View from the train outside Berlin, 2018
I’ve done a lot of different things in my 39 years (so far) and whereas I used to think of them as scattered, I now start to see them as a kind of spiraling web of connections. This perspective is useful to me because it helps me to understand and trust my weird compulsive desire to go and intensely learn and do new, and often disparate things.
Things I’ve done, semi-in order:
Edited video art for money (and lots of boring stuff too)
Taught adults technical skills
Made my own short weird films and music videos
Worked on someone else’s feature films
Made experimental electronic music
Started an independent record label
Performed music live
Worked in sports broadcasting (did not like this)
Worked for a crazy lady at a video transfer house who used to take pills, cry at work, fight with the customers and let her dog poop in the office (this was 2008 after the financial crisis, absolutely awful)
Taught people how to produce electronic music
Learned how to make YouTube tutorials
Taught myself online marketing
Learned game development and computer programming
And now I work at Unity and do something which is a weird salad of many of those things and skills from over the past 25 years. The point of the list is that I’ve sort of zigged and zagged through a unique career path. At no point could I have predicted the next step, even a year in advance. The pattern is: I do something for a while, get super interested, try to learn everything about it, some period of months or years go by and then I get interested in something new and often unconnected, and repeat the process.
Historically I used to get a bit stressed about this. “I just spent all this time learning this stuff! What a waste to go do something new?” But then I go do the new thing anyway. As the process repeats though, I realize that each time I change I still have all the old learnings in my head and it becomes a useful lens to look at the new thing through, and sometimes is directly helpful.
I learned to edit video when I was 15 as an intern, and the vast majority of my jobs since then have somehow involved that skill. I got excited to learn music when I realized it was something you could do by editing things on a timeline on the computer.
This week I’ve been working on a small art video game project called Alea City One as part of the Procjam event. The feeling of being able to create something that involves sound, image, time and interactivity is really good. It feels like I’m getting closer to the things I always wanted to make. The feeling of being able to express myself across multiple disciplines and having them inform each other is super gratifying.
I think if i had tried to be more “serious” and single mindedly pursued any single one of the various things I’ve passed through, I would have missed this moment. The advice then is: just do the thing you’re interested in now. Do it with intensity and learn all about it. Life is strange and you absolutely do not know what will happen next or what you will need to know. Learning things is fun.
