"The frightening and most difficult thing about being what someone calls a ‘creative person’ is that you have absolutely no idea where any of your thoughts come from, and you have no idea where they’re going to come from tomorrow."

"Leaders are not what many people think–people with huge crowds following them. Leaders are people who go their own way without caring, or even looking to see whether anyone is following them. “Leadership qualities” are not the qualities that enable people to attract followers, but those that enable them to do without them. They include, at the very least, courage, endurance, patience, humor, flexibility, resourcefulness, determination, a keen sense of reality, and the ability to keep a cool and clear head even when things are going badly. This is the opposite of the “charisma” that we hear so much about."

"In headaches and in worry / Vaguely life leaks away."

"Very few teams successfully apply game mechanics to real life because making a game is an exhausting iterative activity. It takes immense political will, dedicated resources and deep belief that the right experience, not just the right feature, can change the world. Games are no silver bullet. Instead, real gamification is a master-level exercise in passionately pursuing great usability and user experience. Most such projects fail because few teams have the skill, the patience or the values to pull off making a great game."

"Well, we’ll hire anyone who walks through the door who can pass our review process. The problem is very few people can do that successfully.
The cost of lowering those standards is huge. If any of your readers are interested in the philosophical underpinnings of some of our decisions, The Mythical Man Month is a book that is a pretty good start about what we’re optimising for.
In the games space, or any rapidly changing space, the fewer people that can get something done, the better it will get done.
Additional people on a project have their own negative externalities associated with them, and so you’re always better off getting five people to do something than fifty people, as long as the five can do it. The key is finding those five right people, and that’s an incredibly hard process.
But people we want to work with, we’ll try hiring them for years."