One of the best and most undervalued parts of life is when you get frustrated and don’t know what the hell you’re doing.
It doesn’t feel good in the moment – no – but it’s the most obvious place that life gives you to change, grow, learn, and enhance yourself. It’s just that moment where you most clearly get the choice to reevaluate your circumstances and try things from a different angle.
Which, consequently brings me to the story I have for you today.
If you’re either a professional freelance sound designer or someone who is hoping to get there, there’s nearly a 100% chance of you having either dealt with or heard of teams that are hard to get along with.
Most of this, in my experience, is completely unintentional. The vast majority of communication and personality issues come completely from misunderstandings. Usually the circumstance is not what one party would have you believe – that the opposing party sucks and is awful – but misinterpretations of the circumstances on one or both sides.
Such was once the story of my dear friend – some of you know him well – Akash Thakkar.
Hitting a Roadblock
Akash’s internet presence often wouldn’t lead you to inherently believe this – but under the well-kept, eloquent, delightfully personable and successful exterior – he fails, blows it, and gets frustrated just like you and me.
(Between you and me, he’s 100% going to text me after reading that – but I know you’re going to appreciate him more for “revealing” it)
And, once upon a time, Akash reached out to me in the midst of such frustration. I was – like many of you would be – surprised.
He had run into an issue wherein a team he was working with had one individual who was flat out refusing to integrate Wwise into their project. This is age old sound designer story – sound designers love Wwise, the team they work with is skeptical due to price or some other circumstance.
In this case Akash had the budget, just not the buy-in from fellow developers.
No matter how many times he explained the positives of using Wwise – autonomy for him, the massive audio feature set, time savings, support, etc – the conversation always came back to the developers preferring to build their own system.
No matter what he said, the nut wouldn’t crack. And, as someone who prides themselves on their conversational and negotiation prowess, Akash was mind blown.
This almost never happens to him – and he wanted my opinion and how bad I thought the project would be without the tools he’s used to.
I told him that, in my opinion, he had two options:
- Quit now.
- Step outside himself, commiserate and empathize with the development team, and try again.
The Language Barrier
At the time of the aforementioned story, Akash knew literally nothing about programming and software development other than that he hated it.
If I showed him code that could do really incredible things, he’d “ooh” and “ahh” at it – but the moment he had to sit down and decipher it – he would be like a cat in bath water.
He was so averse to it that he would routinely joke to me that he was “the worst Indian ever” – you know, because he’s a sound designer and not a doctor or programmer.
But it was the issue with this development team that literally broke down everything for him. It was the first moment that he began embracing a skill set he knew that he needed, but he never wanted.
And, instead of figuring it out the way the world told him to – he took very, very small steps in his own way.
The true problem with the development team came down to this:
It wasn’t Akash’s needs that they were concerned about, it was theirs. Specifically how his needs would affect theirs.
The reason Akash struggled so hard was due to the fact that he had zero vocabulary to work with. Because he couldn’t speak one word of “programmer” – it was hard to understand and converse with his team and really “get them”.
As soon as Akash flipped from saying “Having Wwise is really going to increase the quality of our product” to “If you don’t work with me to integrate Wwise, I’ll be emailing you daily with feature requests, bugs, and implementation needs. I’m sure this is a massive waste of your time. I think it would be much more awesome if you got to build these sweet 3 features you’ve been talking about! I’m sure you’ll get to build some cool algorithms!”
Everything changed.
And, within 24 hours, Wwise was integrated into the project.
Speaking the Language
If you’ve been on my email list for any length of time, you’ve heard me harp on the concept illustrated in this story forever.
Your needs, desires, dreams, and wishes matter – they 100% do. But, you will attain them exponentially faster when you consider your desires within the context of other’s needs.
Akash’s story with programming and developers didn’t stop there, I’m really happy to tell you. In fact, it wasn’t long after that where he texted me saying literally this:
“YOU BROKE ME! I LOVE CODING NOW!”
Which was amazing and hilarious all at the same time. Mind you – I’m not kidding when I tell you that Akash was the person least interested in programming that I know. He wasn’t just “meh” about it – his face would turn into Mr. Yuck at its very mention.
Except, he also knew that his career would be greatly enhanced if he could just get over that and program even a little bit.
So, he bought Begin Audio Scripting with Reaper.
Then he went through C# Implementation with Wwise and Unity.
And, just a few weeks ago, he texted me that he built a crappy little feature prototype using C# and Unity to demonstrate an idea to a team he’s working with.
The guy who detested coding literally told me that coding a bad feature prototype was easier than trying to verbally explain it to his team. He told me this as if it were no big deal, too. I couldn’t stop laughing.
Added bonus is his team thinks he’s an audio superhero now because he’s willing to do and understand just 1/1,000th of what they do. And, of course, they immediately understood the feature he was thinking of and improved it – he no longer had to “sell” it.
Blatant Shilling
I hope you saw this part coming, because it’s where I tell you that C# Implementation with Wwise and Unity is back on sale this week. The premium version comes with Begin Audio Scripting with Reaper, too.
You’re going to get more stories this week similar to the ones above – not because I want your money (it’s very nice and I appreciate it, but it’s not my end goal) – but because I believe that some of you want to know this stuff and I’m dying to help unlock the potential you’ve got inside of you.
Akash knew that programming would help his career – but he couldn’t have cared less about any programming course on the internet. Learning the fundamentals of any language wasn’t useful to him starting out. He had no interest in becoming a professional software developer and never will!
But if he could learn a little bit, develop his understanding and vocabulary, have some fun, and hack together some neat things… that would be useful. That would even be interesting or fun!
And that’s exactly what C# Implementation with Wwise and Unity exists for. It’s exactly what I want to show you.
Within the course you’ll learn some simple, basic C# concepts, play with Unity, and then get right to hooking up sounds. My assumption is you already know how to use Wwise and you’re familiar enough with the Unity editor – you just have no idea how to make it all work together.
So, this course will show you.
Using the concepts from the premium bonuses and the course – Akash has gone onto way better things than I’ve ever shown him. And, I promise, he probably hates coding just as much as you do (if not more).
So, if any of that sounds up your alley, go get more information here. I’m making limited number of spots available, and the product will disappear again around midnight Saturday morning PST – so take some time, but it won’t be hanging around forever.
As always, if you’ve got any questions, definitely reach out to me by replying or emailing me@adamtcroft.com.
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