Apotheon

Recently I have been reading up on the ancient Greeks. It's always good to learn and when you get fascinated with something I always suggest just diving right into the subject and learning as much as you can. Luckily a game came out that highlights ancient Greek art styles. The idea is that you play a game with an artistic style of the ancient Greeks. I played the game and it's pretty good.

One thing that I always like to remind people about is to get your ideas out the door because otherwise somebody else will do it. I had this idea years ago. Now I am not saying the developer's copied my idea. Remember if you have an idea, then hundreds to thousands of other people will have the same idea. If you have a good idea, don't wait and especially don't think that you are the only person to have that idea.

So what will I do next? I think I will use this aesthetic for my games as well. Even though people will say "It rips off Apotheon", I don't really think that's an issue.Remember you can build upon what is already in existence.

Back in 2008 I had an idea for a game and in that game there was a section where you play as an Egyptian Hieroglyph. When brainstorming, I thought of doing the same thing with Greek art. Either way, go play Apotheon, make sure you release your creative ideas and don't be afraid to build upon what is already in existence. Here is a screenshot from my game.

How to make 1 million dollars a year

A million dollars is a lot of money but it isn't as much as it used to be.  Adjusted for inflation, 1 million dollars in 1985 is about 2.2 million today. Nevertheless, making 1 million dollars a year would be fantastic.

How do you do it? Most people would try and find a way to make it organically such as getting a good job and saving or trying to start a business. These are both great ways to make 1 million dollars. These will give you the capital to start your road. What most average people do is different from what most rich people do. Rich people invest their money and really rich people use calculated risk.

In order to make 1 million dollars a year you have to be lucky. This can be a business idea or just good luck on investments. Rich people manage their risk. You can make 1 million dollars a year by investing it and using compound interest to your advantage.

All you have to do is get 11% a month on your investments and compound it each month. You need about 300k to make this work. That is the minimum you need to make a million dollars a year. Let's take a look at a boring chart.

Month	Month Interest	Total Interest	Total Value
1	$33,000.00	$33,000.00	$333,000.00
2	$36,630.00	$69,630.00	$369,630.00
3	$40,659.30	$110,289.30	$410,289.30
4	$45,131.82	$155,421.12	$455,421.12
5	$50,096.32	$205,517.45	$505,517.45
6	$55,606.92	$261,124.37	$561,124.37
7	$61,723.68	$322,848.05	$622,848.05
8	$68,513.29	$391,361.33	$691,361.33
9	$76,049.75	$467,411.08	$767,411.08
10	$84,415.22	$551,826.30	$851,826.30
11	$93,700.89	$645,527.19	$945,527.19
12	$104,007.99	$749,535.18	$1,049,535.18

Here you can see the month and the interest accordingly. How do you get these kind of returns? Well, stocks can easily swing this amount within a month. Commodities can as well. You can invest in double leveraged ETFs. This way the commodity in question can sing 5-6% in either direction and you can make your money. Most commodities have a bear and a bull so you can make money either way. 

Once you make the million dollars you have to pay taxes on it. This differs from country to country but let's say you have to pay an average of about 20%. 

That means you have 800k left. The following year you can take another 300k and do it over again. Rinse and repeat. Out of all of the ways to make money, this is by far the easiest. You can be anywhere in the world and become a millionaire. 

How much do you really need to retire?

Most people don't get a retirement these days. If you do it's most likely in the form of a defined contribution plan. This means that you contribute to it through out your career and you take it out when you retire. How much money you get in that retirement is unknown. Some people get a defined benefit retirement. This is where they just pay you money for the rest of your life. These kinds of retirement plans are few and far between.

I asked myself the other day: what is the minimum amount you need to retire?

Most people would tackle this problem by taking the income that they need to live and then multiplying that by how many years they want to be retired for. This would give you a number somewhere in the millions and it doesn't account for simple compound interest and investing rules.

How much do you really need? The answer is actually quite a bit lower than you would expect. The answer is just 500k. This number would work for most people. Here is how it works.

If you invest your money in a diversified portfolio you should get at least 10% a year. If you invest 500k and get a 10% return, you will have 50k extra to live off of. Of course this is subject to tax but for a retirement, this isn't too bad.

You can actually make 6 figures in a year if you use your margin account. In most margin accounts you can borrow the same amount of money you have in your account. If you had 500k in your account, you can borrow another 500k. What poor people do is they see this and then they go buy a Tesla or some other fancy car.

What this means is that you can borrow 500k bringing the total amount of money to 1 million dollars.This gets interesting because 10% of 1 million dollars is 100k. Of course this is subject to taxes but this will give you a very comfortable income.

It seems that all you have to do is save 500k and you can retire for life. Next time we will talk about how you can make 1 million dollars annually.

Black on black

One of my favorite design techniques is black on black. I think I like the fact that it takes a couple seconds for your eyes to adjust. Check out this logo black on black.

While this gets to the point of black on black, if you are looking for a more practical example. Check out the image below.

You can see that the image pops a bit more. This is because of contrast.

Don't think technology will make you unemployed? Ask a musician how it is going for them.

 This video sums up how technology will affect jobs in the future. Most people think that this won't affect them that their job will either be protected by the government or the business they work for.

Think again.

A lot of areas are going to be affected by how powerful technology is going to get. I always say to people:

Remember that your job can be outsourced to a machine at any given time, for any given reason without warning.

Comparisons are usually drawn to the industrial revolution on how machines will take away jobs but there is a more recent and much more relevant example. The example is of course music. People may argue that the music industry is much better off because of the free downloading from Napster.

For the super stars it hasn't changed but for the everyday musician it has become worse, much worse. Music was never a good career choice for anybody but in the past it was possible to make a good living if you were smart about it. Most of the income would usually come from teaching but if you were motitvated and smart there were other ways to make money.

Technology made the distribution of music free and frictionless which was different from being paid and restrictive. The major difference between the two systems is that record companies use to constantly fund new music. Not everything would make money but they would fund new music. That means more jobs for the production process such as engineers, session musicians and even studio assistents.

With less money coming in the record companies could not fund new music. This new technology changed the way music was consumed. Of course the consumer didn't care at all. Free music, sounds great. What people didn't realize is that this new distribution model would not just simply make music free but completely change the social and business perception of music.

This is what people do not realize when a task becomes outsourced to technology. Not only is the task outsourced but the social perception of the task will change forever. When autonomous cars hit the streets the profession of the taxi driver will not be even considered a job.

With music the biggest fallout of the downloading debacle is the fact that money and music and not even in the same sphere anymore. These two ideas do not mix. In people's mind. Here is the major fallout of what free music did to music's profitability.

Life could be better for musicians. Recently I realized that a lot of musicians reach a ton of people. I was watching a very niche music video and it had 2 million views on YouTube. This amount of views will give you only a few thousand dollars in revenue. Not a lot. If people could make 50k plus from 2 million views then you would see people hiring other musicians and supporting the production chain as it once was.

Now the argument that musicians can "Make their money somewhere else" is usually presented. Well, there are two problems with this. One, the fact that you have to "find a new monitization system" or "sell T shirts" means that the product itself doesn't really have a lot of profitability. Of course you could upload your song to youtube and get 10 million hits and maybe make a few bucks but to the average musician it won't matter.

Two, because music is associated with free people do not want to spend money anywhere, even concerts which is where a lot of money was made. Add to the fact that getting a DJ is cheaper and easier than hiring musicians and you see where this is going.

Your job could look like this very soon.

Free is a great tool to leverage business. Store give out free samples all of the time but they are only samples. What happens when your job can be done by a machine that costs virtually nothing? Well your job becomes outsourced.

How do you deal with this problem? Tune in next time and I will tell you how you can avoid this scenario.

Making a lot of small free to play games for mobile

Mobile games seem to be getting simpler and simpler. It makes sense, people don't play the game for very long and most of them are used as a distraction. 

What if, you made a lot of free to play games that took about 20-30 minutes to beat? It's free so most people won't care about the price and you get your app out the door. If you have links to your websites and links to more games, people will come back for more. 

On top of this your total app store download count goes up with every free game released. 

No matter who you are, start a blog if you want to improve

If you want to improve something, anything you should start blogging.

There are so many disciplines that benefit from blogging. Creative disciplines can greatly be improved. When you blog, you create something. If you blog everyday, you create something everyday. Creating something everyday is key to improving.

Back when I was a guitar teacher I told students to practice 15 minutes a day everyday. It was better than playing 30 minutes every other day. The students that practiced everyday got better. It is a very simple and effective way to get better.

If you blog everyday and producing something it can help you get better. The more your produce the better you get. Actually, the improvement happens in between projects. What happens is that you produce something and then you figure out what you can do better. The more you do this process the better you get at whatever you want to do.

If you want to become a creative writer then write a paragraph everyday
If you want to become a good illustrator then draw everyday
Want to learn how to use Photoshop then produce something everyday
Want to learn Illustrator then draw something everyday
If you want to get better at photography the take a picture and upload it everyday
If you want to make games, then make a small game everyday
If you want to make websites, make a small website everyday

There is another benefit to blogging everyday. You get in the habit of getting things done. This is something I had to learn and it was hard. I one summer in University I spent 12 hours creating. All day everyday. This lead to my first entrepreneurial product: 17 educational books.

After that I was ready and able to create more. If you want to create spend your entire day creating. You especially need to do this if want to do it for a living.

How do create a blog? Simply go do blogger.com and create a blog. It takes about 10 minutes to setup. After that star blogging an blog away!

Why write so many essays in school?

Most students write a lot of essays in high school. The only reason is that the government wants you to so they force it on you. It makes sense. You have to write a few pages and defend an argument. Writing essays is a great way to improve your writing.

The only problem is that you will most likely never write essays again after school. A while back on this blog I talked about how students can write blogs instead. The more a student writes the better (more on this later).

One other activity students can do is write sales copies. Email marketing is a lucrative field. I do it almost every day. Writing essays is another area where school hasn't caught up with reality. In reality, you could be training students to be effective members of the 21st century. To do that you have to select the practices of the past which are obsolete and discard them.

A great exercise would be to ask students to pick a product and write an email trying to sell it. It works out an entirely different part of writing and is really under utilized. With anything creative all you have to do is do a lot of it and you get better. It sounds contradictory but the more you produce regardless of quality the better you get.

The other activity that should be encouraged is to write a blog. This is the best way to get students to write. They can write about anything they want to. It would be very easy to mark this. The more blog posts and the more words the higher the mark. There has to be a few rules to this but essentially this is how it works.

You can even ask students to put their work into the Hemingway app. I will be doing that with this blog post.

The debate about writing specific content and reading specific content revolves around the quality. Well in the 1940s, there was a similar debate about comic books. The consensus was that if a person is reading then it is better than causing trouble or other non intelligent activities. Today a lot of teachers still scold kids to not read graphic novels. Who cares, they are reading.

The same thing happens with writing. All you have to do is give people a forum in which they find interesting and they will do more of that activity.

Writing essays is great but there is room for improvement. Instead of writing 100% essays that students hate, write something more interesting. Since this is an international blog. I am sure people from Europe are confused with this post. In North America, the school system is set with an 19th century attitude.

Simple adjustments can have a profound effect.

There are too many games and there will be way too many games in the future

If you haven't checked out this episode from extra credits, go watch it.


It's a good episode. The episode tries to ask the question "are people really getting mad because there are too many games?". A very good solution is presented and that solution is better match making. It makes sense that people want to play a game that they are in the mood for and to have software match it up. It fails to take into the account this problem:

Saturation is the bane of content production. 

 I always say look at where the music industry is today and that's what the game will become. Sure there are stars making millions but there are many people not making any money at all. If you want to produce album ready music you can spend about 500 dollars for the software needed.

While games are expensive to produce the cost is going down and when the cost goes down the quality dips as well.

This isn't bad it's just the way it is.

Sure there will be a few people who make money on their computers in their home. It will be great for some but for many it will be a shock. It will be a shock for people who are used to a game having X features and X budget and to have this game not do well.

Music matching like the game matching above has been around for a while. The biggest problem is that if you want to listen to AC/DC you don't want to listen to a band that sounds like AC/DC you want to listen to guns and roses.

This will work a little differnt for games. But nobody is going to want to play a clone of Candy Crush.

The best bet is have a blog that recommends good games.If you are a game developer get ready for this explosion of games. There are 33 million books on amazon and 14 million songs on iTunes. How many games will there be on the app store in 5 years?

When I learn online I feel like I have a huge advantage over everybody else

Lot's of people want to learn the traditional way. They want to physically go to a classroom hear somebody speak, do the homework ask questions etc.

Learning from your own home on your own time is so much more efficient. I try to learn something new on a daily basis and I only learn online. Why move your body anywhere to exercise your mind?

Not only are the tools of better quality, it is simply more efficient. If you have ever learned by watching a video, you can actually speed up the video to 1.5 times the speed. Once you do this you can never go back to videos in normal time. It just isn't worth the time.

Online learning is for people who simply want to get from A to B as quickly as possible. It trims all of the excess baggage when it comes to learning and just focuses on the content. 

One of the most overlooked advantages to learning with video

Some people love learning by watching videos. One of the most overlooked reasons as to why this is important is the fact that you can watch videos at a faster pace.

When I was making an XBOX 360 game I needed to update my knowledge in C#. There were no post secondary classes that had a course on how to do this and the only course was available through a DVD. The DVD was made with Visual Studio 2005 and we were already in 2009. It was obsolete but most of the information I needed was there.

I was watching the tutorials and going though them one by one. Then I realized that VLC player has a feature that could make your videos play faster. At this point in time I could fly through the videos.

Why go to a lecture in real time when you can watch something at 1.66 the speed. This was my favorite speed to watch videos at. Whenever I watch a tutorial today and it isn't spead up, I don't like watching it.

This is a huge productivity feature nobody talks about. Few educators ever talk about productivity and fewer implement it. 

Watch your videos at a faster rate to learn more in less time.

Check out this blog post about educational apps

I was featured in an article about creating educational apps. You can view it here.

http://www.skilledup.com/blog/how-course-creators-are-following-the-mobile-education-trend/

Is the term social a buzzword?

It seems like everything new is social this and social that. Do start ups really want everything to be social or is it just a buzzword? Should every idea have a social component to it? The core concept is that if people talk about your idea/product/app then it will gain more traction and people will enjoy it more.

There are certain products that are social and certain products that are not. Having a cool cafe can be a social business, your Facebook game about zombies is not.

What about education. Everybody likes to make education social. That is people getting together in a place and sharing their marvelous ideas together and they come out of the experience feeling really positive. Being social and collaboration are extremely important but over emphasis won't get you that far. At the same time over emphasis on being social is just as bad and underemphasis.

Think back to your college days. There were people who locked themselves in a room and studied or produced and there were people who played bridge, world of Warcraft or magic cards depending on how old you are.

Who was more successful in the long run? If anything the asocial people sat down and learned some skills while the social socialized. Turning fantasy into reality is difficult to do so talking about it will get you only part of the way. Actually sitting down and following through will be much more beneficial.

Being asocial is just as bad . Often times people do not even go out to meet people. They just sit in their room and create. While this will get you a good product, you do need to meet people run your ideas through filters.

Where do you draw the line? Because I create technical stuff like apps, games, and creative stuff like music and movies. I can say that if you want to be successful sit in your room, turn off the phone, turn off the internet and get stuff done. This will be a huge advantage to you because most people would rather just fantasize about the future in a coffee shop. If you can get something out the door you put yourself in a whole other category than those who do not.

At the same time, you do have to go out and meet people and you do have to go out and get your ideas tested. Working in a bubble is never good and you need to expand your horizons. Be wrong a few times (or many times).

If you want to create things, I would say be at lest 50% asocial and 50% social. Although in my experience people who are at least 70% asocial tend to be more successful. Any combination above 70/30 will be beneficial. Personally I am about 90/10. After seeing how many people flutter away their time socializing I personally tried hard to go the other way.

I love socializing but not all of the time. Personally, I am really at home in my office. It is my favorite place to be. I guess that makes me an introvert. 

Does using technology keep you mentally sharp in your old age?

When you get older your mental capacity shuts down. I recently read an article saying that your StarCraft 2 ability goes down at the age of 24. It makes sense because there is a lot going on when it comes to a StarCraft 2 game.

It also makes sense that when you get older you are not mentally as sharp. It's harder to learn new things as you get older. Even simple things can be harder than it sounds. I recently played a game to teach kids math. In this game 1-5 animals went into a barn and 1-5 animals left. You had to pick how many animals and what kind of animals remained in the barn. This sounds really simple right? For me I got it right but it was doing the task was much harder than I anticipated.

I have also noticed that older people who are into technology are more "with it". This leads me to believe if somebody is using the most current technology for some reason they are more cognitively able.

When you start to think about it it makes perfect sense. Technology changes all of the time and you have to find a new way of using it. When I upgraded from iOS6 to iOS7 there were a few things that I found hard to do. By using this technology I learnt how to do something new. When you use technology more this happens all of the time.

The short answer is that people are learning when they are simply using technology.

Do music lessons and organized sports make kids future focused?

We have all heard of the marshmallow test you give kids. You give the kid an option to either have one marshmallow now or two later. Most kids eat the first marshmallow but some kids wait. The idea here is that the kids who do not eat the first marshmallow are future focused. They know that if they wait they will be rewarded in the future. This concept works for everything from career planning to savings. 

The core concept is that if you put in the sacrifice today the future you will be better.

If you are a parent and you gave you kid this test and they failed, the good news is that you don't have to jump off the balcony because your kids going to wind up working in some low end job. 

You can really teach your kid to be future focused. You can always talk about being future focused and furthermore you can actually be future focused. You could start saving and working on a new skill.

In implicitly, you can sign you kid up for music lessons or organized sports. Both of these in implicitly teach kids how to be future focused. By putting in the practice today, you will be better tomorrow. Eventually, the kid will understand and see the results of this.

How do you compete with companies that get more than 10 million in funding.

It's no surprise that tech startups in the last few years have received more funding then they are worth. If you are interested you can always google a company with the words "startup capital" or "investment funding". You will be surprised on how many ideas get million dollar evaluations.

What's worse is that now reality hits and these companies and they are not as profitable as they would like to be. That's every business's problem but at the same time. Making even 100 dollars can be challenging let a lone 10 million.

If there is any lesson I had to learn in life it is the lessons that ideas are worthless without execution. I always say whatever happens in reality is what really happens. What happens in your mind never happens.

This is of course a hard lesson. In university a professor told a story about the muses in class. If you don't know the muses are the gods of inspiration. They would "talk" to people and inspire them to create. It's very perceptive as creative people tend to have a flash of inspiration.

Later that day a friend said to me "John I really think the muses talk to you. You have so many ideas". In university I discovered coffee and I did have lots of flashes of inspiration. Suffice to say, I am an idea guy. If you flash forward a few years until after I graduated, I was confronted with the 2008 global financial crisis and the harsh reality of nobody caring about your ideas. It wasn't until about 2 years after I graduated that I heard that I could get funding for my ideas.

It seemed simple enough, I could pay myself more than I was making and of course money cures all right? Anybody who actually produces and tries to sell a product will realize that even 1000 dollar loan is hard to pay back let alone a 500k or 2 million dollar loan.

I thought about it but declined. Luckily. I said, there is no way I could get a good ROI on any investment.

How do you compete with companies that get funding. Simple. Produce a product, sell it, listen to your customers, stay small, improve and repeat.

Why does school need to be so unproductive?

We talk about productivity a lot. What does it even mean? In economics, productivity means the rate at which you can produce products. If you are more productive you can can produce products that are better quality for cheaper and today with people thinking about the environment, it means to be less harmful to the environment.

How does this apply to education? Productivity in education would center around these points
1. How fast the students learn
2. How easy it is for the teacher
3. How expensive is it?
4. Overall happiness for both students and teachers.

Currently most school systems are not productive. This is not surprising because most schools use standardized testing. If schools marked produced products instead of standardized test, then we could measure productivity better.

Instead we can focus on the delivery of the material. Most teachers spend their time making lessons for the students. That means teachers spend all this time making material that is about 90% the same. It would be much better if the lessons were made pre hand and the students could then watch the videos. They would still go to class, but watch the lectures in class. If they didn't get what the teachers were saying the students could go watch the videos at home.

This makes life easier for so many reasons. The first is that the teachers don't have to make lessons plan each night. The second is that the students can watch the videos as many times as they need. Lastly, it frees up the teacher to help the students who need help.

This makes the classroom way more productive. It also makes life easier for a teacher. That may not seem important, but having employees that are not stressed out is really important. A lot of teachers end up burnt out or with even more severe mental problems.

When it comes to mental problems you have to treat them like physical problems. Often times you hear "you wouldn't tell a cancer patient to just deal with it and cheer up". Going with that line of thought, you wouldn't work at a factory that has poor air quality and can give you lung cancer. If you did get cancer and the factory was at fault you could sue them. Why would you want to work at a place that was mentally hazardous in the same way the factory is physically hazardous.

It's only a matter of time before a teacher is going to sue a school board for this reason and win. Frankly teaching the classroom is not fun, tiring and physically exhausting.

All roads point to the online education revolution.

Does dyslexia make you more productive?

It's no surprise that lots of entrepreneurs have lysdexia. If you read through a lot of biographies it comes up again and again. Recently I was watch shark tank and I heard Daymond John say that he was really dyslexic, couldn't read and didn't go to college. His networth is also 250 million. That's a lot more than people I know. You might also think that this might be a one off, but if you talk to a lot of entrepreneurs you find that they do mention just in passing that they are somewhat dyslexic.

Does dyslexia make you more productive? Consider what you would be doing if you were not reading, you would be probably out talking to people and possibly making something. Those two ingredients are perfect for entrepreneurs. On top of that the ideas you would be formulating would be practical ideas versus theoretical ideas.

Entrepreneurship is all about doing and much less about thinking. If thinking practically will always trump thinking theoretically.

This picture really says it all.

When it comes to life your 20's should look like the picture above. So many people change paths or change careers. Ultimately its for the better. The next big idea is just waiting to be discovered and age is not really a factor.

You can start a new idea today with no experience necessary. All you have to do is get started.

What do startups really spend their money on?

In the last post we talked about what not to do when you get your project funded. If you don't know the silicon valley tech startup bubble is either deflating or about to pop. What this means is that mediocre ideas are getting overvalued and getting more money then they are worth.

For example, I could go to an investor with a mediocre idea like: "Let's make educational iPad games for kids and get a lot of funding.

In the real world it doesn't really work like that. You have to build your product first, make some sales, then go to an investor for capital. Although sometimes tech companies can do this process a little differently. Generally you want to make sales first before you go ask for money. The invest is there to leverage your business not make your business.

What are all of these startups spending their money on? Advertising. I see it everyday on my Facebook page and in the ads on the internet. Startups that have too much funding spend a lot of their cash to get the word out.

This is why I don't like to advertise. I can't compete with the "Educational iPad games for kids" start up that just received 2 million dollars pre revenue. It's not cost effective.

For people like me this bubble deflating is going to be a great thing because what you see on the advertising sites will be established companies with profits to actually pay for their advertising. It brings down the noise and it highlights the businesses who are actually profitable.