Fewer, better, stronger

Once in a while, I remember that this is a blog, and so I like to tell you something about the lessons I’ve learned in my working life as a VR developer, entrepreneur, and blogger, hoping that they may be useful for other people who, like me, are facing similar challenges. Today is one of those days, and I want to tell you about a new approach I started to follow in the last few weeks.

If you know me, you know that I have a big passion for Virtual Reality (or as Meta would call it, Mixed Reality), and this passion has always led me to try to do too many things simultaneously in this field. I blog, I go to events, I do contract work, sometimes I try to build products of my own, and so on. And in these fields, in the beginning, I was used to saying “yes” to every proposal I got. On one side this is good, I like doing many things and I’ve obtained satisfactory results in all the above fields, but on the other side, doing many things can be stressful and can also prevent the necessary focus to make a dent.

I started thinking about it some months ago, also thanks to some books I’ve read (Antifragile being one of them) and some things I’ve verified on my skin. And I realized what is now a rule upon which I’m basing my working life: it’s better to do fewer impactful things than do many slightly relevant ones. Let me tell you more about this.

One of the fields where I started thinking about this has been social media. I’m used to sharing many links to relevant XR-related articles on Twitter/X because if I find something interesting, I’m happy to share it with the community so that I to inform everyone about it. So I was used to reading a post, clicking on the share button, maybe writing a couple of hashtags, and publishing it. I continued to do so for a while until I realized that most of these posts got almost no engagement. And it’s not that I want to collect hearts, it’s that it meant that no one was reading them, so sharing them was completely useless. Observing a bit what the others were doing and reading some informed articles about the new algorithm on X, I realized that these posts were not rewarded by the algorithm because they were not sparking a debate, or creating emotions, and were even sent into oblivion because there was a link to an external resource that drove people outside the social media website. Social media algorithms are pure evil, we all know it, but this is not the theme of this article. What is relevant here is that I was investing my time in sharing content that only very few people were reading. This means I was wasting my time to have nothing in return: no informed people, no new followers, no new connections. I was creating a lot of content that was just useless for everyone.

I understood that I had to change my approach. I so stopped sharing whatever I found interesting and start sharing only the things that I found the most relevant. And when sharing them, maybe put more effort into them to make the post more interesting, instead of just lazily sharing just the title and the link (something I still do, by the way, but less than before). I don’t want to fall into the trap of the algorithm and make content that starts a harsh debate about politics, but still, I acknowledge that I have to play by the rules of the game, and I try to make my posts more informative and interesting (in a positive way). This usually pays off with more people who read what I’m sharing and maybe later connect with me.

The same principle holds for everything I do. In the past, sometimes I had the obsession to write at least one article per week (besides my usual roundups): if I had nothing relevant to say, I still rushed to write some short post with some announcement about some holidays I was celebrating or some events I was going, or some quick tricks I found in some XR software. But the story was the same as the X posts described above: I still spent some time writing these articles (being a blogger is very expensive, time-wise), to give nothing relevant to the community, and so get nothing back (no followers, no reputation, no working connections, etc…). So now instead of writing a shallow article, I prefer writing nothing and using the time I would have used to write the article to do something else that can be more relevant to me. When I write an article now, I’m more careful about it being informative and so worth my time (and also the time of the people who read it). Sometimes it happens that with this approach, I have a big impact: my post about Android XR allowing for camera access brought my blog to be mentioned in various online magazines, which is very good for my reputation and also for my SEO. Writing 10 posts just to say “I love you VR community” (which is true, by the way), would have brought me nothing.

As a developer, I was used to taking whatever contract work I could, but making a single project worth $100,000 (as a team, not all for me, unluckily) is much better than making 10 projects worth $10,000 each. The bigger project has more chance to be for a good customer with which you can start a profitable connection, it has a higher chance to be a project that is cool so you can share it on social media, and you can put it in your portfolio to have a reputation boost. The $10,000 projects are probably POCs for which you get money, but they are not good enough to talk about them. Bigger projects are also more complicated and can make you grow much more as a professional. The biggest project I’ve ever worked on is the VR platform for concerts called VRROOM (you can read about my journey here): working on it for one year and a half taught me about development and people management much more than I’ve learned in the 3-4 years before put together. This says a lot.

Everything you do has some associated costs, at least for what concerns your time. Even more relevant is to mention that everything you do has some sort of fixed cost. In the example of the projects above, managing 10 projects means spending the time negotiating 10 contracts, plus having probably at least 10 weekly update calls with the customers, plus 10 people mentioning post-delivery bugs to you. One single project has only one of these things. Of course, finding a big project is harder than finding smaller ones, so I’m not here saying to accept only projects bringing you at least 50K (considering the current status of VR, you would probably die starving). I’m saying to try to pursue this scenario, and that if you are in a moment you can choose, you should choose bigger and more relevant projects over smaller ones.

It is not that I’m saying anything particularly new: if you, like me, are a fan of Pareto, you know that 20% of the things that you do are bringing you 80% of your results. This means that you could theoretically remove 80% of the tasks you do and lose only 20% of value. This is only a theory, but it gives you an idea of the fact that if you focus on doing very relevant things, you can do just a few and have similar value than doing many of them.

I’ve mentioned the book Antifragile, because it exactly talks about the “non-linearities” of life. More important things have a bigger impact than many smaller ones combined. If you drop a big stone on someone, you could kill him/her, but if you break the stone into a thousand pebbles and drop them one by one, probably the person will be fine (not happy, but fine). The effect of the large stone isn’t the same as the 1000 small ones combined, it is much more.

I want also to mention quality, because it is a very important factor, too: when you are busy doing one million things, you don’t have enough time to create quality artifacts. When you do less, you finally can. This is good because doing good work makes us feel more satisfied, delivers more value to other people, and can also give us more reputation. I have always had an obsession with quality in my work as a developer/entrepreneur, and now I have started to associate it also to the concept of reputation. I want to be considered in a way so that you know that if you contact me, I’ll try my best to deliver quality work to you. Of course, this quality is associated with a cost, and while before I was embarrassed to ask for more money for my work, now I believe that this is my worth after spitting blood working 10 years in this industry. I can do fewer projects, charge them more, and deliver better work. I still work a lot, but in a healthier way than before.

It’s important to remember that you can not only focus on quality, though. Unless you deliver something that on its own can make you a legend (e.g. you invented CTRL+ALT+CANC, the three keys I use the most on Windows), usually only one good thing can’t make you successful. Let me return to my social media example. Sometimes in my Twitter feed (yeah, I still like to call it Twitter), I see some random person who wrote a Tweet that resonated so well with the people on the platform that it got an insane amount of likes (like 50K, 100K, or even more). I usually go watching the followers’ count of this person, to discover that the number is still very little. It means that even if this person had 100K likes, most of the people just appreciated the message, maybe shared it with their community, and then went on. They did not feel connected with the person sharing it, because they did not even know who this person was. The only way to get more followers is to deliver interesting posts REGULARLY, so that at the 4th post of yours that someone likes, he/she starts realizing that he/she likes you and so follows you.

This is a concept that is very relevant for networking and events. I started applying the philosophy of “fewer but better”, also to events, so for instance this year I went to CES, one of the biggest tech events in the world, and I made the most that I could to make that event the most impactful possible for me. I ended the event with my body fully destroyed, but I came out with new important connections, a better awareness of the XR ecosystem, and also new followers on YouTube. It was great. But if I just went to an event every two years, I would have very little in return.

Around 6-7 years ago, when I had far less experience as an entrepreneur, I was at an event in Milan and I found there Francesco Ronchi, the CEO of Synesthesia, a very relevant IT company in my city (e.g. they organize here an important event about Android called Droidcon). While I was trying to convince him to eat chocolate and insects (that’s a story for another day), I asked him if he could share with me some wisdom about how to do networking. He answered that at the end of the day, it is important that you make your face seen around because the actual good connections that you develop at events are the people that you see 2, 3, 4 times. It’s hard to make a relevant connection after a quick chat during an event. But if you start seeing someone multiple times, then every time you meet your connection deepens, and then maybe you start becoming friends and/or collaborating. From my experience, this is very true: sometimes with people, you click at first sight (e.g. Christian Steiner at XRCC), while with others it is more of a slow discovery. That’s why you can not only stick with quality without quantity. You should deliver quality over time, you must have discipline and regularly deliver good work.

My last piece of advice is that beyond quality, and quantity, you should also think about long-term impact. I would be very happy to write a post on Linkedin today and get 1 million views, with an associated influx of comments, and connections. But then… what real benefit is this bringing to me? How is this changing my career in the next 5-to-10 years (it’s always the same timespan of Vitillo’s law of technology…)?

This is why together with my usual work (which is already pretty “unusual”, to be honest), I am also thinking about what tasks could I do every week that can have a longer-term impact on my career. This is something I already mentioned in this other post mine about VR careers, and I want to stress it again. It’s good to focus on fewer more important projects instead of many shallow ones, but it would be even better to build the opportunity to create a very big project that can make you grow a lot, or to become a manager in a big company, or allows you to be on TV, or whatever other thing you would like to do that can have a huge impact in your working life.

These tasks about the future are usually slower and longer term, but I consider them important because they give me a direction, and allow me to strategically try to make my career make a big step forward. Of course, you must know what you want to do in the future to understand what these tasks can be.

And this concludes my rant for today. Summarizing this wall of text:

Do fewer but more impactful things, for your present and your future. You will deliver more value and get more value back while being less stressed and more satisfied.

You can write this sentence on your toilet paper, which is still something coherent with this post, because it is something that you use in a few very important moments of your day…

In the end, I don’t know if anyone needed to hear this, but I hope that these thoughts of mine have helped someone else in improving his/her own working life. And if it has been the case, let me know in the comments (or share this post on social media, but put some effort while doing so :P)

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