks run out of money, how they aggressively invest to obtain more assets, and how people can be left empty-handed when a bank disappears.

Modding

When I was into modding, I made custom character skins for a popular game that started out as texturing work and evolved into full 3D modeling. 

While I never considered my work to be of any great quality compared to the art produced by the game's in-house team, I was prolific, and I focused on a niche art style that the game usually didn't include. I ended up with a small fan base that grew over time and I very much accidentally discovered the power of advertising.

It turns out that while producing work of similar quality, the advertising it's wrapped in makes a huge difference. (Who would have thought?)

Skin 1: a generic download with an uninspiring title that I'd worked on for two weeks, with a small blurry screenshot of the character in-game and almost no text description (I didn't actually name it that, but you get the idea). I was convinced it would do well because the technical aspect of it was carefully done, even though the presentation wasn't.

Skin 2: (MyIngameName)'s Raven (CharacterName), something I had worked on for about a week at most. In its favor, it came coupled with hand-drawn character loading art, a background story and a custom in-game icon. It wasn't as well-made of a change, but it had all the bells and whistles on the outside.

In the end, the first couldn't hold a candle to the second in terms of popularity, which is why I started to understand the sensibility of a business model built around offering an experience rather than a raw product. Merchants ranging from Apple to video adapter cable distributors replicate time and time again.

The $20 cable adapter with a shiny white box thing and a pretty double-wrapped cable cover sure looks more attractive than the $8 raw black cable that just gets the job done?.

Which one you buy is up to you, but one sure seems to have a lot more going on for it.

Guilds

Early days

Planetside 2: a game where you could fight over objectives as a regular soldier, but you could also pilot tanks and aircraft in the context of a massive world that sported fights of up to several hundred players in the same area. I started playing right around when it launched.

The bigger fights really lent credibility to the MMO tag.

Based on an online personality test with a heavily credible root in a basic scoring algorithm that said I would enjoy taking the lead if nobody else did, and since no groups had been properly established in the days following the launch, I set about making my own during that period.

Nothing too serious, I told myself, just invite a few people and see what happens.

Within the first few weeks, the Iron Vanguard of the Cobalt server was a mish-mash of random players that occasionally got together just so they wouldn't play alone.

But we were growing.

Within the next two months, we merged together with another, similar-sized and likeminded outfit, which added an actual chain of command to the group. (Kind of like a business merger.)

Saturation

In the months that followed, the game became saturated with player guilds. Every active player, it seemed, was already in some group or another.

You couldn't bring someone new aboard unless:

• they were quitting something else they already had deep ties to (and encouraging that was generally frowned upon);
• they had just started out but were promising based on their stats.

Kind of like recruiting good professionals in general.

There were times when I'd play alone. We weren't all that huge, so we wouldn't always have a party going.

Playing with a random team was always an option. I grouped up, time and time again, and it usually just involved players that banded together in a bid to not play alone, similar to my own group. A voice chat would emerge from time to time, but that was as serious as things got.

Then, one day, I met a player (let's call him Jack) that deeply changed my perspective on the game and what a handful of well-coordinated individuals could achieve within it. He had no official group, but his performance was spectacular. Top 0.1% in the game, easily, and gifted with an unparalleled ability to distinguish which tool was appropriate for which opportunity.

Not only that, but he was leading a group of players close to his skill level, all without an official tag, like something out of a movie.

I started teaming up with them regularly, and while I was an outsider, I helped in what ways I could and drove myself to perform at competitive levels. Every enemy was called out, near or distant, traps and ambushes were set in every conceivable manner, each battle was dropped into just long enough to turn the tide before being forgotten for the next.

The budding leader in me imagined what it would be like to have them on my side in an official capacity, and after courting their interest for a few weeks, I managed to convince Jack to become a sort of Chief Special Ops Officer in my group. (Also kind of like a business merger!)

Sudden missile storms like this then became a regular occurrence.

The Peak

After that, everything changed. People started joining the Vanguard so they could be a part of Jack's ops, which had reached a server-wide reputation, but also experience the group at large. The outfit became layered - one layer of legendary elites, and another of regular but well-organized players. I later discovered Jack was also a real-life team lead in a spec ops group - no wonder he was so capable within the game.

Things were good for a while. We were 150 strong, of which around 50 were highly active. We'd meet up daily but in especially large numbers on weekends and play late into the night, but when having a group on that scale, constant recruiting efforts were needed to keep up the numbers.

I'd started looking into each and every new player on the server and contacting all those who performed above average for the purpose of setting up a sort of interview. We desperately needed manpower, but bringing on the wrong people was more costly than bringing in none at all. (Kind of like the Google philosophy.)

Daily operations were managed by co-leaders, and players of all types would join the fold just enough to keep numbers stable.

People would make promotional videos, and a website and forum came up. Jack divided his elites into smaller, specialized units while the rest of us organized the regulars.

We partnered up with the largest groups in our faction and had an arch-nemesis in another that mirrored our way of doing things, with which we'd regularly engage in prolonged but very satisfying battles.

The downward spiral

At some point, the leader of the group we initially joined with left us and took a few people with him (kind of like when a large corporation loses a star team when they go make their own startup), but the rest of us continued to work together.

However, we started becoming fatigued with the game. At the same time, on the horizon, a new group of seemingly peerless players formed their own group that everyone wanted to be a part of. They took the center stage, and we started fading out of it. Kind of like when many of the star companies of the 80s and 90s faded away during the dotcom boom when they couldn't keep up with the new kids on the block.

After some time, we decided to go out with a bang by organizing a massive fight. It involved reaching out to every group on the server and bringing together around 600 players to fight for control of the most coveted base on the map for several hours.

It was a lot of fun, and also a great way to learn about the pitfalls of event planning; I had organized internal group events hundreds of times by that point, but it turned out that getting external groups to join in, even if their leader had given both written and verbal approval for their participation, was a bit like herding cats.

Not knowing this, I didn't pester them like an app sending you daily push notifications, and at least 40% of the expected players didn't show up. Thankfully, since the stakes were low, it wasn't a bad way to learn that lesson. (Lots of people first discover the large-group-cat-herding problem when trying to organize their weddings)

The endeavor eventually came to a close after a year, but many of the experiences closely mimick what many companies go through during their lifetimes - the idea stage, the success-beyond-wildest-dreams stage, and the only-going-down-from here stage.

And other pursuits

There were a few other memorable areas:

I once had my own IRC server with around 2000 users. I enjoyed it greatly, but since I didn't have any cash at the time, I relied on the kindness of a free hosting provider.

They eventually redirected everything, leaving me with nothing, which was a great way to learn that there's no such thing as a free meal.

I tried to launch a video game that brought together a lot of my previous experiences, and the wrapping-vs-product dilemma came into question a lot. Looking back, I spent far too much on the wrapping side of things; one can fail by going too far into either extreme.

I mined Bitcoin when it was $3, got into day trading when it reached $1000 and took a practical crash course on trading by losing around 80% of what I had in the space of a few months. It was simultaneously expensive but also free, since I had never invested anything but time into it, and it's a constant reminder that things too good to be true usually are (such as pretending a stock will always go up just because it has so far).

I tried public speaking. I didn't fear it at first since I thought that nobody cared when I read materials in highschool classes. At a teacher's behest, I then went on to speak at a contest where a dearly-crafted speech on medtech lost to a speech about penguins. Despite not winning, I realized speaking in front of a crowd could be more fun than daunting. The experience would come in handy in later years.

Also, the penguin speech was pretty good.

The Takeaway

A meeting that everyone was glad was not an e-mail

So how do all these experiences add up?

At the time of writing, I am a developer working in a relatively corporate environment.

It leads to a few necessities:

• Understanding the business side of any technical endeavor, which makes sense within the context of publishing mods;
• Communicating between teams, which involves corporate mails, which I always try to write as a character in the Deus Ex universe would;
• Understanding group dynamics: being able to organize efforts when necessary, how group layers work, how people grow over time based on their ambitions, and why they get pissed off, which makes sense given the time spent with Planetside;
• Producing graphic assets and optimizing them for users, which makes sense in the context of game development;
• Occasionally presenting an idea in front of a group without losing their interest, with which public speaking experience helps with;
• Not giving up on a seemingly impossible yet necessary task, which makes sense in the context of having played Dark Souls.

These come up on top of the job description, but being able to navigate them with the help of these apparently unrelated experiences makes them much more manageable.

The experiences listed above don't exactly constitute birth-to-death skill practice.

But they still lead to picking up a few skills - most unintentionally - and, as a result, some tasks can be approached in a unique manner.

Reading mails in Deus Ex, defusing fights between teams in Planetside and dealing with administrative hassles for an IRC server were not things that I did with any further goals in mind; certainly nothing as lofty as "developing a highly versatile skill set for today's competitive market".

Still, those experiences now help me with navigating a landscape of constantly shifting teams and deciphering goals that might not always be obvious; a technical requirement provided with no context is usually a business requirement that lost meaning along the way, but making sense of it is a lot easier once you've had a few goes at cat-herding.

In closing

A lot of people I've talked to have met with similar success when taking on their regular tasks based on approaches they've learned from unexpected sources: IT managers that learned the rules of discipline and organization from construction work, UX designers that learned about user intuition from their time as mountain rangers, sales experts that got their best pitches from the spirit of the Fallout series.

To me, that's what the idea of overlapping "10% skills" means - using that mix to get things done rather than relying on a laser-like focus on a single pursuit.

Of course, they don't go around erecting scaffolds or hiking all day, but the way they complement their main aptitudes with skills that wouldn't obviously come in handy is a beautifully effective thing to behold.

In case you're curious, here's a link to the article that inspired this post: