Forget zero to one. Before the big leap, there’s a scrappy phase: zero to some. No rules, no manuals—just figuring it out as you go.
Imagine a small, thin metal dome, no bigger than your thumbnail. You place it on the counter, press it, and it makes a gentle pop – not loud, just a subtle shift as it turns itself inside out. You flip it over, press it again, and it pops back. On the desk in front of me, that’s all it does. That’s its entire function.
I’ve got a hand warmer with an almost identical small metal disc inside – given to me, very kindly, by a company I once worked for. It’s a chemical hand warmer: a pouch filled with a supersaturated solution of sodium acetate, and that same kind of silver disc sealed inside.
If you’ve ever used one, you’ll know how it works. You boil it for a few minutes, let it cool, and it ends up looking like a disc in (in my case) blue water. But inside, something’s different. The liquid holds a latent potential. Still. Ready. Waiting.
Then you click the small metal disc, and something magical happens.
Chemically, the action releases a tiny, imperceptible shard from the disc. That tiny bit of energy – in the right environment – changes everything.
The disc flips, just like before. But this time, inside the sodium acetate solution, it triggers a chain reaction. The whole pouch begins to crystallise, radiating a gentle warmth as it does. Before you clicked it, it was just liquid. Afterwards, it’s glowing with energy, transformed by a small act in the right context.
Tribes
This week, something similar happened to me – from a community point of view.
A game studio I’m very close to had to close down. It’s heartbreaking. Redundancies. Uncertainty. Friends and colleagues left wondering what’s next. And others – those who had to make the decisions – doubtless left with sleepless nights and no easy answers.
Games are hard.
So I took a small step. I set up a Discord group – just a place for people to gather, talk, and support each other.
Over the years, I’ve met so many brilliant people in this industry. Game development has a wonderful way of attracting phenomenal talent. So I sent out a quiet message, essentially:
“I started a discord group. If you’d like to be part of this, drop me a message and I’ll add you in.”1
That group now has 150+ people and is still growing. Not big numbers in social media terms – but this isn’t social media. This is a very different tribe.
The act wasn’t efficiency-based, best-practice-driven, or planned. Other people could follow the same process and get different results. But this was 150+ battle-hardened AAA game developers, gathered in just four days. And it’s a privilege to belong to the tribe.
It’s not open to everyone, and that’s deliberate. It’s a tribe – trusted, close-knit, and built on shared experience.
I didn’t set out to lead anything, but I did feel a responsibility to create a space – something calm and useful in a time of upheaval.
The tribe was always there. Scattered geographically. Spread out over time. But it existed – waiting in the soup, so to speak. And that Discord invite? That was the click of the disc.
In the wrong environment, that tiny dome just makes a quiet pop. But in the right one, the same disc – unchanged – can create warmth, comfort, and even joy.
I’ll be thinking about it a lot in the future – about community, about responsibility, and about what happens when you give people the right conditions to come together.
Sometimes, you don’t need to create something new. You just need to be the right disc, in the right soup, at the right time.
I read Zero to One by Peter Thiel about a decade ago, and over time, I’d forgotten that it’s rarely zero. Sometimes it’s a supersaturated solution – waiting patiently for the right disc to make a tiny pop.
Maybe that’s what quiet leadership is.
Not telling people where to go, but creating the space where they can move forward together.
Identity and character come before efficiency and best practice. That stuff comes after the big change eventually settles down.
Before comes the mess. And the fog. And the whispered emotion that moves things forward.
I’m a toy maker.
I trade in joy.
And grace.
And purpose.
