We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Nicholas Pudjarminta a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Nicholas, so happy to have you on the platform with us today and excited to chat about your lessons and insights. Our ability to make good decisions can massively impact our lives, careers and relationships and so it would be very helpful to hear about how you built your decision-making skills.
My current philosophy on decision-making is to balance creative intuition with the guardrails of logical reasoning. I’ll share a story of how I came to this conclusion!
Throughout my life I’ve explored several creative endeavors like game design, filmmaking, contemporary dance, and painting. I see these disciplines as being very improvisational and feeling-oriented. When I’m designing a game or choreographing a dance, ideas often come in the form of feelings. I think “That felt good” or “That didn’t feel right”. My subconscious does the work pulling from my past experiences to make quick connections. This way of thinking can be applied to all walks of life and it’s a great approach for high-level creative problem-solving. One caveat is that this approach relies on memories and past experiences being accurate and reliable, but sadly I’ve found that this isn’t always the case! Time and time again, I’ve found myself making bad decisions because I overreact to certain feelings like fear. This overreaction happens when my memories are biased and distorted with an emotion.
Here’s a very harmless example, once I was trying to decide whether or not to attend an event in the heart of Los Angeles. Before I could even think about it, my subconscious brain shot a bunch of fear signals saying “Parking in LA sucks, you won’t find a spot, so you shouldn’t go to the event”. In that moment, this rationale felt so true and sound, that I thought “Yeah, parking will be impossible, best to avoid the event!” But before I fully caved into this thought, I began to ask myself some questions: Why do I think this way? How many times have I actually been unable to find parking? Thinking about it some more, I surprised myself by realizing that I couldn’t think of a time I absolutely could not find parking. So I had to override my intuition and go! (I did indeed find parking there) Events like these made me realize how easily my intuition can get hijacked by strong emotions.
So what can I do? An approach I’ve been experimenting with lately is leveraging data! Inspired by my more recent work with technology and science, I’ve been on a quest to build data-driven guardrails for my creative intuition. This may be a little extreme, but I’ve gotten into the habit of collecting a lot of data about my life whether it’s my schedule, thoughts, or feelings. This gives me a baseline of absolute truth of how I operate in specific moments. So anytime I have a loaded thought like “I think this idea is going to be really bad for the project” I’ll log it to my personal database, and then afterward once the project is resolved I’ll go back in and log what was the outcome. Keeping this database has helped me compare my thoughts to my reality, helping me assess how reliable my intuitions are. And if I find that it isn’t reliable I have the data to break down what cognitive distortions have been seeping into my brain! I’ve found this dynamic to work well for me as it encourages my artistic side to go with my intuition and generate lots of creative ideas. And once I have that list of creative ideas, my data-driven framework can then help me choose which of those ideas I should listen to most.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
I’m a producer making games, films, and experiences that push the boundaries of storytelling and technology!
My journey began as a young kid amazed by the immersive qualities of video games. At 11, I made an eventful Google search: “How to make a video game?” I immediately downloaded a 3D software called Blender and began to make everything from 3D models, animations, and games. However, as my projects got bigger, I realized I couldn’t do everything on my own. So I moved to LA, attended USC, and learned to become a producer! So now, rather than doing all the technical and creative things myself, I’m the one that brings people together and facilitates collaboration. Over the years I’ve led some awesome teams with projects that have been recognized by MIT Reality Hack, BAFTA, IndieCade, and Games for Change.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
Curiosity, storytelling, and empathy!
Curiosity is so critical because it is what excites us to learn about the world and develop new skills. I think curiosity’s biggest enemy is fear: Fear of failure, fear of discomfort, fear of judgment, and fear of opportunity cost. So I believe we must nurture environments where we feel safe to explore our interests without external pressures like getting into a particular job or school. That’s when we can allow our genuine curiosity to thrive! And the irony is, that curiosity often drives us to learn great things that will indirectly help us get that dream job or school.
Storytelling is one of the most underrated life skills. No matter how good we are at something if we can’t communicate our story, we’ll be left in an empty vacuum! One way we can nurture storytelling is to engage with a variety of different stories. In 2020, I did an experiment where I forced myself to watch 250 films from different genres, time periods, and countries. It was a very successful experiment, and I found it gave me a strong intuition of what effective and ineffective storytelling was. Then I began to apply this to my day-to-day life. Every time I need to communicate something important to another person, I think about the message I want to share and ask myself what is the beginning, middle, and end of this story. Life is all but a story we tell to each other! Disclaimer, in my note about watching lots of films I put a lot of emphasis on consuming diverse content! I don’t think watching 250 Marvel films will be very valuable…
Empathy allows us to understand and connect with each other. No matter how good we are at something and how good we are at pitching that something, if we can’t connect with those around us life is gonna be pretty sad! And I do believe empathy is a muscle that we all need to train and practice. It is not a static personality trait. I think one of the best ways to nurture empathy is to expose ourselves to as many different types of people as possible, That means connecting with people from different occupations, religions, ethnicities, and political views. We don’t have to agree with everything, but we can do our best to understand their different points of view.
We’ve all got limited resources, time, energy, focus etc – so if you had to choose between going all in on your strengths or working on areas where you aren’t as strong, what would you choose?
I think it depends on what kind of job/ industry you want to get into. Some roles are very suitable for well-rounded generalists like general managers while others are good for hyper-focused specialists like specialized engineers.
In my own life, I’ve pushed to be more well-rounded, which works well for producers who need to know a lot of different skills. A fun example of me putting tons of energy into something I was horrible at is my relationship with dance! When I was in Highschool I joined an extracurricular club where we had to make this playful dance performance for United Nations Day. It was a club for non-dancers and by the end, I was mocked by a classmate for being the “baseline of sh*t dancing”. This really annoyed me, and at that moment I decided I wanted to prove to myself that I could be really good at it. So I committed myself to the world of dance, practicing 3-5 times a week, and enrolling in a ton of classes. Two years later, I got on the Varsity dance team and performed internationally in Taiwan! I was able to prove to myself that I wasn’t the baseline of sh*t dancing! More importantly, this experience taught me that we all have the capacity to thrive in what we’re bad at as long as we have the time, resources, and interest to pursue it!
Experiences like these may not directly impact my career, but they give me a growth mindset and confidence that I can adapt to whatever life throws at me. Which I believe will only get more important as we navigate our rapidly changing world!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.nickpudjarminta.com/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholas-pudjarminta/
Image Credits
Qeisan Kendy, IG: @qyuwithaqyu
Sean Chee
Harris McCabe
so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.
