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I’ve been subscribed to Masahiro Sakurai’s Youtube channel for a while now though I find myself only occasionally watching his videos. They’re short, so I shouldn’t really be putting them off, but there it is.
This video here is one from a few weeks back that I did happen to watch and it goes a long way to justifying this whole devlog thing to my brain:
Key Takeaways:
Time spent taking in lots of different kinds of media is not wasted.
Time spent creating lots of different kind of media is also not wasted.
Rather, both these activities are incredibly important and should be done as much as possible.
Because of my history, I often find myself falling into the trap of thinking that if I’m not working on my main project then I’m wasting time and being lazy. Things like these blog posts are worthless and I should be chiding myself for getting so off track.
I know that this isn’t a good attitude to have - I’ve tasted the end result of such thinking (and never want to get that burnt out again), but it’s an attitude that is hard to shake, especially in this day and age.
What this video says to me is that doing things that aren’t my Main Thing are not only okay to do, but also a good idea to do. Playing games, reading books, watching movies, it’s all good.
Not only that, but creating different things is important too.
Taking in different pieces of reference to build your internal library seems obvious, but I hadn’t thought a lot before about having different forms of output. To the me before this just seemed like procrastination, but now I think differently.
I’m the kind of person who gets bored easily if I’m not doing things. I find it hard to passively sit there without something to at least chew on in my mind. That’s where all my stories come from.
But always working on stories, especially longer ones where you do a lot of the groundwork only once, gets tiring, like it’s using one muscle and only that muscle. However, following Sakurai’s advice would mean using all kinds of different muscles meaning not only does each one get to rest but I also don’t get bored.
Seeing this video lifted a weight from my mind as I found myself naturally working on different, non-Main Project things but wasn’t sure what to think of this. Now I know that it’s a good thing.
