Taking breaks is OK, but never give up!
A personal story on the importance of believing in yourself
Happy Mystery Monday!
November is already coming to an end, and I feel like I haven't done enough work.
I spent the first half of the month going on a planned week-long vacation — my first real vacation since I went to Japan in 2016 — only to be met with a bad case of COVID-19 when I returned home.
So the truth is that I really haven't done a lot this month, but I have had a lot of time to think.
I'm still recovering a bit, and can't write anything too complicated, so I thought I'd share a personal story in today's newsletter.
I hope you enjoy!
Although I'm known for being kind of a shut-in, the truth is I always enjoy exploring new places and getting to know new people.
This month, I traveled to the luxurious island of Palm Beach, Florida, because I was invited to attend a very special dinner.
Having grown up in the rural Midwest — literally with a cornfield in my backyard — Palm Beach's tropical climate and beachfront properties were an incredible change of scenery.
I'm a frugal person, and I almost never spend on anything other than investments, so this was a pretty unusual trip for me.
But I had the opportunity, so I took it.
I had a lot of time to think on the flight there, and I realized that things were very different for me just one year ago.
One year ago, in November 2022, I was actually at one of the lowest points in my life.
I hadn't worked on my game Detective Butler 2 in years, and I wasn't sure if there was still an audience for it.
I was pretty sure that the scope of the game was too large, and that even if I did finish it, I wouldn't make nearly enough money to justify the time spent on it.
And I had lost so much momentum — I had lost my Twitch audience because I stopped streaming, and my Discord server was practically dead.
I had also quit my job years ago and had been living off rapidly dwindling savings, and so I needed to figure out something fast.
All I had were a bunch of half-finished projects that nobody knew or cared about, and none of them seemed like they were getting me anywhere.
I had lost nearly everything, including my ambition to create video games — literally my childhood dream.
What hurt even worse was that some of my closest friends had stopped talking to me at this point, and so all of these points hurt so much more because I had to deal with it all alone.
I can’t tell you how many times I tried filming videos talking about how I was going to quit everything and move on to greener pastures.
I never uploaded those videos, because the message just never sat right with me, but I still have them.
I cursed myself so much for making all the mistakes that had gotten me to that point.
At that point, I was ready to just give up.
But I tried one last thing instead.
I reached out to someone who I hadn't spoken with in a very long time — someone who was once very close to me.
I thought maybe I didn't have anything left to lose at that point.
That conversation changed everything.
It literally gave me the motivation to keep going.
That person probably doesn’t know, and might not ever know, how much that conversation truly helped bring me back from the dead.
Out of all my options at the time, working on Detective Butler 2 logically seemed like the worst one.
But I had a gut feeling to keep pursuing it, if only because of that conversation.
I kept working on Detective Butler 2 over the next six months, creating a Steam page and demo.
And as a natural consequence of those efforts, I ended up creating the Mystery Gamedev community.
The truth is that if I hadn't made all those mistakes in the past, then Mystery Gamedev literally wouldn't exist.
I realized that those "mistakes" I had beaten myself up over weren't mistakes at all.
They were choices that had led to the creation of my most ambitious project yet — a project with a purpose beyond just myself.
I just wasn’t able to see the end result until now.
Mystery Gamedev is the culmination of everything I love wrapped up into one thing: games, technology, business, helping others, and the pursuit of truth in all its forms.
Within these short few months, I've made greater friends than I've ever had before, and accumulated a community far larger than I've ever been in charge of before.
My business is booming, and I'm scoring huge freelance contracts.
I’ve already helped so many people in our community, and I even led our team to a victory during last month’s game jam.
If I had just given up, none of those things would have happened.
My sense of purpose is renewed, my confidence is back, and I've never felt better in my entire life.
I went from having nothing one year ago, to having everything today.
I thought about all of those things while on my little vacation.
As I sat and used the gold-trimmed utensils to eat the most delicious meal I'd ever had, I looked up at the golden ceiling and realized how much more I needed to push myself.
Sure, I'd accomplished a lot of things in life and already achieved so many of my goals.
But I was nowhere near the top.
It might have been a vacation for me, but I was surrounded by people who lived that luxurious way of life every single day.
It was refreshing to be out in the world, among all those people, and I realized just how different my life could be if I worked hard to make it happen.
So much had already happened over this past year — where will I end up next year?
As we get older, we get more complacent, doing just the bare minimum to get through another day.
Sometimes you just need to be taken far out of your comfort zone to see how much more you can do in life.
Life can also be cruel, throwing curveballs that repeatedly crush our dreams and ambitions.
But in spite of that, I encourage you to keep aiming high and do your best anyway.
You never know how much things can change in just one year.
As nice as my vacation was, I was completely blindsided when I immediately contracted COVID upon returning home.
Honestly, I’m not even sure it came from the vacation, since a family member I was with the whole time didn’t get sick at all.
So, it’s actually a total mystery how I got infected.
But I was completely incapable of doing anything other than sleeping, eating, and drinking for almost an entire week.
A lot of my plans for the month had completely gone down the drain.
It made me remember the value of our limited time here.
It's important to prioritize the goals you truly want to accomplish, and not get sidetracked too much.
Hopefully by next week, I’ll be feeling back to normal again.
I’m ready to make more good things happen!
Thank you for reading!
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