“Embrace the chaos” is my new mantra as a VR entrepreneur

Today I feel like writing a post that is less on the tech side, and more on the entrepreneurial side of VR, something that talks about my experience working as an entrepreneur/freelancer in this field. In particular, I want to talk about the attitude that I’m starting to have in my work and that is helping me to cope with this period of uncertainty. Since I know that many other professionals are reading my blog, I hope that it can help also many other people in handling some complicated periods of their working life. This is still a blog, after all, so sometimes I feel the need to vent and share my thoughts with you, hoping that they can help someone or that they can foster an interesting debate.

I’ve always been a person that tries to plan things ahead, and tries to evaluate every decision very carefully: what can be the consequences, what happens if things go wrong, what can change in 5 years in my life (the infamous “5 to 10” years we always talk about in XR). This approach lets me avoid rushed decisions I could regret later on. My buddy Max knows it well: I like to play safely and make a step forward only when I can feel that the ground is solid, and there is a good path in front of me.

The problem is that in the last years, this approach started showing some limitations. I mean, we are in the middle of:

• A pandemic that is creating harm worldwide, and in which every few months the situation changes completely (new variants, new vaccines, etc…)
• A cold war between USA and China, with me being in the middle, since I have big friends in both countries
• A chip shortage that is hurting the production of all worldwide hardware, and that is not going to end soon
• A political situation in Italy that is stable at the moment, but with an unsure future, considering that the government is held with the duct tape (Draghi’s tape)

(We only lack the Zombie apocalypse… and for this reason, I have played Resident Evil 4 VR… you know, to train for it, just in case)

To pour gasoline on the fire, I even work with an emergent technology, that is VR, which is a continuous rollercoaster of new hardware (think about the upcoming PSVR 2), new market leaders (some years ago there was HTC, now there is Meta), new rumors about possible disruptive announcements (Ming-Chi Kuo has a new rumor on the Apple headset every day, I guess he has an automatic generator and writes his posts with GPT-3). It is a growing field, so the situation is confused about what is going to happen, and now with the hype of the metaverse, it is even worse. New people are coming into our field just to try to earn money from the situation, and some of them only add noise, while others become new competitors for me.

(Not that the situation goes better for the other technologies around us: until some years ago, I would have found it impossible that people could spend $50K to own a JPEG of a monkey… while now it is considered normal… the world is getting crazy)

Looking at my job, the situation is a bit confusing as well. I’m trying to do many things, and I have no idea of how they will go: the blog is something I enjoy having, but I always wonder what could be its true potential, and if I’m doing well in keeping writing when people actually prefer watching short videos on TikTok. I work with VRrOOm on VR events, and this let me even be featured on the Unity blog, but how these events will evolve in the long run when the pandemic will (hopefully) end is a mystery. With NTW, the agency I co-founded, I am looking for funds for our game HitMotion: Reloaded, and its future will depend on how much we will be able to raise. I also wonder if I can keep doing all these things together, and for how much time.

This uncertain situation led me to have a lot of stress because it’s complicated to try to make a step forward trying to see a path when actually there is no firm ground. Actually, the ground looks like the one of those platform games where the floor breaks under your feet: if you stay still you die, if you move, you may die anyway. It’s stressful trying to make a long-term decision because the conditions change constantly, and the outcome may not be what was expected until some months before. And the fact is that being an entrepreneur, it’s up to me to make a call: if I were an employee, it was my boss taking decisions for me, and I had just to take a list of tasks and do them. But this is not my case: I can consult, and I can speak with others, but at the end of the day, I am alone deciding what to do with my working life. I remember reading an article on Medium some years ago about the loneliness of entrepreneurs: while I don’t agree with everything it was written, I agree that in some moments as an entrepreneur and freelancer you really feel alone in having to make some hard decisions.

Some weeks ago, I started taking an approach different from my usual safe one, and I want to talk with you about it, so if you feel a bit lost like me, maybe it can help you. I don’t know why it happened, I guess it was a mix of things: my situation was getting too complicated to handle, and so I had to find a solution to not get crazy; a good number of people I worked with showed me the different attitude they had in handling their life, and I absorbed part of this attitude; I kept reading personal-growth articles and books that showed me new tricks to improve my attitude in life. All these things mixed into my head, and the result of this operation was that at a certain point came to my mind again a sentence that Suzanne Borders, the CEO of BadVR, told me when I interviewed her in 2019. It started wandering inside our mind out of the blue, like when for some reason you start singing again the refrain of an old song. I’m talking about this part of the interview:

If you want to step into the role of being a CEO and being a founder, just be really ready to have zero stability in your life and to really be ready to embrace the chaos and the unexpected. Because that’s really what is going to rule your life for the next couple years. I think people sometimes underestimate how chaotic and unstable it is to be a founder and it is to be a CEO of a company… I mean, obviously if you’re a CEO of an established company, that isn’t true, but being the CEO of a small startup you never know what’s gonna happen. Every day is a new adventure

Suzanne Borders

Of course, I didn’t remember the full quote, I’m not a cyborg (yet), but I clearly started remembering Suzanne telling me to “embrace the chaos”. I have to admit that in 2019 I didn’t totally grasp the meaning of this, but after more than 2 years, I have finally digested this sentence, and I can now imagine Suzanne Borders like Master Yoda telling me to embrace the chaos (“The chaos you must embrace”).

My working life has a big chaos component. Some is bad chaos (the pandemic), some is good chaos (the growth of VR/AR/m**averse), but it’s anyway always a big gray cloud of things that are happening. I understood in the end that I should not try to make a sense of this situation, or try to think too much about what are the long-term consequences of every decision I make, because there’s no way I can know how this will turn out to be in some years. And most probably no one else has an idea, either. There’s no way that I make an order out of this chaos. It is much stronger than me, so either I accept it, or I suffer from it. In the end, I have taken Suzanne’s advice and decided to just accept it, and live together with it. After I have accepted this friendship with Mr. Chaos, I have to say, I feel much better.

You are maybe wondering what do I mean by this idea of “embracing the chaos”. Well, it’s hard to explain it using just written words, because it’s a mix of different things all together. I should provide you a brain dump to explain this in the right way… but since this is not possible yet (damn Elon Musk that is so slow with his Neuralink), I will try to write something to convey the idea.

First of all, it means not trying to overthink every decision. But don’t misunderstand me: it doesn’t mean saying “yes” to whatever, but to consider every opportunity only for what it is, without thinking too much about all its possible bad long-term consequences. I evaluate if an opportunity is good for me or my team, and I check if may not lead to very bad outcomes in the short or medium term. I check if it is interesting, if it is good enough, without looking for perfection. If these conditions apply, I’ll try to go for it. And if I envision there could be some little problems in the long run, I will take it anyway. Most of the times, these problems turn out to be somehow manageable or don’t even happen. I was used to trying to avoid doing something if there was the possibility of a problem arising down the road, but now I let this perspective scare me less. Problems are part of (the chaotic) life, after all. And unless they are big ones (that you should actually work to avoid), they are usually manageable.

This leads to the other important thing of my new attitude: I learned to say is “I’ll handle it”. I’m starting to get more confident to handle whatever will come: in my work, one of the biggest talents I have, actually, is finding solutions to problems. I’m good at making things work, at finding always a way to deliver something. At a certain point, I’ve started wondering why I should keep worrying about the situations in life in general, if actually in every situation I can think to find a way to solve it. Someone said that you should never concentrate on the problems, but on how you should solve them. I think he/she was right. Most of the problems could be solved by just thinking about a solution: maybe it won’t be a perfect one, but it could work anyway. When I have a problem, I have learned to take action by decomposing it into smaller problems and deciding the various small steps needed to solve them, and then going on in performing them. I know that for most situations, I can do that, and I have learned to trust myself a bit more. I now know that I can handle a good number of situations: if there will be roadblocks in the road I have chosen, or if there will be new challenges ahead because of the continuously changing conditions, I know I can work to find a way to go through them. This makes me feel a bit better, and ready to accept whatever will come.

I’ve also learned to take bad news or bad results with a bit more irony, a more positive attitude. The same goes for my errors. I am not saying I’m happy when things go bad: as I already said in this blog, it’s ok to be angry or sad when something is not working. But after a while I am sad about something that happened, like someone refusing to work with me, I just say that one thing has gone bad, and there will be others that will go better. I also think about what I could learn from my failure, what lessons it has taught me because there is always something interesting to learn in a defeat. I stop for a while, then I stand up again and return to fight.

In general, I’m more open to accepting whatever happens: acceptance of the current situation, looking at it for what it is, and adapting to it, is very important to live in the chaos. For instance, I accept that things can turn out to be different than I hoped for. I’m not happy that there is a current quasi-monopoly of Meta in VR, but this is the current situation, and I have to accept it: so I’m working more with the Quest, and writing more articles about it. I still keep writing about the other headsets, because I want to foster a healthy ecosystem, but I admit that the current situation is this one, and I adapt to it. I accept that something unexpected may happen, and I try to think very fast about a solution to solve it or to take advantage of the situation. I also accept that people have a different way of thinking different than mine: often there is not a “correct” opinion (every one of us thinks that his own is correct, actually), just different ways of seeing the same situation. I exploit this to my advantage, enriching myself with the point of view of others, that adds useful information to my simple one. And all this operation of absorbing opinions is making me work better because I can now evaluate many situations from different points of view, so I can analyze them better, and handle them better.

I feel ready to accept what happens and solve the situation adapting to it. I feel free to create more opportunities for myself and my team, I’m more open to accept proposals that are around me or to come up with ideas and trying to develop them myself, by creating my own opportunities. And it happens that when I take an opportunity, it usually leads to other opportunities: maybe I do a project with a person, and that person liked how I worked, and one year later she comes with a new unexpected collaboration proposal. And some of these new opportunities are good, and others are bad.

The result is that with this new approach, I have new opportunities, so even more choices to do, and also more chaos. But it’s ok. If the opportunities are many, they actually create a net of possible things to do, of possible outcomes for my life. And the more I go on with this approach, the more the net becomes bigger and thicker. I don’t have to find an exact path, because now I have a network of possible paths, with many of them being actually good, and I just have to take the one that seems better for now, follow it, and see where it takes me. And if I have chosen the wrong path, well, I’ll handle it. I will find a way to return back, and find other opportunities to exploit. It’s a matter of being elastic, looking forward just for some steps, and see how things go on.

Some bad things may happen. Will I fail as an entrepreneur? Probably, but now I have a good reputation in the XR community, so I should be able to find a job and be an employee for a while and pay the bills until I find a new gig. Will I have too many things to do and won’t be able to handle the blog anymore? I can try finding other people that write good guest posts for me. There’s always a solution, there’s always a road that can be tried.

If you read about the life of successful people, the true life, not the one said in the movies, you realize how often their “success” was something truly chaotic. Maybe they succeeded with one thing, then they failed, then they succeeded with something else, then they disappeared, etc… One of my favorite books is the biography of Steve Jobs, and in it, you can see that his life is a full mix of successes, problems, and failures. Everyone remembers when he launched the iPhone and disrupted the mobile phones market, but few ones remember when he was kicked away from Apple and founded a company that never succeeded (NeXt), almost running out of money. Very rarely success is linear, very often it is a curve going up and down. The definition itself of “success” is very confusing and every one has his own.

Also the definition of “luck” can be questioned. One article that I read online some years ago, mentioned how people that believe themselves to be “lucky” are just people that are more open to catching the opportunities around them: they are confident in their luck, so they try different things, and in the end, following all these different paths, they eventually succeed, making their luck become a reality. But it is not a matter of luck, it is a matter that they are more open to exploiting what was around them.

I’m telling you to accept more uncertainty in your life, but I’m not saying that you shouldn’t have a vision: without it, you just let the sea take you to whatever random place, and usually, this is not a good idea. I have a vision myself: I want to be a successful XR entrepreneur. You should also have goals, and have a rough timeline. You should plan in advance. These are all very important things because you must have a direction: without a destination, all the journey doesn’t make sense. But I’m saying that these things shouldn’t be too rigid. New events may change the current status quo, and you could have to adjust your timeline, your goals, and maybe also a bit of your vision. But that’s ok: you have just to handle the situation and think about a solution to go out from it in a good way. You have to be more liquid and less solid. You have to believe that you will be able to handle what life is bringing to you. And you should create the biggest number of good opportunities around you, so you will have always something to do if what you are doing now goes bad. You should try new things and eventually fail. You should surf the chaos to find always a way to get closer to your goals. And maybe you won’t get to reach your dream job, but you will land to someone else that you like, and will be anyway a good outcome.

Of course, this attitude should be paired with good discipline in working a lot and working well. It’s difficult that without effort you will be able to obtain something in life… very difficult. I’m not saying you should burn out, and not even saying that you should work a minimum number of hours. But you must always do your best, work a lot and work hard. Without the right attitude of working hard and aiming at delivering the best possible, it’s hard to succeed in anything.

“Accepting the chaos” is what is driving me forward now. I have tried to explain what it does mean for me, and I hope that something of what I have written may inspire you in your job.

I don’t know if in this 2022 Apple will launch its headset, if Zuckerberg will reveal to the world he’s a robot, or if the “metaverse” will turn out to be a virtual reality full of JPEGs of monkeys. I just know that I will accept whatever will happen, I’ll handle whatever situation there will be, and I will do my best to exploit all the possibilities that there will be down the road. I’m ready to embrace its chaos. And I hope you will do the same.

(Header image by Peter Herrmann on Unsplash)