How Your Career is like a Parisian Time Capsule

How long would you pay rent to keep a precise moment in your life? In 2010, descendents of the French actress Marthe de Florian found her answer – 70 years.

In 1942, de Florian fled her Paris apartment to escape a Nazi raid. I assume that most of us, if put in her shoes, would’ve either assumed the apartment a loss and quit paying rent, or at some point returned to collect our belongings.

de Florian did neither, she simply continued to pay rent on the home year after year until her death in 2010. At the time, to my understanding, her family was completely unaware – which meant that no one had gone in or out of the apartment since 1942.

What they saw when they finally got to walk into the home was, like your work, a precise moment captured in time. We like to think of our careers as a puzzle in immediate need of solving, with questions like “how should I brand myself?” or “should I go into indie or AAA games?” But give me a moment to explain to you today why those questions are fleeting and ineffective, and why you should be thinking of your career more like a time capsule.

You’re going to get to do a lot in your career.

Assuming you don’t give up early on your creative career (and quitting is the most common cause of “failure”), you’re going to get lots of opportunities in your career.

While the odds are against you to become the most famous musician/sound designer/engineer/composer/producer/programmer – the odds are certainly in your favor that you can do some very cool things if you stick to it.

When you’re either young or unemployed, there’s a definite need to solve an immediate problem – where is my next paycheck coming from? As legitimate of a problem as that is, it’s actually not a life-long crisis. However, plenty of us like to equate choosing to get a day job or take a small indie gig to a “permanent choice” which means we can never “un-choose”.

I mean that to say, designing sound on an indie game does not mean you’ll never work in AAA. Focusing on sound design doesn’t mean you’ll never be a paid composer. Working at Subway doesn’t mean you’ll never work on a video game.

These assumptions cause us an incredible load of anxiety simply because we don’t know what the future holds. As all of us know, we can’t control circumstances that are outside of our control – and hiring is one of those things.

But, instead of panicking and attempting to make “the best” decision, I’d suggest another tact.

Focus your attention on the long-term.

While I don’t recommend neglecting to solve the “where is my next paycheck coming from?” problem if that’s real for you – for everyone else I advocate stepping away from your anxiety for a bit with some pen and paper.

Make a list of everything in your head that you think would be cool to do some day. Start with professional accomplishments, but you could go crazy and write everything you’d ever like to do if you really want.

Take some time with this – maybe even days if you need to. Just get your thoughts, ideas, and dreams out an onto paper.

When you feel like you’re done, or at least close enough to it, give yourself five minutes to just look over the list. Here’s where we get to the mind-bending part.

You need to look at that list and realize accomplishing most of it is actually very possible.

If that scares the heck out of you, makes you scoff, or you don’t believe me – GOOD. That’s a normal response, and you’re wrong (I was too, don’t worry). Let me be clear, though, what you’re looking at here is the start of your very own career time capsule.

This is the very first mental transition you ever need to make to actually start accomplishing some of those dreams. After all, if you assume they’re out of reach – why would you even try to reach for one in the first place? Once you’ve wrapped your brain around realizing that you actually can and potentially will accomplish these dreams, you’re going to start getting to work fast.

But, for right now I understand how all of this can feel intimidating. So let’s move to what we should do with the list (after you’ve now envisioned yourself as a GRAMMY recipient or working on Halo – because that is a lot of fun to think about).

Get to work, step at a time.

You may have heard the question “How do you eat an elephant?” before. The answer to that question is the same answer to the question of how you start building your career – one bite at a time.

As I’ve already advocated to you before, I believe you should be breaking down your life and goals into laughably-small chunks. My philosophy on this doesn’t change even when we’re zooming out and looking at your whole career.

In this case, the investment of your time and effort compounds over time into something extraordinarily cool. Few of us truly believe anyone is an “overnight success”, but we often want that. The only way to get there is adding little tiny bits of effort over a (potentially very) extended period of time.

So what have we learned?

Your career won’t be made or broken by your most immediate mental crisis
If you need a paycheck, it’s not shameful to get a “normal” job
Believe in yourself, you can accomplish most of the goals on that paper
You’ll do it by tackling it all a bit at a time

So long as you don’t flee your career…

You’ll eventually have your own time capsule to look back on. It won’t be stuck in one moment in time at 1942 – instead you’ll have years of memories and accomplishments to be pleased with, knowledge to share with others, and stories to tell your friends, families, and loved ones.

And now for the hard part.

I want you do to just one simple thing today. Pick one item on that list you made, and start working towards it.

Pick the item – say you want to win a GRAMMY – and figure out what the very first step is to tackling that. Assuming you need to start writing songs, that step probably looks like “open up my DAW”.

Now do it!