The other day I was listening to a YouTube video (yeah, listening) with 2 people that I consider industry experts talking about leadership in videogames.
One of the two quoted this sentence from Orson Welles:
“…in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
His point was that, as a leader, you shouldn’t try to create a peaceful environment. In fact, great things come out from hard times.
This post is not to enter in the center of the question. In fact, those persons are people with at least five years more experience than me. And in companies with great products where I dream working someday. So that for the sake of this post they are right.
But I ask myself: what do I want to do with my job?
Do I want to become a name like Leonardo or Michelangelo? Or do I want to create something that brings fun in every place it is placed, like a cuckoo clock?