[Micro post] Tell everyone your plans or keep them secret?

Hey all! Today I’m asking these questions: do you tell everyone about your plans, or keep them secret?

On our last post, I mentioned that I’m now starting my days at QuestForge with marketing instead of development, because I would do development out of necessity anyway, but there would always be something more urgent than marketing.

On our Facebook post, fellow gamebook maker Jeffrey Dean had this to say:

This is a good point – it’s easy enough to say QuestForge should start marketing, when our book is getting ready to ship. But does it make sense to market something before you’ve made it? What if you never finish it?

That led me to find this gem, from Derek Sivers, the entrepreneur behind CDBaby (emphasis added):

The repeated psychology tests have proven that telling someone your goal makes it less likely to happen. Any time you have a goal, there are some steps that need to be done, some work that needs to be done in order to achieve it. Ideally you would not be satisfied until you’d actually done the work. But when you tell someone your goal and they acknowledge it, psychologists have found that it’s called a “social reality.” The mind is kind of tricked into feeling that it’s already done. And then because you’ve felt that satisfaction, you’re less motivated to do the actual hard work necessary. (Laughter) So this goes against conventional wisdom that we should tell our friends our goals, right? So they hold us to it.

It’s unwise to argue with scientific studies, so we’ve got a problem here. We clearly need to market DestinyQuest Infinite, and we need to start that marketing before the game is finished. In addition, I find that when I’m working alone, I’m not accountable and can often spend weeks being what I’ll generously call “adrift.” I’ve often found it’s extremely useful to write down my plans and be accountable to someone else for completing them. (There’s an old saying that goes “If you want to climb a wall, first throw your hat over.”)

So how can I discuss our upcoming projects but still feel the drive to accomplish them?

Derek suggests that it’s not just if we state our goals, but how:

But if you do need to talk about something, you can state it in a way that gives you no satisfaction, such as, “I really want to run this marathon, so I need to train five times a week and kick my ass if I don’t, okay?”

How do you state your plans in a way that makes you accountable, without feeling so satisfied that you’re less likely to finish?

DestinyQuest

DestinyQuest Infinite is the first in the QuestForge Games, a new line of gamebooks.