# DotA 2 for Tome.gg Transfer learning from games for mid to senior level software engineers. > *Learn in games, apply it in life. Win at both.* **DotA 2 for Tome.gg** writes about what you can learn from DotA 2 and apply to your mid- to senior-level software engineer career. In your career, your will encounter varying problems, goals, and scenarios. What should you pay attention to? What should you do or what you should not do? That's one of the problems: there are a lot of unknowns. I highly recommend you start with the commitment to know yourself. {% content-ref url="/pages/OBfxV6KQQgt85DzmeiBV" %} [Know yourself](/mental-models/know-yourself) {% endcontent-ref %} ## Information **DotA2 for Tome.gg** is a learning platform led by [Darren](https://sapalo.dev), in collaboration with [The Gaming Classroom](https://app.gitbook.com/s/CnyFLMsXi5AQy7tqzpvw/~/changes/dqiTc3j5wLS6i2FlRujQ/learning-domains/gaming/dota-2/knowing-yourself). **Subscribe to the Tome.gg project by** [**signing up for our newsletter**](https://darrensapalo.typeform.com/to/mIo8hWXx)**!** In the video below, you can listen to Darren talk about his software engineering journey, and how gaming and engineering mindsets intersects. {% embed url="" %} # Know yourself If you find yourself repeatedly failing to be effective in a role, it might be that you don't fully understand what your role is. ### Problem * You find yourself uncertain about what you should be doing at a certain time period. * You find yourself trying repeatedly to do something but you're not getting the results you want. * Your teammates struggle to work with you, or struggle to predict how you would behave or act. ### Recommendation

Understand demand. What does the situation require?

* **Understand demand** - Assess whether or not you are clear on what role you should be playing. What does the situation require? * **Distinguish needs vs. want** - Understand that there is a difference between the role you or your team needs versus the role you want to play. Sometimes, these are two different things and you need to find the balance of what role to play "now" versus what role you want to play "later". * **Accept change** - You may have played a role before that no longer suits you now. You may play a different role next year. This is normal. Know that a lot of things change in life, and that knowing oneself is continuous. * **Be gentle and kind** - You will be a constant companion to yourself until you die. Be kind to yourself. The journey is long- you might as well make yourself a friend along the way. ### Effective use

Balance is when you fit neatly into the role that you are meant to play, while effectively relying on others to play their role.

* **Balance** - By knowing clearly what role you can play and should play, you can better find situations or teams that will work best with your toolkit. This would mean a technologist would partner up with a businessman, and a farmer would partner up with a salesperson. * **Clarity** - Once you have clarified what role you want to play, you'll be able to quickly disqualify distractions, or questions that might cause you to lose focus.

Peace means you are able to avoid chaos you cannot manage, and leverage opportunities that it brings.

* **Peace** - There are various elements of chaos outside of oneself, at play in the world. Many things are outside of our control. But knowing one's self, inclinations, desires, and preferences enables you to maintain order within your mind and your realm. This enables you to have stability as you go out and face the challenges of the world. ### Misuse

Avoid distractions and dawdling.

* **Experiencing distractions and dawdling** - When you don't know what role you should play, you end up getting distracted and wasting a lot of time. There is a fine line between dawdling (mindlessly wandering without directions) and being lost- which can become frustrating.

You'll feel overwhelmed when you're playing your role incorrectly.

* **Overwhelm** - When you repeatedly play the wrong role or force something against your nature, it can feel like things are stacked against you.

Miscommunication and mismatched expectations. Do your teammates know what your plans are?

* **Misalignment, miscommunication with teammates** - By picking a role (e.g. position 5 support) and then suddenly playing differently from that role (e.g. roamingposition 4 ganker), it is very likely that your teammates will misunderstand or be confused about how to work or integrate with you. ### References

As a carry, your goal is to farm. Build your farming item.

* **As a carry, your goal is to farm.** As a position 1 carry in DotA 2, BSJ explains that [you build your farming item first so that you unlock your scaling capability](https://youtube.com/clip/Ugkx6ieL2hJ-yY76mls7lpEZOhNvecjwnz0l) and open up a variety of options such as clearing waves fast so you can push towers.

Recognize your cards and your teammates' cards at play. Will you have enough space to farm?

* **Recognize your cards and your teammates' cards at play.** As a position 1 carry that has a greedy midlaner, BSJ explains that [you can opt to get kill or gank-oriented items instead of your usual farm item](https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxzX7jAZnyDqvXxg7QbCRsByAg0wuwnykh), with the foresight that most of the map space will be taken by your position 2.

Assess and compensate for your hero's weakness.

* **Assess and compensate for your hero's weakness.** Once you unlock your farming capability, you'll need to be able to survive so that you can take up more of your enemy's side of the map. BSJ demonstrates this with how [he leverages his Linken's Sphere on Weaver to initiate skirmishes that he has low commitment to, while causing his enemies to put themselves in bad positions](https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxDLERtdXg5YxIirRYxZS7_Yg2Qvlx_1mg).

Ask the right questions about yourself and the environment around you.

* **Ask the right questions about yourself and the environment around you.** BSJ frames three key questions to ask yourself as a carry: How do I kill the enemies? How do they kill me? How do they survive? "[These are important questions to get into the habit of asking yourself](https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxnsE5SrVekF2HobB4N51yFUifXVuplE5w)." * [Jordan Peterson instructs his students to Clean Your Room](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GmD_cCHfiE) which is related to this idea of starting with setting order to what is within reach (or what is within you) before trying to change something out in the world. * My blog writings on the difference between [wandering and dawdling](https://sapalo.dev/2022/01/30/direction-what-do-i-really-want/), and [how to figure out what you want](https://sapalo.dev/2022/02/08/direction-what-do-i-really-want-2/). # Don't carry rocks Things feel overwhelming and burdensome. ### Problem * You or other people around you whose opinions matter to you, berate you and put you down. * You doubt your capabilities. * You remember your past mistakes and you feel overwhelming embarrassment or feel asamed. ### Recommendation

Accept the truth. Don't let your fear or ego get in the way of grounding yourself and making progress.

* **Accept the truth** - If you did make a mistake, face it and own up to it. Acknowledge the truth that you did something wrong.

Learn to forgive yourself, and use whatever mistakes you've made as a lesson.

* **Forgive yourself** - If you did make a mistake, acknowledge it and learn from it. Understand exactly why you made the mistake, and make commitments to not make the same mistake.

Learn to command your focus not on the errors of the past and the risks of the future. Focus your attention!

* **Don't waste energy; focus your attention** - Focus your energy and efforts into doing better next time. Don't waste energy on bringing yourself down.

The journey is long. Take only what you need.

* **Conserve your energy.** The journey is far, and you have much to accomplish. Don't waste your time and energy carrying unneeded baggage that will weigh you down. ### Effective use * **TBD** ### Misuse * **TBD** ### References * [**The mountain (my personal blog)**](https://sapalo.dev/2020/01/28/the-mountain/) - A blog post on how to overcome great challenges and to sustainably accomplish difficult things. # Use the right tool for the problem Contextualize. You sometimes find that a certain strategy or tactic or solution works effectively on multiple cases, but there are some cases where it doesn't work well. This may be caused by incorrectly equating different cases as similar. Read the situation more carefully. ### Problem * You have a strategy, tactic, or a solution that you often use (e.g. your intellect) that works extremely well for many cases, but fails for some situations (e.g. relationships, love-life). * Your standard personality / way of speaking with people works well with your known set of friends but doesn't usually work for complete strangers. * You only have one way of doing things- and you don't step back to reflect on what are other possible ways. * Historical bias - You look at a situation and scenario and immediately jump to the idea that "this might be the same thing as the thing that I experienced before", when it could possibly be a completely different situation. ### Recommendation * **Practice logical comparisons** - Instead of asking "Are the tools (or situations) really similar?" ask yourself: What are the areas wherein there are similarities and differences? How similar or different are these situations? * **Read more** - Learn about more situations and tools by exposing yourself to the world. Talk to people, read books, and listen to people's stories and put yourself in their shoes. This gives you perspectives on other situations you may not have personally experienced, but by empathizing, you enable yourself to introspect what you would have done (or would have changed about what others did). * **Expect differences and avoid biases** - There are a lot of different things in the world which are not completely equivalent or the same. Learning comes from understanding the small details and being able to articulate the differences. ### Effective use * **Caution** - Instead of jumping straight to assuming that situations are the same, you instead proceed with caution and ask first. Instead of jumping straight for your favorite tool (mindset, solution, technology), you enter the space with a blank slate - ready to comprehend the whole picture. * **Attuned to the unknown** - You are clear about what you know and don't know. This helps you ask questions to truly understand the scenario- which helps you identify what tool is best used. * **Efficient and effective** - By using the right tool for the right situation, you feel the natural benefit working to your advantage. It feels naturally advantageous (e.g. using a screwdriver for a screw, a hammer for a nail, a life vest on a boat, a chalk for a chalkboard). ### Misuse * **Painfully inefficient** - Using the wrong solution may feel comfortable because it is familiar, but it feels slow, and ineffective (e.g. using a hammer for a screw). * **Limited learning** - When you pigeon hole all problems to be alike, you limit your opportunity to acknowledge things that you don't know and understand. This causes a blindness - thinking that you understand it already when you don't. This prevents you from asking questions, because you think you know already, which then stumps your growth. * **Breaking your tools** - You can accidentally break your tools, your materials when you try to use the wrong solution. When working and relating with people, if you only have one strategy for conflict resolution, if that doesn't work out, it is possible that the relationship breaks. ### References * To follow. # Qualify your confidence levels Speak truthfully and precisely. * ### Problem * People who listen to you sometimes understands you and sometimes misunderstands your statements. * You know things but you are not sure if you should say it because you are not completely certain. * People are beginning to distrust what you say because sometimes you are flat out wrong. ### Recommendation

Speak of things that you know of. And remember: it is okay to say "I don't know".

* **Speak of the things you know of** - Speak about things you have sufficient confidence in.

Techies qualifies how dangerous his explosives are: "explosives are only as dangerous as the person who builds them. Uh oh."

* **Say your confidence levels** - It is okay to say “I can only remember this lesson around 40%. Please note that this isn’t an exact quote lifted from the textbook”. This gives your audience some meta information about what you are trying to communicate. This is important context on how specific and accurate your relayed information is.

If there are things that are left to chance, you can simply say the ranges of possibilities, and maybe probabilities as well, rather than make assumptions.

* **Inform your audience about the things you don’t know** - That way they don’t have to wonder if you have already considered certain things, and it is also a great opportunity for others to share and educate you about those topics. This removes the possibility of you being mistaken as trying to mislead people to believe that you know things that you don’t. ### Effective Use * **Truth** - You are able to communicate truthfully - both the known truths and the known uncertainties (the unknowns). * **Clarity** - Your audience has a better understanding of your levels of confidence in the things that you say. * **Shared curiosity** - The burden to “have all the knowledge” is not something you need to bear. By acknowledging the things you don’t know, you position yourself and your audience to ponder and question things together- facilitating learning together. * **Humility** - By admitting the things you don’t know, you humble yourself and open yourself to the opportunity of being taught by the people around you. ### Misuse * **Misled** - People think you know things that you don’t. You set yourself up for opportunities for people to catch you lying (whether intentionally or not). * **Distrust** - People are more doubtful of you because you are not careful with your words. * **Proud** - You struggle to admit the things you don’t know because you think you know everything. You are too proud to admit what you don’t know- so very few (if any) offers to give you feedback or correction. You end up more lost because you fail to admit what you don’t know, or to ask for help. ### Examples * TBD. # Terraform your environment Mastery of oneself can be restrained or amplified by your working environment. * ### Problem * Your place of learning and/or work is not conducive for productivity or growth. * You feel like the people around you and their attitude is slowly corroding and influencing you negatively. * You feel burdened by extraneous or environmental factors that are outside of your control. * You feel limited by the things you have access to, or what is available. ### Recommendation * **Identify and evaluate your environmental dimensions** - There are different environmental dimensions: social environment, living environment, work environment, relationship environment. You evaluate them and determine which ones are doing well and which ones are struggling. You decide which environments to nourish, trim, discard, or retain.

Amplify good environments, to enable and empower yourself in that area. Gain vision, gain information, make better decisions.

* **Amplify good environments** - The good environments that you already have, double down and strengthen them. They will be good foundations for your growth and living. For example, choosing which good classmates to surround yourself with will heavily impact your learning environment.

Minimize the damage from bad environments. Marci struggling to get out of Monkey King's ultimate: Wukong's Command.

* **Minimize the damage from bad environments** - We sometimes do not have control over our environments, and some environments are bad. Recognize these situations and do not waste more effort, energy, attention, or patience in these areas. Recognize the disadvantageous scenarios, prepare to avoid them, and minimize damage and costs. Avoid bullies and avoid high-risk low-reward activities.

Determine when to relocate from bad environments. Monkey King surveying the environment from the tree tops.

* **Determine when to relocate from bad environments** - You may not always be able to afford to relocate and find better opportune environments (e.g. new job, new set of friends, new relationship). Nonetheless, determine for yourself what your exit strategy is, because not knowing when to leave or what your hard boundaries are is a major factor for getting stuck. Not strategizing even though you recognize the problem is worse. ### Effective Use * **Energy-efficient** - You don’t waste time in places, situations, jobs, or relationships that are evidently harmful, toxic, or dangerous. In hard-pressed situations (e.g. family relationships), you know how to minimize your attention, energy, and emotional costs in things you do not have control of. * **Directed** - Recognizing whether an environment is good or bad for you is a fruit of knowing what you want and where you are headed in life. Having a clear mind on what your objective is and what values you stand for gives you clear directions and evaluation metrics on what “good” environments are. * **Empowered** - You feel less helpless. Eventually, you don’t feel helpless anymore, and you feel frustrated. Later, you no longer feel frustration- you just simply have clear focus on the things you need to do because the plan is set- and you just know when to leave bad environments and you can recognize good environments. * **Sustainable** - You are drawn to values and principles that are long-term sustainable, and you look to engage people in long-term trust games rather than short-term advantages with people. * **Mimicry** - When you surround yourself with supporting friends and good influences, you will eventually adopt their positive and action-oriented thinking. As a social creature, you will have a tendency to want to belong to this group, and will adjust your behaviors and mindsets to conform to it. ### Misuse

Helpless and desolate. Barraged by a torrent of spells, Marci wonders, how did I even get here?

* **Helpless and desolate** - You feel helpless and hopeless, and resigned to your fate that you are in the wrong place. * **Distracted** - You choose to find short-term numbing activities (escapism through games, or tv series) and try not to think about the hard questions of what you want and don’t want in your life.

Clueless. Marci gets ganked in the jungle and she's not entirely sure how to escape.

* **Clueless** - You also don’t see “the end of the tunnel” of how to get out of this bad environment or situation.

Envious. Marci attempts to skirmish for the bounty runes but gets booted out. The energy spent feeling hungry for the bounty rune and getting frustrated doesn't result to anything productive.

* **Envious** - You feel envy or jealousy with people who are in better environments, but this negative energy doesn’t translate to anything productive or uplifting for your personal life. * **Inactive** - You recognize that there is a problem, but you don't schedule when you will strategize how to get out of the environment. Break down the task into small steps that are *cheap*: (1) spend 60 seconds dreaming of a better environment and life, (2) spend 2 minutes thinking of when you'll be free in the week, and (3) sit down for 5 minutes and figure out how to get out, when you want to get out, and who you could ask for help from. ### Examples * TBD. ### References * TBD. # Connect with your audience For you to be understood, you need to know who is doing the understanding, and what they know so far. ### Problem * People do not understand what you’re saying. * You have difficulty expressing yourself. ### Recommendation * **Audience-oriented** - Before selecting words and phrases that you want to use, familiarize yourself with the language that your audience already uses. * **Broaden your vocabulary** - Build up your set of options in expressing yourself by reading a lot- whether reading books, exposing yourself to great thinkers and speakers, and researching new words that you don’t understand. This helps you understand differences in terminologies. * **Simplicity** - Use simple language that is easy to understand. ### Effective Use * **Attention-efficient** - Your audience doesn’t get bored and is able to receive the important signal that you wanted to communicate. * **Concise** - The signal to noise ratio of your communication is high - i.e. there’s very little unnecessary words used. * **Complete** - You don’t miss out any important details. * **Correct and confident** - You are communicating what you know to be true, and when you don’t feel confident that things you know is true, you communicate your confidence levels. ### Misuse * **Self-oriented** - You forcefully choose to use language that suits you or what is comfortable to yourself rather than the language that works for other people. * **Excessive and boring** - People get bored or tune out when you start speaking. People struggle to or choose not to pay attention to you. * **Incomplete** - People struggle to understand what you’re saying because you don’t say all of the things you need to communicate. * **Incorrect, or vague** - You say things which are wrong, and when you feel doubtful or not confident about what you know, you don’t tell others about your uncertainty. This frustrates the people you try to talk to. ### Examples * TBD. # Minimize rather than maximize Inverting your perspective on a problem gives you a fresh and broad perspective to the situation. ### Problem * Trying to do more things feel more difficult, or is not creating commensurate value for the effort * It's difficult to decide on what to choose to do, or assess how to do things "better" ### Recommendation * **Invert the problem** - Rather than think of what to do, consider what not to do or what to stop doing instead. * **Make less mistakes** - Rather than how to "do" better (e.g. Get 100 headshots per practice session), consider how to make less mistakes (e.g. Have an accuracy rate of 95%, on headshots in 10 minutes). ### Effective Use * **Optimal use of energy** - You trim down the waste in your movements (e.g. Emotional flailing, doing things you need to undo). * **Safety through minimized risk and harm** - You create value for yourself by minimizing the occurrences of things that can hurt you or others. You encounter less dangers. ### Misuse * **Too much wasted actions** - You find yourself doing things that aren't productive or isn't generating your desired results. * **Fixation on positive action** - You stress out about all the things you could do that you don't consider the inefficient things you already do. This misleads or distracts you. ### Examples * TBD. # Problems, goals, scenarios How to read and navigate using the graph visualization We're currently in the process of building out a visualization so that you can quickly find relevant and useful content on Tome.gg. It takes some time to understand how to interpret and use the graph, which we will explain below in more detail. We understand that people learn in different ways- so we contextualized our content using the following learner mindsets. ## Learner mindset Learners can choose to explore and learn in different ways, and tome.gg supports the following frames of learning: 1. **Problem-centric** - A learner might have encountered a problem that they wish to understand better. 2. **Goal-centric** - A learner might have a specific goal they wish to accomplish. 3. **Scenario-centric** - A learner might be interested to read up and learn more about situations and scenarios, but not necessarily do something. 4. **Mental model-centric** - A learner might be interested to understand how a certain mental model is used and misused. Given the above different mindsets that a learner explores more information, we present tome.gg's content in a graph-based perspective. ## How to read the graph The tome.gg graph is presented through nodes and edges. * **Nodes** - nodes represent a piece of content on tome.gg like a blog post, an article, a youtube video, or others. * **Colors** - colors of the nodes represent whether the node is a (a) mental model, (b) problem, (c) goal, or (d) scenario. * **Edges** - edges represents a relationship between nodes. For contexts, these might be the occurrence or observance of a mental model in a certain context. ## How to navigate the graph To browse through the content rapidly in tome.gg, you can: * **Hover over nodes** to emphasize or highlight the relationships that the selected node has. * **Click a node** to view the content based on its external reference. ## View the graph Currently the visualization overview of tome.gg's content is an unfinished draft. You can view the draft from [this visualization](https://observablehq.com/d/815819df12419798), but do expect bugs and issues! We'll post a message on discord and on the newsletter once the visualization is completed! # Mental Models ## What is a mental model? A mental model is a tool for thinking, reasoning, analysis, and decision making. > A mental model is a kind of internal symbol or representation of external reality, hypothesized to play a major role in cognition, reasoning and decision-making. > > Lifted from Wikipedia contributors. (2022, March 25). Mental model. In *Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia*. Retrieved 07:13, November 24, 2022, from ## Structure The mental models are broken down into five sections: 1. **Problem** - The problem section defines the scenario or situation wherein the mental model might be applicable. It describes a situation wherein some issue is encountered, or an opportunity for improvement exists. 2. **Recommendation** - The recommendation section highlights what actionable things you can do to try to apply the mental model. In practice, application of the mental model will vary. For better contextualization, refer to a specialist or an expert (e.g. a doctor, therapist, coach). 3. **Effective Use** - The effective use section describes what it would be like when you apply the mental model effectively. It paints a picture of what it is like when you reap the benefits of the principle. 4. **Misuse** - The misuse section is different from the problem in that the problem describes the scenario in more detail, while the misuse section focuses on the impact of the problem on yourself. This section digs deeper on the adverse effects and how it can compound with other issues. 5. **References** - The references section enumerates external links, analogies, or domain-specific contexts (e.g. DotA 2, Valorant, games, TV series) wherein this mental model is at play. ## Table of contents The full list of mental models can be viewed sequentially by going to the next page, or you can view an [overview visualization of all the mental models.](/mental-models/use-the-right-tool-for-the-problem) # Privacy Policy ## Privacy Policy Tome.gg ("We" or "I", or "Tome") takes your privacy seriously. To better protect your privacy we provide this privacy policy notice explaining the way your personal information is collected and used. ### Collection of Routine Information This website track basic information about their visitors. This information includes, but is not limited to, IP addresses, browser details, timestamps and referring pages. None of this information can personally identify specific visitors to this website. The information is tracked for routine administration and maintenance purposes. ### Cookies Where necessary, this website uses cookies to store information about a visitor’s preferences and history in order to better serve the user and/or present the user with customized content. ### Advertisement and Other Third Parties Advertising partners and other third parties may use cookies, scripts and/or web beacons to track visitor activities on this website in order to display advertisements and other useful information. Such tracking is done directly by the third parties through their own servers and is subject to their own privacy policies. This website has no access or control over these cookies, scripts and/or web beacons that may be used by third parties. Learn how to [opt out of Google’s cookie usage](http://www.google.com/privacy_ads.html). ### Links to Third Party Websites We have included links on this website for your use and reference. We are not responsible for the privacy policies on these websites. You should be aware that the privacy policies of these websites may differ from our own. ### Security The security of your personal information is important to us, but remember that no method of transmission over the Internet, or method of electronic storage, is 100% secure. While we strive to use commercially acceptable means to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee its absolute security. ### Changes To This Privacy Policy This Privacy Policy is effective as of June 11, 2022 and will remain in effect except with respect to any changes in its provisions in the future, which will be in effect immediately after being posted on this page. We reserve the right to update or change our Privacy Policy at any time and you should check this Privacy Policy periodically. If we make any material changes to this Privacy Policy, we will notify you either through the email address you have provided us, or by placing a prominent notice on our website. ### Contact Information For any questions or concerns regarding the privacy policy, please send us an email to . # Roadmap Tome.gg is all about contextualized learning; more specifically, contextualized learning from play or games. > But what is it exactly? You can immediately see an example by checking out one of the mental models: [Know yourself](/mental-models/know-yourself). ### Focus Initially we are targeting people in the software development industry because we believe technologists and engineers are in the best position to create value and space for people. More space, means more people who can play, learn, and grow. ![Tome.gg is all about contextualized learning: learning from play. We initially focus on the software development industry.](/files/lxWV2Y8iHQ11QWeTkghi) Over time, tome.gg will position itself towards strengthening its impact on the health sector to pursue stability and safety. As compared to other industries, software engineers gain more resources and inherently have more mobility in moving horizontally (shifting jobs to an adjacent role) or vertically (getting promoted). With the surplus, the initial market can participate in producing learning and knowledge content in tome.gg which fellow gamers working in other industries can leverage. ## Summary Temporarily, I just copy-pasted the information I wrote down on the private Discord channel which you can join by [joining the newsletter](https://darrensapalo.typeform.com/to/mIo8hWXx). It gives some high level overview of tome.gg and its plans. {% hint style="info" %} **Currently a work in progress:** Hi there- this page is an example of [doing a shitty job](https://sapalo.dev/2022/01/30/mental-model-do-a-shitty-job/). Sometimes, we just don't have the space to perform at our 100%, and that's perfectly fine. See: I'm doing it right now! In any case, the important thing is being able to communicate enough value while respectfully caring for you, my dear readers, and your time. {% endhint %} ## Pitch The pitch is basically: As competitive gamers, the things we learn to optimize in games, can be applied to advance your professional or personal growth. So tome.gg fuses together education and technology. I've reflected on this for a few years now - things are just synthesizing and becoming more clear for next steps. Ultimately, this startup or service is about LEARNING and growing. I love games, and I love learning to play better in games. I do it because I love learning and I want to share the best practices I've experienced in learning and also learn from others as well. ## Involvement and Contribution > *What kind of involvement can I expect?* Either software development, receiving product directions from me that need to be written down into a document, organizing/managing the project/and or the team. I kind of want to make the startup/service grow small first- but that doesn't mean that interested parties have zero involvement. Some might be beta users, some might be data collection points. If you got invited to this channel, this means you are interested in competitive e-sports and also in the tech industry. You are part of the target demographic of this service, and can be part of the alpha users/potential market we'll be collecting data from. 🙂 On the road map, a big portion of what I expect from you guys would be heavy involvement in (2) market research (with incentives), and maybe a few of you guys might be engaged in some contract to work on this project with me. ### Clarity > *Things are a bit unclear at this stage...* Yes, it is- I have some thoughts for it already and I do need lots of kinds of help. I can understand if you may or may not be completely onboard yet, especially with the lack of details- So for now, sit back and relax for a bit- I'll likely [collect emails so I can send a newsletter](https://darrensapalo.typeform.com/to/mIo8hWXx) for this product/startup growing. ## Road map Forgive the very rough drafts of my plans- this is just really how things begin. 1. Detailing the general idea of the product/service 2. Market research (likely do surveys with you interested participants, who are also similar to the target demographic) 3. Devise a small prototype 4. Identify next set of activities, and the roles/teammates we'll need Currently I am quite busy - but I will have more free time to organize this by July 2022... so that is also why I am checking out interested parties who might wanna work with me here :eyes::stuck\_out\_tongue: ## Hesitations > *I don't think this is for me- sorry. I'm not interested...* That's okay and that's perfectly fine. In the Discord community, you are free to just lurk, observe, or leave altogether! Anything that suits you. Personally, I am practicing a habit of learning OPENLY, which I highly encourage for others to do as well. So if involving yourself in market research and/or the startup may seem intimidating or not your style, know that you are granted the privilege to observe me and the few community members who will be part of the team, as we figure out and study building a startup together. 🙂 ## Let's go 🤩 > *This sounds super exciting, I'm super down for you to send me notifications when the ball gets rolling!* Awesome! Make sure you [sign up for the newsletter](https://darrensapalo.typeform.com/to/mIo8hWXx) so that I can send you updates once we get more stuff going on with tome.gg! At the end of the newsletter, **you'll get a link to join Discord** where you can meet me and a few of my other really lovely set of friends. I usually host learning sessions there where you're perfectly welcome to just pop in and say hello! Thank you for your time, friend. I hope we all get to enjoy the things we love.