I hate the word "luck" because it both means "luck" and also "working to be in a spot where luck can boost your chances" but then being able to be in that spot is dependent on "luck" which both means "luck" and also "working to be in a spot where luck can boost your chances" but https://twitter.com/gracebruxner/status/1386684770852032513

Grace is right. My career is literally dependent on 1,000,000 things going exactly the way they did - things when I was not even born yet, when I was too young to not shit myself, when I was too young to write a sentence, when I was an annoying teenager, when I grew into my role

Here's six random things:

1. The guy that installed the hand-me-down IBM386 my dad got should've blocked MS-DOS access and messed it up, leading to me stumbling through a foreign-language interface at age 6 which led to GORILLAS.BAS & started my fascination with code

2. My kindergarten teacher decided to distract me from being a bored kid by starting a chess program where in one exercise we could modify the chess pieces' rules, and he also started a computer program. It made me think about game design & code & their interaction.

3. I walked into a computer store because I was bored while my mom was shopping and found one single copy of DarkBASIC, leading to me swapping from level editing to more code & meeting the first independent developer I ever met at @evochron, giving me courage to go indie later.

4. I made an error sending out the paperwork to enroll at the game design university I enrolled in, which meant that I could not study that year and instead got a retail job selling computers. It taught me to negotiate. I re-enrolled next year & ended up in a class with @jwaaaap.

5. I made presskit() for myself and never meant to made it public. I sent it to @PTibz for feedback and he was just at a point in a development cycle where he could soon use it. In response to him asking if he could use it, I decided to make it public so anyone could use it.

6. Being raised Dutch-Egyptian, I noticed that I'd only play games in which I played people that looked like my Dutch friend and shot at people that looked like my Egyptian friends. It led me to exploring the socio-geographical context of game development & my travels & work.

Are any of these things anything I "caused"? Not really. The coin could've just as easily landed the other way. Some of these things honestly felt like they were going to ruin my career.

In hindsight, they were all lucky because things worked out? It is all weird.

Does that mean you should just wait until "luck"? No: doing nothing to further success will reduce your chances of finding "luck". Does that mean that every success is mostly dependent on "luck"? Yes, paradoxically, yes. Even the best-laid plans are dependent on getting lucky.

How do you tell aspiring creatives & entrepreneurs that "please do the work, please please take things seriously, you have to put in the work to get anywhere" but also "listen everyone that ever made it was so incredibly lucky you wouldn't even believe how much luck was involved"