
What Kind Of Sandwich To Make Yourself
They say that in your 20’s you’re supposed to find yourself. And after you’ve found yourself you just go and live life without thinking about it anymore because you arrived at an infallible decision. I took heart of this idea. I found my love for games. Tried to apply for game companies. Spent most (all) of my 20’s making games. Started my own game company. Made many, many games. What happened? …. I failed. I failed very hard. Now, I don’t know who I am in my thirties. I feel like I’ve been shooed out of game industry, as if they said “we don’t want you here.” This made me sad. Now I’m trying to figure out exactly what to do. And it hit me the other day that I simply never thought about “what is it that I truly want to do.’ In my 20’s I just picked up games because I’d been making them for so long. I realized If I’d thought about it I’d have arrived at a much different decision.
Although I don’t have a very clear definition of what I WANT to become, I have a clear definition of what I like to do. I want to do a set of things. Martially I like drawing, coding, electronics. These allow me to craft multiple work products: Comics, Games, Creative Things, Making toys, building worlds, thinking endlessly about general theories, Inventing, Tinkering — overall approaching the childhood dreams I had about being some kind of ‘creative figure’ like Miyamoto or Toriyama. I want to utilize 100% of my time as I see fit, not bound to a schedule. Additionally I must learn something every day. Something wide, and new. That’s why “Inventor” is the one thing I can think of that I love. The one thing that satisfies everything: allowing you to be 1) Creative and 2) Learn new things and 3) Make stuff that uses ALL KINDS OF THINGS. Especially technology. (for example why just draw a comic when I could draw a live-action comic on PC that talks and is interactive?) That’s how my brain works. I switch desires a lot. One second I love drawing comics, the next second I love learning about technology and thinking about blue-tooth and NFC, and the next second I’m writing about things. The jack-of-all-trades approach gives me the fuel to continue by changing focus between different tasks. But it takes TIME. And I’m burdened by so many people.
Being an inventor not new to me. I wanted to be an inventor when I was a kid. I loved it. I cherished it. I really, really wanted to be one. Always drawing things. My idea got lost when I started games. I worked very hard on them. I think an inventor is different from one who makes games because an inventor approaches a host of subjects rather than just one subject. He is a jack of all trades and he loves to learn wildly new things — not just little things pertaining to his field. He tinkers and toils and comes up with entirely new concepts — things that create new genres of entertainment. Regarding entertainment — that’s a specialized inventor. Perhaps the most important aspect of what I like to do. I like creative things: franchises, characters, stories, worlds. I like the art of them — not so much the intellectual. I’m not that experienced with writing stories. But I love to make characters and draw scenes and think of odd worlds and “what kind of world is this” and “why is this entertaining?” I like to draw, and color things in. It’s time-intensive but it’s so much fun because you have unlimited freedom to create new concepts of monsters or environments. It really starts to build a world inside of your head that nobody can enter. Your own safe place. It’s secure. And you can share this feeling with others.
I realized that I have a tough time setting a goal. Without games I don’t have a real object to work towards other than to be a comic book artist. I’ve stopped coding and started mostly just drawing all the time. Aside from being a real artist (which I am not skilled enough) I love the story and character in comic books. You do not need to be rich to be an artist. (and..really a good artist) You just need enough money to pay the bills. However you cannot get to where you want to be by living on the street. You need access to a computer and need to have art supplies and all that. You need to have access to the safety and security of being in a safe place to feel creative. So you need money, and thus you need to work, or leech. And to tell you the truth if you’re really passionate about art, then you shouldn’t feel bad about leeching because the world is created in such a way to favor the wealthy and enslave the poor, leaving no room for the poor to sustain themselves while cultivating their creative side.
I enjoy freedom to work on what I please. Freedom without pressure. But that’s not a job, is it? In fact it’s the opposite of a job. I like being an artisan. I like to make things. But if you don’t have a deadline then you don’t have pressure. If you don’t have those then you aren’t really working, are you?
The “Freedom to Work” that an Artist Desires is Obtainable only by Working for Everyone while Sacrificing Stability, Income, and Quality of Life.
Creative work requires more freedom than rote familiar/known/planned/outlined work because creativity requires more room than is allotted in a typical task..as such work -especially when of good quality — it is not a linear process. I desire the freedom to work as I please — without pressure and deadlines. The feeling of being free from pressure to perform causes you to feel unbounded, and this feeling allows your creative side to grow and flourish. This means not having any pressure to perform. Worrying whether your boss is going to fire you is an example of this pressure. You can work for yourself as well, but still be under a lot of pressure.
For example if you are a 1090 and you have clients — the clients will bitch at you just the same. A closer thing related to the freedom to work is to be something like a professor who teaches some field, then does ‘research.’ This research is granted money based on hypothetical productivity, and the professor is nothing but a think tank. Although he guides his own work, the investors still want to see something..eventually. Thus he is still under pressure.
Freedom to work is present when you are not pressured. You’re only not pressured when you don’t have someone specifically begging them from you, but you can still make money from. The things that you can make at your leisure are created for nobody specifically. Works of art, for instance. You’re not pressured by anyone specifically when you sell to everyone (generally). That is, except for investors, if you have them. But you’re still working for yourself at the highest level when you have investors. That’s the solution to ‘freedom to work’. Now of course it comes with consequences: when you work on things and try to peddle them you are an artisan. You are poor. You risk a lot being an artisan hoping that someone will pick up your work and market it for you. (That lets us want to ask what the difference is between an artisan and an inventor?) The secret to being a rich inventor is twofold:
1) Being a better artist than most.
2) Being able to market yourself.
3) You must have money to market. But artists don’t have money do they?
I want to be an inventor, but also a creative person who crafts worlds, and brands. But I want to be an inventor as well. Perhaps these are contradictory? Perhaps I want to be too many things? That’s why “Inventor of entertainment things” seems to capture just about everything. It captures my desire to utilize technology to create a fantasy world. That’s probably why I loved games so much. (But that part is dead) The world includes the characters. The duality of technology along with fantasy is where I feel the most at home. I feel, for instance like simply drawing a comic is something that has been done for decades. It’s an old thing. The principle of entertainment is: surprise, newness, flavor. Technology is what’s new. Always creating new ways to be entertained, while at the heart of things always bringing people to a beautiful world that allows them to forget about this shitty one. I don’t think this world is as shitty as it was when I was younger. I mean being older, free, free to do mostly what I want barred only by having to take care of women. I feel like I’ve lost most of my socially-driven neurosis. It’s been replaced by ignorance: meaning I don’t care what people think about me. I just go on and smile, and wave and try to be nice.
The reason I desire to create a fantasy world has its heart in recognition. I want to be recognized by any common person saying “oh that thing that’s his.” Plus I enjoy the actual MAKING aspect of it. It’s something I can do and I can get drawn in so hard that I forget about my mortality and everyone else’s.
I want to have the luxury to create ideas and then patent them. Not only an inventor, but I want to be a creative inventor. I want to create videogmaes, board games, IP and worlds, and stories. This is what I like. It’s hard to explain this to anyone, even my wife, who still has trouble grasping exactly why I behave erratically and am so forlorn to be earning money at a job which pays higher than most jobs. The issue is that it’s not about the money. It’s about my life; what I like to do (and the wishful possibility of becoming wealthy). Earning money for capital will only set you back. In fact I’m sure there’s a break-even point. You need TIME to work on your ideas, and to flesh out what you want to do. You need to be WORKING ON THEM, not working at a job. And that’s why I am sad to work at all. But more sad to have to work beyond what’s just needed to continue working on my own thing.
A creative person living in the midwest USA is doomed to be sad. Not just that the culture out here is anti-creative. It is. But the stigma is that one must always do for himself without help. I must make money but I want to do what I love — but i can’t have both. Nobody’s going to help you/me in this case. The last thing any of us care about — or anyone reading this cares about, is whether or not you or I is happy. Your wife might. You have to power through I guess and not kill yourself. The only thing preventing you from doing this is that you say the future will be better than the past, just wait for it. The future is truly very random, and the amount of power you have over it depends on the amount of freedom you have in the present to change it.
Desire to Change The World
I think I err in wanting to be Shigeru Miyamoto, or John Carmack, or Akira Toriyama, McFarlane off and on or whoever else I’ve wanted to be in the past. Being known for being the first person to do something is essentially what I’ve desired — and this status is gained randomly. But one thing that’s sure is that recognition is gained by being a critical part of something new, and big. Changing the world, I guess. Being the idea guy behind the next big thing. Mostly I want to be Miyamoto or Toriyama. Someone who is known for being genius creatively. But I less want to be like Steve Jobs. I don’t really have a passion for boring things of which no fantasy, or characters are involved. I love the strong new tech with its own world. That’s not even a thing yet. But I can invent it. New tech that makes things easier on us, but it’s all part of a fictional world, story.
Formula For GREAT Success
Famous Geniuses aren’t famous because they did ONE thing. They are prominent Geniuses because they did a LOT of things and have always kept hitting the mark. Think about this for a second. You don’t do just one thing artistically, because when you stop working on something, your world stops growing. The quicker the world stops growing, the faster it dies, thus the less expansive the world. For instance if Akira Toriyama had stopped writing dragon ball just a few comics in, then the world would be so small and nobody would have remembered it. But he kept making it better and innovating it and it turned into Dragonball Z when he concentrated on bad guys and fighting. The same thing with Mario — the old NES version was a hit — but he kept being the decision maker — never left — and then it became what it is today. I feel like the formula for the success I desire is something I’ve stated before.
1. Search for your passion, your love.
2. Gain a position that has opportunity to grow to doing what you love.
3. Wait for the opportunity of creative power to arise.
4. Make something great, utilizing (1). — What? How?
5. Stay as the decision-maker of that thing for many years. How?
6. Keep hitting the mark with each new release. What’s the Mark?
a. Keep innovating.
b. Utilize new technology — cutting edge stuff.
c. Stay inspired with new ideas.
You are the decision-maker in lots of products and you make them right. You stay in power. Creating something marvelous at your opportunity: Mario, Dragonball Z, Family Guy, and become recognized as the “idea guy” behind the works that incorporate invented franchises — thus calling the shots as to what’s good quality. Never settle for low quality stuff. Have a peculiar art style. A STRONG art style. That’s what Toriyama and Miyamoto have in common. Cute, cartoon. The question is how much different is this from like Game Of Thrones author? Because he was a writer and not an artist. I want to be an artist as well. The guy who invents the cute characters that everyone sees everywhere. I want to do something new, like technology. I like games/toys — not necessarily characters but creating the art form of the toys is also cool. Then also creating the logic and technology behind it. Creative Technologist is probably a good term.
In fact the more I think about this stuff the less I want to do it. Breaking stuff down gains you insight at the expense of motivation. If you need motivation just look at the way young children do things. They don’t calculate. They jump ritht the fuck in. Get hurt sometimes. That’s truly what Motivation is. You just DO IT.
