One of the amazing things about pursuing your goals is how your perception of your goals changes during the pursuit. Often the closer you get to something which seems Awesome from afar, the more you realize it is Not So Awesome. I wish I could remember the details, but I recall listening to a radio show about the concept of Quitting, and how we have this incorrect assumption that Quitting is akin to Losing — made worse because it implies a voluntary act to Not Do Something. On the contrary, the show argued that the act of Quitting is in fact giving yourself permission to free yourself from something in your life that is preventing you from succeeding, and how knowledge of The Things You Do Not Want is just as valuable as the knowledge of The Things You Do Want. Our society is so blindly goal-driven that we rarely stop to question the Goal itself, which I argue is vital to the process of success. Goals are slippery, tricky devils that do not distinguish between bringing your dreams or your nightmares to life, and so we must provide due diligence to question them. Otherwise we are as likely to be led to ruin as we are to reward.

Which brings me to the issue at hand: I quit.

When I started Jawbreaker Interactive in March of 2008, I was tired of being a freelancer and living from project to project, consistently turning down work because I was too busy with the current project to take anything else on. Feast or famine, with no stability, for two years straight (and for extended periods of time earlier). It’s exhausting. And frustrating, since “When It Rains It Pours” and I’d always get offers for work whilst in the middle of something else, but not enough bandwidth to bring in new work. What I thought I needed was to spin up my own shop, get a couple of talented people on board, and start managing projects instead of turning away business. This became my Goal.

However, running a shop is completely different from being a freelancer. You need to become a manager, not a worker. You need to take care of the business if you want it to take care of you.

So I spent the better part of the past two years working on Jawbreaker Interactive, becoming a business owner and manager, with some success. I bootstrapped everything, so we had no debt. I bartered work in exchange for office space, so we had almost no overhead. I got some great people to do some amazing work. We made money — not much, but considering most businesses don’t make any profit in the first couple of years, we did ok. And most importantly, we had fun. I definitely made some rookie mistakes, but overall running Jawbreaker Interactive has been as rewarding as it has been challenging.

But building a business, like building anything, is a creative act, and if I learned anything valuable in art school it was this: you have to know when to stop. My painting professor talked about how working with the canvas was like having a conversation, and when there was nothing left to talk about, that was when you should stop. Otherwise, you start changing the subject and the painting starts to be another painting. Not that it’s a bad thing when that happens, but you can keep going forever and never “finish” anything. More importantly, you will deny yourself the opportunity to start something new.

So you have to know when to put a bullet in it and walk away. Thus, I hereby announce the closing of Jawbreaker Interactive.

I realized earlier this year that I did not want to run my own shop — being a business owner and manager meant I was spending too much time on things that are what my friend Todd M. Fay refers to as “Not It”. So I have been looking for ways to liberate that time for things that are “It”. I do not want to be a manager, I want to be a worker. I have been telling people “I don’t want to be the guy in the front of the shop selling shoes — I want to be the shoemaker.” I want to make games. I want to learn how to be a better developer. I want to improve my craft. Which brings me to some Awesome News…

I am absolutely thrilled to be joining up with the team at Macguffin Games as their Senior Software Developer.