Angela Duckworth’s book “Situated” came out this week and it helped me see that the people, places, and culture around a person have a big influence on individual success. Pop culture wants us to believe in the idea that singular people can do anything they set their mind to through hard work alone. We need to reject the idea of solo triumph and face the reality that greatness requires a community.
The book argues that the community around us must also have high amounts of both challenge and support. Low challenge and high support leads to complacency. Low support and high challenge leads to burn out. It’s only when we have high support and high challenge that we can safely push beyond our current capabilities. This is the sweet spot.
Game devs have a lot of opportunities and ways to create this kind of environment. In today’s Studio Session, I wanted to go over what it would look like to create a Brain Trust to do just that. Check it out!