This Question Might Kill You

I hope you’re ready. I’m about to both ruin and vastly improve your day.

Do yourself a quick favor and pose to yourself this question –

If the world were perfect and I could actually accomplish the one thing I dream of most in the world with no problem, what would that one thing be?

Almost immediately, you’re going to ruminate through either your immediate goals or your far-flung dreams. I want you to focus on those far-flung dreams.

The next struggle you’re going to hit is lack of commitment. It’s going to be nearly impossible to pick just one thing.

Or, if you’re somehow the 1% of people who are brutally honest with yourself – you’ll know exactly what you want – good job!

For the rest of us, run through this exercise:

Imagine you have a life-or-death decision to make and you must choose only one option. Then, as much as it hurts to pick one – speak that choice out loud. Just say it, mumble it if you’re in public – whatever you need.

It will probably make you squirm at first, but say it a second time. The more times you speak your choice out loud, you’ll find comfort, conviction, and confidence in your choice.

Then an amazing thing will happen – you’ll have some clarity.

You might even think to yourself something like…

“Well, if I want to be a successful musician – I guess I’d better start picking up my instruments more.”

And to think… a few seconds ago you could’ve sworn you had no idea what you really wanted to do with your life, right?!

Focus & Clarity

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that I completely stole this exercise from Akash Thakkar. He, in turn, stole it from Socrates.

I’ve watched him pull it on enough people that I now affectionately call it “Socrateasing”. When you know what’s coming, it never ceases to be incredible and downright hilarious at the same time.

Yes, don’t worry – he’s pulled it on me and I’ve done this to myself as well.

I never cease to find it incredible at exactly how much clarity this question pulls into people’s lives. It’s also shocking that you always have the answer. I’ve never seen someone not answer – just squirm until they have to be honest with themselves.

The jist of the question is formulated like this:

Pretend you existed in a perfect world and could do XYZ with no problems – what is XYZ?

It works in a lot of situations, and even works when genericized as I walked you through above.

If you want to work in game audio and have no idea how or where to get started, I’ll pull this one on you (I’ve literally done this with two people in person in the last 2 weeks):

If you could work on any game that you wanted, you had the skills and knew they would hire you – what game would that be?

If you find yourself in that situation – ruminate on that for a minute.

That conversation inevitably goes like this:

“You: Any game? Oof… that’s hard. There’s lots of games I like….

Me: Yep, this is the normal reaction – but just pick one. There’s no wrong answer.

You: Man, I really have no idea… I can only pick one?

Me: Yes, only one. Imagine I was putting a gun to your head and everything would be fine so long as you picked ONE. In other words… if you HAD to choose – what would it be?

You: Oh gosh… well… I really love sci-fi. And… I like shooters.

Me:Okay – so pick one. Is it Halo, or Destiny?

You: Halo. Definitely Halo. I just really love those games.”

Notice the initial squirm and attempt at running away or dodging the question – but then the absolute definite answer at the end.

This happens literally every single time. Also – perhaps because I’m in Seattle – but 95% of the time the answer is also Halo. I have no idea why, but that cracks me up tremendously.

Once you have an answer – and we’re going to assume your answer is Halo for the sake of this story – it’s very easy to get clarity on what you need to do next to actually accomplish that goal.

It isn’t hard to figure out that the Halo team uses Wwise, what DAWs and equipment that they work with, that you need to be great at making gun sounds, or vehicle sounds, or sci-fi monsters, or learning how sounds work in multiplayer, or orchestral scores, etc.

That also means you can completely ditch your assumptions that you need to learn FMOD, fantasy wizard sounds, dinosaur growls, zombie groans, etc.

Instead, you have focus and know exactly where you want to go.

Will you get there? Who knows – that requires consistent hard work, talent, luck, and timing. But, if you don’t aim, you’re not going to get anywhere.

Worst case scenario that occurs, usually, is you work on another cool non-Halo game that you’re excited about and never expected to be a part of.

And that, my friend, is still awesome.

Saving Lives

I elaborate more on picking one thing and breaking down how to successfully go about mapping your own career to game audio in my book Quit Aspiring.

If you can be patient, I’m putting both it and Like Magic on sale the week of November 24th. That’s not very long from now.

In honor of my late father, who passed away from prostate cancer 20 years ago that week – I’ll be directing you to donate to ZERO: The End of Prostate Cancer – a charity focused on prostate cancer research.

You’ll get more details as we get closer to that week, and then you’ll receive a week of emails from me promoting the effort. I’ll get $0 from the endeavor – 100% of the proceeds will go directly to the charity.

So, if you want to improve your life while hopefully saving some others – I hope you’ll join me.