5) Is there an opt in or opt out clause for data collection?
Users will be allowed to opt-out of Mass Effect 3 data collection from inside the game.

For those who are not familiar, the Mass Effect games are role playing action adventures where the story changes and unfolds based on the various choices the player makes along the way. The data collection being referred to here involves the player’s PC/console sending anonymous statistics back to EA (the publisher) and Bioware (the developer). I find it a little bizarre – although not un-expected – that there are people who complained about this enough that the newest game now has the option to turn it off. Apparently people are complaining so much so that in a list of only eight “commonly asked questions” this one makes the list.

Why?

Seriously… why?

These aren’t the tinfoil hat crowd of videogame conspiracy theorists, but rather most of them are generally thinking people who I assume to have a generally reasonable view of the world. If I give them the raw benefit of the doubt I hope that their argument is more existential than paranoid. I hope their concern is, “If we let you report statistics about how we play your game, it’s a slippery slope to letting companies collect more personal information about our non-gaming lives.” I hope their concern is, “You say you are only reporting anonymous gameplay statistics, but how can we be sure that’s true?” The concern of having your personal computer secretly logging and sending information about you to some corporate datastore is valid… but only to a point. I mean, if you are paranoid enough to not believe Bioware’s claims about the data they are collecting then why would you believe that changing the in-game option to “off” would actually turn anything off?

I find it regularly hilarious how delusional most people seem to be about their current level of privacy. I posted a link on Facebook a short while back (that I can’t find right now) about people complaining that software on their new iPhones kept a log of their text messages and phone usage, which could then be ostensibly reported back to their carriers. Of course I found this hilarious. Do people actually, honestly believe that their cell phone carriers don’t already have access to that information? Do you think that your cell phone company doesn’t have the ability to read every one of your text messages or listen in on every one of your phone calls? It’s like being shocked that your mailman has the ability to read all of your mail. He (probably) doesn’t read your mail, and neither does your cell phone company, but of course they could.

Spoiler alert! – you probably have a GPS system inside your cell phone that allows them to track you to within one meter.

Spoiler alert! – even without GPS your cell phone’s location can be triangulated using nearby cell towers to within about 50 meters.

Aside from criminals on the run, who honestly cares?

The technology that allows Big Brother to find you with your cell phone is the same technology that lets you find the nearest Starbucks (or in my case, allows me to find my phone when it gets lost). The technology that lets Verizon listen to your calls is the same one that lets YOU listen to your calls. The satellite uplink in your car that allows Ford (theoretically) to track where and how frequently you drive is the same system that allows them to send you an ambulance when you get in a car crash.

This is the world you live in. Deal with it.

Data collection exists everywhere all the time in everything you do, and this data aggregation will always have a fringe case where someone can reasonably ask “what if the terrorists/Big Brother/illuminati use that data for evil?!”

My response is usually, “yeah, i guess… whatever.”

• Google knows the history of what I have searched for.
• My bank knows how much money I have.
• My credit card company knows how often I go to Taco Bell.

I just don’t really care. I don’t consider that an invasion of my privacy. I realize that some people do. These are the people who run their internet connections through proxy DNS routers, keep their cash under their mattress, and wouldn’t ever dream of having a credit card in their real name. I wish those people nothing but happiness, but I am content to live in the normal world. The normal world allows for endless convenience and entertainment, but it also requires that you accept certain realities.

When I go to the grocery store I always use my store membership card. I would argue that it’s stupid not to, and I think most people would agree with me. Have you ever stopped to wonder why stores are willing to give such widespread discounts to people who sign up for and use those membership/savings cards? I could be wildly wrong – having never studied grocery store marketing – but I see two obvious answers that make sense.

1. Presumed customer loyalty.
2. Data aggregation.

Number one is obvious. If you bother to get a card you are theoretically much more likely to shop at that particular store again instead of using their competitor across the street. However, because the practice is now universal to all major stores – and access to these cards is free, fast, and easy – I expect this reason to be decreasingly worthwhile. If anything, NOT offering a savings card is more likely to cause people to NOT shop at your store, rather than the original intent of the opposite.

Number two strikes me as the real value to the store. Hopefully this isn’t news to any of you, but when you use your savings card the store logs the quantity and cost of every item that you purchase. Over time the stores will have the ability to build a very accurate model of everything that you buy, how much you spend, and when. The store can know how much you are willing to pay for something. The store can identify your preferred brands. The store can accurately measure whether a particular sale or promotion has an effect on your shopping habits.

If you think that data set isn’t worth the fifty cents you just saved on butter, well, I’ve got bad news for you: you’re delusional.

And still I say, “so what?” I recognize that my local Vons store has the ability to look up how much cat food I buy (a lot), but I also don’t care if they have that information. It isn’t an invasion of my privacy for them to know that my cats like their Fancy Feast grilled instead of sliced. It actually makes me happy, because I am directly helping ensure that Vons keeps selling the grilled cans.

I am happy to report usage statistics to Verizon because it shows them where they need to increase their coverage or add more bandwidth. I don’t mind reporting my driving habits to Ford because it helps them build safer, more reliable, and more efficient cars. I don’t mind my bank knowing when and where I am withdrawing money because it tells them where they need to put (or keep) ATMs.

And as for this manufactured Mass Effect 3 controversy, I don’t mind Bioware collecting data about the choices I make in their game. I know for demonstrable fact that they use that data to make better games. There is a ton of crazy shit you can learn from their Mass Effect 2 data. I can understand the fear about secret software running on your computer, but we all need to at least start the conversation from a different place. We can’t start from zero. We have to accept that data aggregation and tracking has become an intrinsic part of the common first world experience.

Privacy is a very real issue with very serious implications. Bioware and EA/Origin is almost laughably silly to be considered a serious part of that conversation.

My Friday was a little bit frustrating. No, it was a good deal more than “a little bit” frustrating, to be honest. I don’t think it would be appropriate for me to go into any real detail about the day’s events though; in fact I may make a few people upset by writing this post at all.

While keeping things vague I will say that I spent a lot of time over the past week modifying my company’s existing systems to build out a custom solution for one of our new clients. We had scheduled a meeting with the client for Friday, and so it seemed like an obvious opportunity to impress this client by racing to finish their large project much sooner than they expected. And so it was that I spent another series of full days and nights pounding away upon my laptop. Thursday in particular was pretty rough, but at 7am Friday morning I finished rolling out my code… only a few brief hours before the scheduled meeting.

And with that, exhausted, I passed out.

I awoke five hours later, my head still groggy, and jumped onto Skype to have a conference call and see how everything had gone.

“It was great. They loved it. You did a really impressive job.”

I was too tired to truly enjoy the compliments, but it still felt nice. All my hard work had paid off and…

“…but I just got off the phone with <CLIENT NAME REDACTED>. They are no longer going to be doing business with us. That’s <REDACTED LARGE NUMBER> dollars of business that we just lost.”

fuck

I am not going to get into the who, what, or why but it basically sorta sucks. Our company isn’t going out of business or anything, but it was definitely not good news. I felt a lot of conflicting emotions. I still do.

* On the one hand I felt proud of what I had done for Client A. On the other hand we just lost Client B.

* On the one hand losing Client B wasn’t my fault at all. On the other hand, I hadn’t done anything to not lose Client B.

* On the one hand I was a little upset with my co-workers since client relations is their job. On the other hand, it actually wasn’t their fault. We all knew Client B, in particular, had a rapidly expiring shelf life. It was inevitable.

The loss of a major client is bad on the surface, but having now digested the situation for a short while, I wonder if it isn’t actually a good thing. And I don’t mean that in the sense of a “look on the bright side” forced optimism. I mean it for a very specific, very personal reason: it has started the countdown on my employment with this company and catalyzed my degree of participation in the company’s operations. Both are critically important, and until Friday morning both were critically absent.

The rebuild of my company began a little over a year ago, and in that time I have defined my participation in a very narrow way. Essentially, my philosophy has been, “I will write the code and handle the technology… you guys can deal with everything else.” I didn’t want to talk to clients. I didn’t want to answer phone calls from customers. I didn’t want to be consulted about revenue, expenses, salaries, investors, or anything else that didn’t live specifically within my databases or code repositories. I never even bothered to make a business card because I didn’t want to talk to anyone who might ask me for one anyways. I really just didn’t care at all about our business as a business, and I regarded our company as an ultimately doomed venture whose only curiosity to me lay in how long the other people I worked with could keep it from going bankrupt.

Yeah, that makes me sound like a huge asshole. I probably am one.

When asked for my opinion about the occasional business decision my answers were always honest but always apathetic. The only times I ever spoke up with any passion were when an idea struck me as egregiously bad. As generally ambivalent and occasionally venomously negative, there were a lot of hurt feelings over the past year. With time I came to realize that my “critiques” were mostly causing problems. Rather than try to be positive and productive, I took the second of two clear options and withdrew my level of participation even farther. If you can’t say anything nice…

To fully understand my ambivalence you should probably go back and read every post I have ever written on this blog. Start in 2004. The answer is too complicated to contain within one post (or probably any number of them). The best way that I can remember having explained it here was in one half of one paragraph of one post from 2008.

As a perhaps unfair analogy, it felt as if I worked at a grocery store. Sure our store made money – maybe because we specialized in organic foods or had stumbled upon a good location – but there is nothing special about selling groceries. If I did my job really well we might be able to sell a lot of groceries, or maybe someday open a bigger store, but at the end of the day – at the end of my career – I would still be selling groceries.

I guess you either understand me from that… or you don’t.

My company is not special. What we do is not special. The way we do it is not special. The people who work there are not special (other than that one of them is me). We could become the most outrageously successful version of our company that the world will ever know, and it still will not be special. I can sell the largest amount of the highest priced, most delicious groceries on earth… but I am still just a grocery store. For most people – from my life-to-date’s acquired understanding of “most people” – selling a shit-ton of groceries would be awesome. For me, I don’t think I could ever be proud of myself for that.

And if the most extravagantly successful version of our company still makes me think, “so what?” then why should I waste my time struggling to accomplish some fraction of that success?

That has been my mindset. At least until the past month. And most specifically, until Friday.

I still don’t give a shit about what my company does or how it does it. We do not make the world better in any way, and that isn’t going to change. I have been thinking a lot about it, however, and am beginning to recognize that there is inherent value in attaining success. And by value I don’t mean money; financial statements are just the scoreboard.

Of all places, this is where I found my epiphany:

Burnt out from my all-nighter and bummed out from my conference call, I spent Friday afternoon playing Skyrim. After 60+ hours of playtime my character is an un-killable badass archmage at this point, with effectively maxed-out stats, spells, and equipment. As I walked into a newly discovered town an NPC ran up to me and told me a story about a demon who had taken over a nearby cave and blah blah blah could I please help? I happily accepted his quest and set off to kill the demon and save the town.

But why do any of that? The town was small, the quest was unrelated to the game’s main story line, the demon could almost certainly not even hurt me (let alone kill me), and there was no item it could drop that would be better than what I already had. There was literally no direct benefit to me killing the demon. And so of course that’s what I spent the next half hour doing.

While crawling the dungeon I wondered to myself why I felt compelled to be doing it. OCD completionism is one easy answer, but there is another.

It felt important to me because success has inherent value. I could try something and accomplish it. And totally regardless of difficulty, effort, or reward the accomplishment of my goal has value to me. You climb the mountain because it’s there. You kill the demon because you can. You make your business a successful business because that’s what businesses are for.

It’s probably dumb to explain a change in my mindset about my company by way of explaining my mindset while playing a videogame, but whatever… maybe that analogy will resonate with somebody.

Yes, we lost Client B on Friday. But I also impressed Client A. Maybe I could have impressed Client B too if I had ever bothered to try. In Skyrim I don’t accept the townspeople’s quest, walk into the cave, and then take my hands off the keyboard and watch my character die. If I am going to accept the quest, I am going to complete the quest. I walk into that cave and start slinging some motherfucking fireballs. It should be the same in real life. If I am going to bother spending part of my life working for this company, I should spend that time doing the best and most I can. It shouldn’t matter that I don’t actually care about the townspeople, the demon’s treasure, or the metaphysical value my company provides to the world at large. I lost a client on Friday, start business school on Tuesday, and between the two I realized that somewhere inside of me is an un-killable badass archmage with a quest that he accepted.

I’m sorry it took me this long to start slinging fireballs.

With that said, I had a pretty good year of fantasy sports in 2011.

Back to back league champion, and a perfect, undefeated season too. I’ve played in this league for five seasons, and have two firsts and a second. Those other two years… well, we don’t need to talk about it.

In 2011 I played in a total of four leagues, two for baseball and two for football.

Baseball League #1 – 1st place in 14-team league. Paid $1135 (150 buy-in, split with lukas)
Baseball League #2 – 3rd place in 11-team league. Paid $224 (150 buy-in)
Football League #1 – 1st place in 10-team league. Paid $470 (100 buy-in)
Football League #2 – 3rd place in 12-team league. Paid $525 (150 buy-in)

Overall, that’s a pure profit of $1311.

Or, considering the time that I put into it, roughly fifty cents per hour.

The Queen of Spades.

The first player checked quickly.  The second player casually tapped the table as well, clearly eager to get to showdown without any more of a fight.  Instinctively I reached for my chips. Without looking at the stacks before me, I grabbed what felt to be about 80 dollars worth.  As I moved my hand forward to bet I suddenly felt a wave of guilt.  This was pointless.  No, not pointless… this was something worse.  This was mean-spirited.

Game rules wouldn’t allow me to change my mind and check at this point; I had to bet something. And so, in a wholly meaningless and failed effort to feel less dirty, I only bet 60 of the 80 dollars.  I put the remaining chips back into my stack.  It didn’t matter; both of the players immediately folded their hands.  Eighty dollars, sixty dollars, or twenty dollars, they were not going to call any river bets.

I then turned to the man sitting next to me, an older fellow that I had played with many times before, and said, “Hey.  You want to see something cool?”  And with that I flipped over my hand.

The final board read: Jack of Spades, King of Spades, 9 of Diamonds, 4 of Diamonds, and now the Queen of Spades.

I held the Ace of Spades and Ten of Spades.  I had made a royal flush.

What happened next happened very, very quickly, and thinking back on it now still comes in foggy.  The man next to me literally yelled “Oh My God!” and jumped up out of his seat.  The dealer said “Wow!” and shook her head in disbelief.  Most everyone else at the table yelled, clapped, gasped, or some combination.  Within a few seconds the players at other nearby tables had crowded around us to see what happened.  Somebody patted me on the back, while somebody else came over and shook my hand.  The poker room manager came over, congratulated me, and then told me “that’s not supposed to ever happen.  Something like one in ten million…”

See, it wasn’t merely that I had hit a royal flush.  I had hit THE royal flush.

That night the casino had been running a jackpot promotion in an effort to drive up interest in their poker room.  Casinos do these all the time, and like all such promotions they are structured to tease their customers, but never go too far.  There is one large grand prize that is nearly impossible to win, and then a lot of much smaller prizes that people win all the time.  It’s like playing the Monopoly pieces at McDonalds.  You “could win $1,000,000!!” they say, but nobody ever does.  Instead, you win a free hamburger.   Nobody is ever upset to not win the million dollars, because nobody ever expects to, but winning the hamburger makes you feel happy and that’s what McDonalds is going for.  Of course, nobody would bother choosing McDonalds over Burger King simply because of the chance at winning a free hamburger, but they probably would make that same choice for a freeroll on a million dollars.  The million is the carrot; the occasional hamburger is the reward for trying.  Casinos work the same way.  You will sit in front of the progressive slot machine because of the enormous ever-increasing jackpot number it displays above your head.  You don’t expect to win big, but given the choice between the machine with the big numbers over it, and the one in the corner with no numbers, the choice is obvious to most.

Poker room promotions typically change from month to month, but on this particular night the jackpots revolved around the always sexy, ever elusive royal flush.  If you made a royal in hearts, diamonds, or clubs the casino would pay you $1000.  If you made the royal flush in spades the casino would pay you $20,000.

The carrot was the $20,000 jackpot, but in a manipulative (and intelligent) move to further decrease their risk the casino said that the 20k only applied to spades.  What’s more, the player had to make the royal flush while holding two of the five cards in his hand, and one of them had to be the ace.  If you made a royal flush holding the jack and queen, it wasn’t worth anything.  If you only held the ace, and then the 10-J-Q-K came on the board, congratulations… you don’t win anything.  You had to hold one of four exact hand combinations (suited AK AQ AJ A10), and then you needed the board to come with a perfect three out of five.  Oh… and then even if you do make a royal flush holding two cards including the ace, there was a 3 out of 4 chance that it was only worth the $1,000.  You had to do it in spades to win big.

Even so, the casino was still able to run an ad campaign stating “Make a royal flush, win $20,000!!”

I make it sound a bit dishonest, but in Vegas these things are so common that nobody is ever fooled anyways.  I still go to McDonalds for the Monopoly pieces even though I assume (without evidence) that there is only ever one printed Park Place piece in the entire world.  Winning the million dollars is never going to happen, but why would I pass up a freeroll?

Well, when that queen of spades rolled off on the river my freeroll came in.  I had made a royal flush.  I had done it using both of my hole cards.  One of them was the ace.  And most importantly of all, the suit was spades.

For my dazzling display of pure luck I was rewarded with $20,000.  Everyone else at my table won $1,000 just for being there.  Although they knew about my 20k, not everyone at the table realized they won a thousand because of it.  When I told her about it, a lady two seats away leaned over the table and kissed me.

The room around me went completely apeshit for about five minutes.  For my part, I just stayed in my seat, watched these people lose their minds, and alternately smiled and said “thanks” as strangers congratulated me for my win.

It took me a while to write this post because I wanted to put some emotional distance between the win and the account.   More than that, I needed some time to find a way to accurately describe the win without sounding like an asshole.  It’s been about a month now, and I still haven’t found that way.

Sitting in my chair at the end of the poker table, people screaming all around me, I instantly became excessively self-aware.  Everyone was looking at me, all with their own motivations and judgments, and I felt bizarrely obligated to somehow reward their attention.  I felt like I was supposed to be overtly celebrating more than they were, even though I didn’t feel like yelling, clapping, or even smiling too much more than usual.  I shook peoples’ hands, but only because they offered me theirs and I didn’t want to be rude.  When the people at my table said congratulations, I said congratulations back, reminding them that they had won too.  It was all very weird.  Maybe it was shock, but I didn’t feel like celebrating at all.  I actually felt bad because I knew that everyone in the room was watching me, expecting a crazy reaction that I wasn’t going to give them.  I smiled a lot, but that was it.  I didn’t jump, I didn’t dance. I don’t think that I even got out of my chair for at least ten minutes.

Outwardly I mostly stayed my same composed self, but internally the adrenaline had taken full effect.  I picked up my cell phone with hopes of taking a picture of the cards, but my hands were shaking so badly I nearly dropped the entire thing.  I asked one of the other players to please take a picture with my camera, and he was kind enough to oblige.  He took three pictures, all of them blurry, but at that moment I couldn’t possibly have done better myself.

Perhaps fifteen minutes later it finally occurred to me that I should tell somebody what had just happened.  It’s strange, but I didn’t know who to tell or how to tell them.  With still shaking hands I awkwardly texted my brother.  “Just hit the jackpot.  Won $20,000.”

Simple and to the point.

I texted Lukas and Matt something similar, and then got up from the table to call my parents.  Over the next half hour I made half of a dozen calls, all of them with the same awkward intro: “Hey… so do you want to hear something cool?…”  I wanted to tell people what happened, but didn’t want to sound like I was bragging.  I was playing poker, they dealt me a royal flush, and oh by the way now I get twenty grand… just wanted to let you know.

I won’t pretend like my reaction to the jackpot was normal, but I also won’t pretend to know what a normal reaction looks like.  A few years ago a man sitting at my table hit a jackpot for $45,000.  He sat there in seemingly stunned silence for a short while, but about ten minutes later his wife came in to check on him and he finally spoke out loud.  She literally fainted when she heard the news.  It was pretty hilarious, actually.

I can’t imagine ever fainting in a poker room.  I never clap, cheer, yell, jump or curse either.  I don’t taunt people when I win and I don’t throw cards when I lose.  I occasionally roll my eyes or shake my head, but I make a strong effort to keep my emotions flat whenever I’m in a casino.  When I lose a big hand I force myself to say “Nice hand.”  When I win a big hand I force myself to say nothing at all.  Everyone hates a bad loser.  Everyone hates a bad winner even more.

I suppose that I’ve been actively suppressing my emotions for so long now that I apparently can’t turn it off, even when it’s both expected and encouraged.  Whether I win a $20 pot or a $20,000 jackpot, I don’t feel much more happiness.  It’s gross, and probably unhealthy, but it’s also the reason that I don’t play poker very much anymore.  I’ve probably written about it here before, and definitely talked about it IRL: the ups never feel as good as the downs feel bad.  Although I’ve thought about the concept a lot, before my royal flush I didn’t realize the extent of my complex.

Barry Greenstein, a famously successful poker player, wrote a book called Ace on the River.  Within the book is a section where Barry provides a personality self-quiz to help determine whether you have “what it takes” to be a professional poker player.  Not surprisingly, almost everyone fails the quiz.  The problem, as the author explains it, is that a poker player requires a very specific combination of personality attributes in order to succeed.  Finding that combination within the same person is exceedingly rare.  Lukas and I both took the quiz, and he failed it on multiple fronts.  As I remember it, I failed the quiz too, but only on one point.  At the time I thought that basically meant I passed.  It took me a long time to realize that the seemingly dumb little quiz was right.

Most people can’t handle gambling because they can’t detach themselves from the value of money.  I see this all the time, and it almost always makes me laugh.  People who lose $100 playing blackjack and then whine about how much they lost.  People who are afraid to double down a $5 bet when they are showing an 11 against the dealer’s 6.  People who buy into a $2-4 limit poker game for $20, get dealt pocket aces, and don’t raise.

I will never, ever, ever understand those people.

It’s not fair of me to judge people who are risk-adverse (or simply poor), but I can’t identify with a person who gambles with money that they can’t afford.  Worse, I can’t identify with a person who lets the real-world value of their chips affect the way they play a particular game.  If you can’t handle losing the $5, then don’t sit at the blackjack table.  If you do sit down, you better bet the $5 like it’s already lost.

Anyways, long story short: I don’t have that problem.  Concerns about real world money are important when buying chips in the beginning, and cashing them out at the end.  In between, the chips are nothing but clay pieces acting as a scoreboard.  If you ever play blackjack with me you’ll probably hear me saying things like “plus 2” or “minus 4 point 5.”  I’m not counting cards; I am just tracking my bets.  I sit down at a table with a particular multiple of my bet size, and then track wins and losses based on that.  If I am betting $10 per hand and am up $50 then I am “plus five.”  If I am playing $25 per hand and am ahead $125 I am also “plus five.”  The particular bet size is irrelevant.  Before I even show up to the casino I would have decided, as an example, that I am comfortable losing $500 and that I want to play $25/hand.  That gives me twenty bets to play with.  Not five hundred dollars.  Twenty bets.  Hours later when I’m driving home I will convert back to real world money and feel happy or sad about the dollars won or lost, but from parking lot to parking lot real money does not exist.  The abstraction of money and chips is easy to write about, but extremely difficult to practice.  It is the number one “flaw” in most wannabe gamblers, but I actually do very well with it.

The second major personality trait that most failed poker players lack is a true sense of empathy.  You have to be able to put yourself in your opponent’s position and understand enough about them to understand their motivations and actions.  As a skill it is non-obvious and impossible to either measure or explain, but it is something that is easy to notice when players can’t do it.  Without empathy you are forced to play reactively.  You can only respond to what your opponent actually does instead of exploiting the reasons for why he did it.  I feel like my sense of empathy is well above average, but I would argue that it is also the most wildly overestimated ability in poker.  Everyone thinks they are good at it, almost nobody is.  In an effort at humility I will admit that I used to be much better at using my empathy than I am right now.  It used to be fairly easy for me to just understand what somebody was going to do at a poker table before they did it.  Now that sense of total control is much rarer.  That isn’t what’s holding me back though.

The third important aspect of a poker player’s personality is sympathy.  To be a professional poker player, you have to be able to turn it off.  That is what I lack.   That is why I stopped playing.  Empathy means that you understand your opponent.  Sympathy means that you care about your opponent.  It is crucial to have one, but not the other.  I need to know you well enough to find your weaknesses, but not care about using those weaknesses to hurt you.  I have spent a lot of time trying, but I can’t seem to turn off my sympathy.

When I say that the highs don’t feel as good as the lows feel bad, it is sympathy that is to blame.  When I lose a lot, I feel the pain.  I acutely feel the loss of money, but just as bitter is the understanding of my personal failure.  I HATE losing.  Meanwhile, I like winning… but I don’t LOVE winning.  Poker is generally a zero-sum game, meaning that for somebody to win somebody else has to lose.  When I win a big pot, it necessarily means that somebody lost a big pot.  I feel good about my win, but the sympathetic part of me feels bad for the guy who lost.  So when I lose, I feel the full force of the misery.  But when I win my joy is offset by the pain of having hurt someone else.  I can’t truly celebrate my wins because I am too aware of the other player’s loss.

Hitting the jackpot didn’t have this problem of course.  Not only did none of the other players lose for my gain, but they all won small jackpots of their own.  The only loser was the faceless mega-corporation that owns the casino.  I obviously don’t feel bad for taking a corporation’s money.

So then why wasn’t I happy?  Why didn’t I scream or yell or jump out of my chair?

Eight days after hitting the royal flush I found myself back in the same poker room.  While waiting for a seat one of the floor managers came up to talk to me.  “Oh man, so what was it like when you hit that royal?!”

The man was smiling in eager anticipation of hearing about how fucking rad it clearly must have been to win.  What came to my mind when he asked me that, though?

Guilt.

The first thing I thought about was how I had tried to bet eighty dollars on the river.  The casino was about to give me $20,000 and I was still trying to coax just a little bit more cash out of these two genuinely nice other players.  What an asshole.

At that point the jackpot money didn’t mean anything to me yet.  I had conditioned myself too completely for any amount of money (apparently even 20k) to significantly affect my emotions.  Hours and days later it would matter, but sitting at the table it was nothing more than a number to me.  Twenty thousand may as well have been two hundred million; the number was purely a hypothetical.

Still, my empathy allowed me to understand what other people expected from me.  They expected celebration.  They expected shouts of “Drinks are on me!” and a display of raw joy appropriate to twenty grand.  I understood that they were also all judging me, deciding whether I was worthy of the jackpot in some ambiguous way.  Nobody wants to see the asshole win.  They were all watching, trying to decide whether I qualified.  A bit of paranoia definitely set in, but it wasn’t my dominant emotion.

My sense of sympathy would not allow me to get past my river bet.  After the initial eruption, but still in the middle of the mass hysteria, I actually leaned across the table and apologized to the other guys for betting on the river.  They didn’t care of course; they had just won $1,000.  I couldn’t seem to let it go though.  By making that bet I was actively trying to inflict pain on these guys for absolutely no reason.  What did that say about me as a person? In that moment I truly hated myself for what I had instinctively done… and that’s what I remembered most clearly about hitting the royal flush.

The floor manager was still smiling at me, still waiting for my answer.

I smiled back at him and lied to his face.  “Yeah… it was pretty great.”

(thinking about my recent purchases these recommendations are embarrassingly not wrong… *sigh*)

This was page one.

Page two was the announcement of the PC launch for Assassin’s Creed.

And this was page three… the last page, and two clicks in.

It’s not a big deal or anything, but your credit card and personal information may have been captured by an unknown group of hackers. But on the bright side, if your cards still work and your identity hasn’t been stolen, you can save big on Sniper: Ghost Warrior!

That’s not entirely true, of course. Some people came – enough of them to recoup our costs – but it was nowhere near the amount of traffic we expected. After another six months of break-even operation, problems in our separate personal lives forced us both to abandon our project and seek refuge in the steady paychecks of otherwise normal day-jobs. Our failure came to us both as a shock. Clearly we were too idealistic, but I had a hard time coming to terms with the realities of business. It just didn’t make sense to me. We had created a quality product that would be very useful to a large number of people. Shouldn’t that be enough?

That was the first time that I ever seriously considered going to business school.

If you were to ask all the people who know me, I doubt any of them could give you a good answer as to why I would want to go to business school. The majority of people – those who know me only casually – would expect me to eventually earn a post-graduate degree, though most would probably guess it to be a PhD and not an MBA. To them I am the smart, quiet kid who did well in school and for some unknown reason seemed to enjoy it. Those people long ago came to assume that I would end up with a high paying job doing something that they’d never heard of and probably wouldn’t understand even if I tried to explain it. They would think of me as the sort of person who spends his time doing research on the high-level, abstract theories that are ultimately important to the world, but never practical to their own lives. Business school, with its emphasis on “real world” education, would seem only slightly out of place in their view of my life, but ultimately none of them would be surprised to learn I had an MBA.

Meanwhile, the few people who know me well would probably never imagine me going to business school at all… ever. I am nowhere close to the popular image of the “corporate type.” To them – and admittedly, even me – MBAs are stereotypically for lawyers and finance-types. Most people seem to get an MBA to help them get a better job with a better sounding title and a higher salary. The people who know me best know that none of those things matter to me. To my close friends I am generally regarded as the highly independent kid who likes to figure things out on his own. I am the sort of person who gets restless when he’s not moving, who can’t do the same thing for too long, and who could not survive long within the rigid structure of a typical corporate environment.

In truth, both groups of people are probably right about me; just as both groups are certainly also wrong. Overall, I think that is what makes me a great fit for your business school.

From what I understand of business school – UNLV and Las Vegas in particular – I am not going to be your typical applicant. What’s more, once accepted I don’t plan on being your typical student. I will bring to your school a skill set, point of view, and method of thinking that I would not expect your typical MBA candidate to have. My particular combination of technical knowledge, industry experience, and personal ambition will hopefully be considered as much an asset to you as your school’s program will be to me.

To more clearly understand what I want from a business degree you need to understand, if only briefly, how I got here. What happened along the way that suddenly turned me into an MBA hopeful?

While in college I devoted a huge amount of my attention to the theoretical. Northwestern is a research university, sure, but more and more I found myself ignoring the general concept courses and burying myself instead in the more ethereal aspects of academia. But after spending so much time worrying about high level theory I increasingly came to feel like something was missing. I didn’t want to spend my life writing papers about my ideas; I wanted to take those ideas and actually build something that normal, everyday people could use.

So instead of going to graduate school I took an internship with NASA and spent a summer working for their education department. We built fun programs that were given away to schools to help kids better learn about the Earth and universe. I worked for free, gave away everything that I made, and watched the bizarre bureaucracy of government first-hand. It was amazing, but only temporary. Unpaid jobs don’t make for great long-term careers.

Eventually I found my way into a tiny internet startup, earning only slight more than the nothing that NASA had paid. While there I got a front row seat to the struggles of a small business, particularly the challenges of relying entirely on the internet for survival. Eventually I left the tiny team of the startup to join the huge workforce at a corporate coding warehouse. I didn’t last long there. I hated being anonymous as just another faceless employee. But more than that, I hated that my work was anonymous too. I wanted what I did to actually matter to people. And so, after a stint working as an independent contractor, I took a job at a non-profit cancer research hospital.

Somewhere along the way my friend and I embarked on our failed attempt at starting our own business. Each of my different jobs had taught me something else about myself, and starting a business brought that all together. I wanted to work for a small company where I could be an active participant in what we made and did. I wanted to create something useful for people; something that improved their lives in some way. I wanted to push myself intellectually. I wanted to struggle at finding the answer to a new problem, not merely repackaging someone else’s solution to an old one. And obviously, I wanted to be able to make a living doing it.

It turns out that the last item on my list was the most difficult to achieve. We made something good and useful, but nobody seemed to want it. Back in school what we had created would have been a terrific success. We had identified a problem and created a solution. It was theoretically perfect. Sadly, the real world didn’t care. I eventually came to understand what I am sure a lot of other people already know: being good is not enough.

So what exactly do I want from business school? Unlike most applicants, it isn’t a better job. I don’t want a more impressive sounding title or a higher annual salary. I don’t care about diplomas, degrees, or initials after my name on a resume. In three years, after graduating from your program, I want to be right back where I am right now.

And then I will try again.

I want to start my own business, create a great and useful product, and have another go of it. Next time, though, I want to be better prepared than I was before. I want to create a product that is not only good, but also a success.

There is a tremendous difference between creating a good product and creating a successful product. I recognize that now. I probably should have recognized it long ago. All my past education and experience has been focused on creating a good product. I want business school to help me understand how to create a successful one.

What I can offer to your school, more than just tuition and a higher average GMAT, is my ambition. I bring with me a technical skill set and wide-ranging work experience, but hopefully I can also provide a slightly different world perspective. I have been a part of the academic and the practical, the startup and the corporate, the public and the private. I have worked for two non-profit companies, one of which was non-profit on purpose. I have been witness to both success and failure, and, with your help, I am eager to better learn what separates the two.