The right answer is not always apparent at first
Rachel, Mark's daughter, excelled at school until her sophomore year. That year her grades began to fall and her happiness took a nosedive. Mark and his wife were right to suspect that their daughter needed some help and they got to therapy. For a while therapy seemed to not solve anything, until Rachael finally opened up about wanting to move to a different school. She wanted to go to a school were there were no grades, the system focused more on creativity and gave her much or her needed freedom to learn what she wanted to learn. Mark and his wife were very much afraid of the change but at the same time their daughter happiness came first. The move proved to be successful as Rachael earned the summa cum laude from Columbia College Chicago.
Mark looks back and remembers that many times he was scared of making the wrong decision. The correct answer would came along many red flags, which would in turn make him scared that that answer wouldn't be OK. Mark cites some mechanics that somebody else was very excited with, while he had no faith in that mechanic. After playtesting that said mechanic Mark had a change of heart. The lesson here is that you have to be all ears and open to discussion. An idea that seems wrong, unreal or exotic can prove to have its value and place.
This lesson is pretty much the same as his other lesson about questioning your own absolutes. Why was Mark scared about a new mechanic before playtesting it? Because he feared that the new mechanic wouldn't bring up enough excitement to the players. As someone with a heated passion to the game it feels natural for him that if something doesn't excites him, it won't excites their intended audience. I can understand why he feels that way by being the lead designer. However, let's look back at what drives us to fear something. It's usually something that we cannot comprehend or that presents itself as a threat to us. The fear of the unknown is the most primitive of all fears. It's only natural for us to take the path that feels safer and somehow more familiar to us.
There is something called cognitive bias and this lesson is very much related to it. When we do something that goes right and is successful, it's natural for us to feel more secure at repeating it. On the other hand, if something doesn't go the way we expected it to go, we tend to abandon it. Mark declares that he likes to explore the unexplored spaces, which has the advantage of bringing up that freshness that can only be felt when something is brand new. There is a risk in doing that, but there is another lesson in which Mark tells us that not taking any risks is an even bigger threat. I'd say that Mark is quite a guy in being stubborn and cautious at the same time.
If we put all our bets on a team that loses most matches, can we keep on going and betting on the same team over and over? Yes and sometimes we do it out of pure faith. However, we also have to be grounded because faith alone doesn't win us games, matches and being on charge of a business as in Mark's case imposes greater risks when we rely on sheer luck. If we bet on a team that always wins, can the day when that team loses come to pass? Yes and this bring us back to the lesson about questioning your absolutes. Just because something always goes right it doesn't mean that it's going to be right forever. On the other side, if something always goes wrong it doesn't mean it'll never work. Forever and never are strong words and Mark himself likes to say that he never says never.
I think that a subjacent lesson that I'd add here is that the world is full of paths. Some go wrong, some go right. Some are complicated, others are straight. There are many universal constants such as having to please your target audience and having to overcome obstacles. There are many things that are common for everyone, such as every person having their own identity. We can't change certain things such as water being a pre requisite for the existence of life, but we can question how much water is required to live. If something always goes wrong we can question what could be changed for it to go right. If we are unable to find an answer for something, somebody might find it because that somebody else sees things from a different perspective. Holding on tight to absolute truths is a dangerous mindset. One strong example is racism. Racism is driven by fear and beliefs that are very hard to challenge.
From what I can tell, the more experienced you are, an answer should take less time to be found.
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