Darius Kazemi, Tiny Subversions - XOXO Festival (2014)
XOXO Festival7 HN recommenders · 2015–2024
82K views · talk · evergreen · Uploaded 2014-10-21
Darius Kazemi's XOXO 2014 talk on releasing 72 weird internet side projects in a year. Framed as 'How I Won the Lottery,' it argues that success needs both luck and buying many tickets.
HN uses it as the favorite antidote to survivorship-bias success stories, arguing that trying many cheap things raises your odds.
1:25:348 Bit & '8 Bitish' Graphics-Outside the Box
GDC Festival of Gaming
1:05:37Designing the Ideal Bootstrapped Business with Jason Cohen
Rob Walling
19:06This Is Phil Fish
Innuendo Studios
3:36elevated by Rgba & TBC | 4k intro (FullHD 1080p demoscene demo)
Demoscene High-Quality Videos (Annikras)
42:29YouTube's copyright system isn't broken. The world's is.
Tom Scott
24:46Painting a Character with Maths
Inigo Quilez
6:59The Problem With Facebook
2veritasium
1:07:51Shenzhen: The Silicon Valley of Hardware (Full Documentary) | Future Cities | WIRED
WIRED Investigations
10 comments from Hacker News
Darius Kazemi did a talk on a similar idea. [VIDEO] Kazemi is more of an programmer-artist or -comedian, but he releases dozens of side projects a year, all relatively low effort. He uses himself as a test case and also examines KickStarters and how unpredictable their success is.
This falls under the category of "how I won the lottery" vs. "how to buy tickets". The former isn't useful, the latter is. You can see an excellent talk about the difference here: [VIDEO]
This reminds me of one of my favorite talks of all time[1]. Applied to careers, I take the talk as implying that trying things is the secret. After a certain level of experience in your career, you'll know whether you like it. Branching off of that, it might even be the right thing to do to find a new career. One of the best pieces of advice I have ever received is "successful people do stuff. It doesn't matter what that stuff is, just do stuff and you'll eventually be successful". Some people will be luckier than others, and be successful at their stuff at a higher ratio, but overall, the ratio is about the same, and you just need to keep doing stuff. Also, one of my favorite illustrations/cartoons of all time[2] speaks to this point. Basically, if you pursue the same career for your entire life, you're probably wasting your time. once you have your x,000 hours of work in, do something new where you can cross-apply that knowledge into domains that need it. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] Edit: sloppy link formatting
When I saw the comic in my feeds this morning I immediately thought of Darius Kazemi's XOXO talk: [VIDEO]
If you like this comic, you'll appreciate Darius Kazemi's talk "How I Won The Lottery". [VIDEO]
That comic strip is similar to the talk Tiny Subversions by Darius Kazemi at the 2014 XOXO Festival: [VIDEO]
Here's a funny satirical antidote for "bet the farm" success-story fantasies like this one: [VIDEO]
I'm surprised I don't see a reference yet to Darius Kazemi's iconic 2014[1] talk, which is basically riffing on this joke for 10 minutes: [VIDEO] A key takeaway I've kept with me this whole time is the idea of there being two kinds of creative advice: (1) how to buy more lottery tickets, and (2) how to win the lottery. The former is useful, the latter not so much. [1] Wait, 9 years ago? That can't be right.
Darius Kazemi - "How I Won the Lottery" - a talk at XOXO Festival (2014) [VIDEO] brutally hilarious
I don't think you're thinking of this in the right way. Crafting media and creative products of all kinds is like playing poker. You can go all in or you can make little bets where you think you can win. You're making the assumption that the way to win is to GO ALL IN. When in reality whether you're making AAA games or a small indie digital artist like Darius Kazemi... [VIDEO] (Went to high school with him. Amazing guy. His senior project in the electronics lab was a teddy bear that could detect seizures.) You are just buying lottery tickets.