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The year in review 2013 and plans for 2014

Now, I'm not a particular fan of setting new years resolutions. I personally feel that such resolutions are pretty weak and hardly acted upon. One cannot expect external circumstances to the driver of change in one's life. If one keeps going through the same actions, they will lead to the same result. If one names hopeful goals every new years and fails to achieve them, then something else besides from the goals need to change.

So I'm first having a look back at the year 2013 and seeing what were the drivers of some of the ups and downs of my year and how I can better approach 2014.

The biggest and most notable parts in 2013 were almost all adventures where I traveled interstate. I remember all the trips to Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne and Adelaide I made throughout the year. I really had fun every time I travelled, I attribute part of my enjoyment to my love of travelling, but more importantly, just being around great people. I'm probably happiest to say that I have friends all around the country that I could enjoy hanging out with.

Another big factor of my year was the time I spent working on Gamers Life Network. it was a tough year, full of ups and downs. In all honesty, I didn't achieve the outcomes and goals that I wanted to achieve during the year. But at the same time, our branding and awareness did grow and we did build a lot of good will within the gaming community. So I am glad that we most importantly have that on our side. The most important thing to me is to never do wrong to the community and I think the community appreciates that sincerity that we have.

Probably my most crushing realization during the year is that I'm still not a great leader. My management skills are strong, with my ability to perform and manage tasks with good efficiency and effectiveness. But at the same time, everyone around me was slowly starting to drift away from me. I wasn't as close to my friends as I used to be. And before long, we had drifted apart. This was when I really started to struggle with getting things done and also when I started running really low on time.

My other great failure throughout the year was my fear. Fear of failing, fear of making mistakes and fear from overanalysis. I barely did anything meaningful during the year and I attribute it to my own personal failures as a person.

But 2014 is a new year and this is a new chapter of my life and Gamers Life Network. It's when I shoot for the stars and I makes things happen. Things that I should particularly improve on in the new years are.

- make more friends and build more meaningful friendships with them

- take more opportunities to travel around more

- empower and connect with the people that I work alongside with

- relearn to embrace that willingness to make mistakes and take risks

- think less and act more

Well, that's a pretty good list to begin with. Let's hope for all the best for 2014. Thanks for reading.

The Unknown Variable - Passion

Something that's been on my mind recently is the idea of passion. For those of you that aren't sure of what I mean when I say passion, I'll answer your question with another question. "Do you remember the last time when you were so keen and excited about something that you literally could not wait to get started? Do you remember a time when you really wanted to take that hobby to the next level and do something amazing with it?" That well of energy, motivation and perseverance is what I like to describe as passion. The last time I felt truly passionate about something was when I was volunteering/filming at PaxAus in Melbourne. Although each day was so physically demanding, we still had all the energy we needed to film, work our shifts, meet new people and to have fun at the event. When you can tap into that well of energy, no set back can stop you for long. Now I'd like to relate this idea back to something else that's been on my mind recently, which is gaming community management. In every thriving gaming community, there are a few individuals that really stand out and make that gaming community prosper. Among the Australian fighting game community, I'd say Ali "X" Abdo is probably the most prominent, my local lan scene is blessed with quite a few of these individuals such as Adz Gibbo and the Performance Gaming guys. Also an individual by the name of StrathRG has made the UQLol club an amazing community in less than one year. But what makes these guys so much better at positively impacting their gaming communities than others? Hard work, dedication, perseverance and communication are among the key factors. All of these however, I believe are outward expressions of having passion for what they do.

I've seen plenty of times when large amounts of money, sponsorships and volunteer labor has been wasted for a mediocre result. But then there are a few people like the ones mentioned above that are able to take whatever resources they have on hand and make something amazing from those, achieving a return on investment much higher than their non-passionate rivals. (note: when I say return, I mean more than just financial return. I also mean other factors like attendee enjoyment, sponsor awareness and overall positive outcomes) So what about all those great organisations or projects that start off with so much passion behind them then fade away over time? I personally believe this is the biggest hurdle that all great organisations and teams face early on. How many times do leaders start off great but lose their passion and energy along the way? Often this is revealed as someone needing to take a break or having some personal time. Doing great work takes passion. Over time this passion will continue to drain away until that person starts to hate or dread what they are doing. Unless they find a way to regularly renew that energy and passion, they can't keep up that effort indefinitely. I too faced this problem about 4-6 months ago. I dreaded playing video games more than having a job or going to work (you know you got a problem when that happens).

It wasn't until recently when I started playing some casual rounds of Street Fighter with a mate whom I played a lot during uni (2-3 years ago) that I started remembering some of the joy of playing games. This in turn inspired me to write this blog post today.

So drawing on everything that I've discussed so far, I'd like to draw the following conclusion; that great teams and organisations need to have this mysterious quality, passion to really succeed and achieve amazing goals. But passion is a limited resource that drains whenever someone taps into this well of energy. Many great organizations that started off strong, fizzle out because they couldn't find a way to renew their passion for what they were doing. Becoming tunnel-visioned on the project, organization or business can often cause you to forget that original passion.

Therefore, for everyone that is following a business, project or organization out of passion, you need to remember to build in to your regular schedule some way of enjoying that passion as you used to. Whether it be going for a couple of games at the end of an event or just doing a casual meetup between friends. You always have to be reminding yourself both mentally and practically why you love what you do and why you want to continue to work hard at it.

No wonder so many top creative organizations such as Google really focus on building a culture and reinforcing that culture and belief system. They've simply discovered that passion is what causes people to create outcomes tens, hundreds, even thousands of times greater than what someone with the same resources could have.

TL;DR

- Passion = That energy that you get when you really feel strongly about something (basically like mana)

- Passion applied to a project causes super amazing results

- Passion is a limited resource that people have

- Therefore you need to regularly refill that passion meter

- Remember why you love doing what you are doing and get involved in it casually (or at least in a non-super-serious way) to keep reminding yourself of what you love about it.

- refill your passion meter by doing the above

- rinse and repeat

Damn, that ended up being far longer than I originally planned. I hope that for the few of you that read this, you can take something away from this. So what do you think? Do you think passion is really that necessary for doing an amazing job? What else can have the same driving effect on you?

Collaboration - So Simple, So Overlooked

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending GGF lan in Strathpine in North Brisbane. I had been to the lan before in the past and I've generally always had a lot of fun at these events. More importantly for me, I got to hang out and catch up with the admins and other important people in Qld's gaming community. Guys that I always enjoy hanging out with are Dave and Chad from Performance Gaming. I originally met these guys at RLG lan and got to know them better and better as we bumped into each other again and again.

Later during the day I got to sit down and chat with Chad and Dave. One of my intentions during the day was to organize some sort of arrangement to provide gaming pcs for the upcoming Lansmash Lan. My intention was to capitalize on the popularity of League of Legends and Dota 2 as well as the holiday period by hosting a tournament at Lansmash.

Past experience has taught me that lanning is something that newer and younger gamers are not particularly fond of. The complexity and tedium of unplugging gaming comps and moving them to another location just to play games isn't that attractive. Especially when many gamers have the much simpler alternative of just playing online. So in order for the tournament to succeed, we would need more public use pcs available. So I carefully put it to guys and asked whether they'd be open to some sort of arrangement. To my surprise, they were pretty nice and open to the idea. I don't know, maybe this is just because of my personal struggles with people and team mates lately. But I've gotten more cynical of people. I've started closing off working with people because I feared their own personal flaws would let me down at some point. Or alternatively, if people are capable of doing things, I was afraid that they would only do things that were directly to their own benefit. Interestingly enough, I don't think I'm the only one that thinks like this. I've met many people within Australia's gaming community that think this way. And many of these people are plenty talented. But like me, their own arrogance/confidence/greed blind themselves from the key succeeding in this field, collaboration. Everyone says it something that we need more of, but no one is willing to be an ambassador for that change. But sitting down with the guys at performance gaming, and they way that they were talking, it gave me back confidence that I needed to start trusting and believing in people again. Honestly, it would have been pretty hard for the Performance Gaming guys to do what they did yesterday without some external help. And because they were willing to open up and collaborate, they were able to pull off such a great event. There's still plenty I can say about this, but I think we've reached a good point to end this section of discussion. We'll continue on collaboration and how it's needed in the gaming industry more in the future. Now for all of you guys that might be reading this, let me ask you this? Have you ever had an idea or plan but never acted on it because you didn't have the resources or ability yourself to make it happen? What would you have lost if you just asked someone for help?

Games can get kind of intense at our house. Check out our latest let's play, with 10% more noob Ash.

Don't sweat the details so much

Ever since the Gamers Life Convention incident at Bond University happened in February of 2013, I've been bit of a different person. I've never looked at gaming projects with the same focus, determination and vision as I did back then. I felt betrayed and let down in what I did. I just couldn't get back to the same super-optimistic, never give up person that I was back then. I attribute this problem to many different things, but one of the major impacts that it has had on my life during the last two years is that it has made me a lot more cynical and negative on most matters in life.

I almost never really see the strengths of any plans anymore, all I see are all the negatives and how things can fail. Not only in terms of work, business projects but also with the people around me. This negativity has really plagued my mind and motivation for many months and I've barely been able to shake it. My own personal short comings with colleagues and business partners has further highlighted these issues.

Something that I used to be amazing at is resourcefulness. I would be able to make many things happen with very few resources on hand. I find opportunities or I would persuade the right people to help us or to be lenient on rules. I no longer see myself as the same person that can make such logistical miracles happen.

Looking at every idea, all I could were the reasons why it couldn't work. I never thought of how I could make it work. It wasn't until the other day, when I was driving into the city that I saw an interesting van on the highway, it was a commercial van with the company name, Winsulation. This was effectively a company that installed special windows that were thermal and acoustic resistant. I thought to myself, how niche a business is that? It was possible for a business to run of that sort of work? When would people ever call out a company like this to work?

The only thing that I did know, is that the business was operating. So assuming they didn't just recently start, they were managing to make money on such a business. So I thought to myself, such a business must rely heavily on marketing or promotions to get those few clients they need to profit.

This made me realize that whatever project that I work on in gaming, couldn't be any harder than this really. Unless there was something fundamentally or commercially flawed with this product, you were fine. The business just had to ensure that it was able to market and attract enough customers to keep it profitable. That was fundamentally the key to succeeding in business. You didn't need to worry on so many details initially, too many factors to deal with only causes you to be paralyzed from mental overload or personal fear.

I realized that you can't allow yourself to be stuck over finding a perfect plan. You'll do the best as you can and adjust as you learn and go along. But if you never start you'll never learn. So in summary, don't worry about the details so much and just go ahead and do it.

Reflecting on the last year

So this weekend marks a whole year since we started working on Gamers Life Network's social media. Our first ever video was our community spotlight video at Brisbane Supanova in 2012. This weekend, Supanova finally returns to Brisbane after a whole year. Which makes wonder, what now? What are going to do at Supanova this year and what would we do differently? To be honest, I actually have very little planned for Supanova this year. As far as I'm aware, we'll probably take some photos of the event and write up a recap of the event for Gamerslife.net.au Which, leads me to the question, what have I done in the last year? I've run a couple of events, traveled a fair bit and went to a lot of events. Regarding business and money, I've really achieved very little. I have yet to make any money on the Gamers Life Project.

Although, I'm not happy with what I've achieved in the past year, having a negative perspective is not the right way of looking at things. At least, not the right way to look at things if I want to move forward. I have to look deeper at what I've done and really appreciate everything that I've had the opportunity of doing. When, I really think about it. I got to travel and visit a lot great events across the nation throughout the entire year. I got to attend Supanova, Pax, Avcon, EB Expo, Smash, Epic Diem amongst conventions. I got to meet a ton of cool and amazing people. And I suppose most importantly, I had experiences that I value, adventures where I had fun and learned life's lessons the hard/fun way. I say it every now and then, but I really do love what I do. I guess that's what really is important. Life is too short to waste doing the things that you don't want to do. I know there is a lot wrong in my life at the moment, but to prevent this blog post from getting too long or convoluted, I'll leave those topics for another time. So I suppose, I'll finish off with something that Is on my mind right now. it actually relates to a youtube video that I watched in the past, as much as I try to look for it right now, I can't find it. But it basically asks what is your passion, what is something you would willingly do for free? and how do you build a lifestyle out of it? I think i can finally begin to answer this question. I know what sort of life i want to live. Now I just need to find the way to let myself live my life this way.

Although I still don't really have anything planned for the next couple of days or weeks. I at least feel much more confident now and have a stronger determination to succeed. Here's to the next year of Gamers Life Network.

This is one Epic finally to a battle.

Neko Nation Video finally out. I feel we really captured the atmosphere of the night well.

GLN Community Spotlight - Gold Coast Supanova

After a long hiatus, the latest episode in our Let's play series is out and it is an epic episode. Our friend Dean comes in to comment about this epic fight. check it out at

Here is Episode 4 of Badass Games. Toki and I are again playing Asura's Wrath. Check it out.

The adventure continues with Toki & GrandJ. Check it out! at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mXwEsGYuRs

Hi Guys & Girls. Last week the GLN Team got to check out Manabar's 3rd Year Birthday. Watch to see what happened

And the adventure continues! Join Toki and Me on the second part of Asura' Wrath.

Hey Guys & Girls. I've finally gotten back into my League of Legends Commentary again. Please have a look if you are interested. I'll be making these probably twice a week from now.

After a long hiatus, I'm back to my regular gaming videos. Check out me and toki play Asura's Wrath.

#Badass Games #Asura's Wrath #Grandj #Grandjason #Toki #Let's Play

Jason's Pokemon Adventures - Part 1 (The legend of Table 9)

So a couple of weeks ago, Anthony, James, Bodhi and I decided to travel interstate to Canberra/Sydney to play the Pokemon Trading Card Game at their regional tournament. By coincidence Canberra and Sydney are like 3 hours drive of each other and had their regionals Saturday and Sunday.

So we decided to fly down and try to win as many championship points so we could qualify for the world championships later in the year. The week leading up to the event was pretty busy for me. I subsequently didn't get to practise or test my deck much.I had decided to play Rayquaza + Eelektrik for the weekend because I was having bad luck with Keldeo EX recently.

The long weekend started off bad with my thinking my flight was 9 am when it was actually 9pm. I thought they designed 24 hour time specifically for these sort of situations, WTF webjet??? With an extra 12 hours on hand, I chilled on the Gold Coast with my deck until it was time to leave. I had so much time, I even wrote my decklist in Asshole style. (shuffled and each card in single)

So I left for Canberra at 9. By the time I arrived it was pretty much midnight. I took a cab to the YHA, found the guys, tested like 2 games before going to sleep.

Next day we got up early for the event, we headed into town and found the store quickly. But it was the deadest mall area we had ever seen. Literally it was impossible to find any place for breakfast, so we hiked over to the local Macdonalds for breakfast.

After eating quickly and heading back to the store we got started with our rounds. The first thing we noticed was this, (note the player at table 9)

And he will forever be known by that name. As for how the tournament went, stay tuned and read about it tomorrow.

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