2022 Goals
Why would you post this publicly? Accountability. I need to achieve these goals.
Self-Improvement
Go out of your way to express appreciation. Force yourself to read these goals once a week.
Focus on things in stages with clear goals. Be highly intentional.
Allow yourself to fail without judgement and to have the grace to be undeterred. Seek resolve when frustrated.
Do not believe your fleeting emotions are an objective truth. Do not be swayed by the experiences of others to dictate or define your own experience.
Edit writing to be more brief and less repetitious.
Remember your own accomplishments as a well of confidence to believe you are worthy and capable of being in the room.
Be highly cognizant of how you are acting when no one is looking. Be a person that you would want to admire. Be a person of integrity.
Reach out to your parents and brother more.
Work Improvement
Continually rediscover a sense of joy in the collaborative process.
Build up other people by sharing their accomplishments through work, videos, etc.
Do more vision setting work and less hands-on work. Focus more on the act of inspiring versus the act of prescribing.
Be more high level. Frame ideas in ways that people can add to them. If needed, frame ideas in multiple ways that elicit a sense of a user story. Use terms like, "What if..." or "Imagine..."
Do not take on responsibilities or feelings of accountability for things that are not yours to own.
Treat others how you'd like to be treated.
Ask other people, including your boss, about their challenges and ways that they need help.
Make a desktop background that states important concepts to remember:
Emotion is the enemy of oration.
Ask clarifying questions about challenges or believed intent.
Don't make assumptions.
Remove the judgement of your own experience.
Assume best intent. Ask about its scalability, usability, and deadlines for progress.
Be responsible for the energy you bring into a space.
Rediscover the joy of an idea or of creativity. Do not focus on the challenge but focus on the opportunity and core concept that is begging to be expressed.
Focus on what actually matters, the audience, the audience experience, the way the audience needs to feel at various stages and the core concepts inherent to a given experience.
Ask and seek ways to further your own ability to be a better leader.
Create checks and balances. This means create ways to check yourself at monthly intervals against the goals you've stated.
Do not shoot for speed in any response but shoot for clarity.
Do not allow work to command all parts of your life.
Remember to enjoy the journey of the work as much as the projected destination. Remember to have fun.
Do not assume other people have read, understand, or share any of your same thoughts. Articulate an intent and don't be upset to repeat something that has been stated elsewhere.
Be grateful for every day you get to do something that fills people with a sense of joy, curiosity, and personal discovery.
Seek stories with macro and micro journeys of discovery, questions, thematic universality, unfolding tension and release, humor, power struggles, clear conflict, clear opportunity, clear heroism, rebuilding, and actualization.
Prepare to be interrupted.
Preamble: This was originally written in January of 2021 with the intended audience being a small Narrative team. I never sent this.
Reflection
There's all this time of reflection near the holidays. Last December [2019] I was sitting in London listening to some of the music being recorded for the game. There wasn't a lot of scoring being done against specific scenes. The music composition didn't exist yet or wasn't ready for recording. We recorded the Pelican Flyover from [Outpost Tremonius] to [The Tower] and we recorded music for when the Pilot kisses the ground at [Outpost Tremonius].
I don't have gifts for my family each year. I don't know what to get them. When you're older a thing isn't as important as time, being present, and being reflective. That's all I really can do here is take stock of a confusing series of months. Each month tells a story of our preparation and pains as we ran to a finish line with the earnest goal of comprehension and quality.
We're all going to leave this experience a little different than when we started.
I think about what I've learned in this process and my mind wants to gloss over a lot of things to cope with the struggle of creation. Nothing about the last year was linear. Nearly every moment was a trial in the preparedness for interruption. How do you act when your focus is split? What choices do you make when none of them seem particularly optimal? How do you treat other people of different disciplines and experiences? I've failed and succeeded in various degrees of those questions.
Taught BY DOING
Sometimes I think, "What would I talk about if I went back to grad school?" I think I would write out a bunch of sentences that I couldn't have been taught without experience.
Don't give up before something is done. This one is fairly obvious on its face. More than half of the people I've ever spoken to give up at the wrong time. I've given up at the wrong time. I live with a bunch of regret because the thing "shipped" and I knew if I gave it even the most cursory bit of attention it would have been better.
Know what you're actually good at--not what you want to be good at. The actual role you play in a story is most beneficial to the supporting cast if you lean into your undeniable talents. When you know your weaknesses people can build in a support system to carry the weight. Know your own weaknesses and see them as information instead of judgement.
Business is a relationship and the time investment makes it personal. Five years ago I would have laughed at myself for that sentence but I have a different connection to it now. The best results I've ever achieved have been when I give people my undivided attention and discover what makes them passionate--then unleash that passion into a given thing. This is probably the hardest thing to understand or cultivate because the time spent never seems equal to the immediate output but it pays off in dividends later. The only way this works is if you understand that not everyone communicates, hears, understands, or shares your ideas. This is where rigor, clarity, and the courage to say: "I don't understand" or "I need help" need to be applied.
Everything is about approach. Everything is about belief and confidence to sit with an idea repeatedly. If you don't like something immediately--change it, ask yourself why you don't like it, ask yourself what is causing a distraction. If you go into something not understanding the intent or goals, it’s very hard to repeatedly tell yourself to care about that thing when you inevitably need to face it.
Be transparent. There's a tipping point where too much information is a burden but there's a spot where communication builds confidence. There's so many times where I would have fought for something if I knew about it earlier but because I didn't know or wasn't preceptive I missed some bit of connective tissue or lost an opportunity to express my sincere gratitude.
Everyone is on their own timelines. Make sure everyone understands and speaks the same language.
Without self reflection you lose perspective. Look at your life holistically.
Of Things to Come
Preamble: This was originally written in January of 2020 to a small Narrative team working on what would become the December 9th, 2021 release of Halo Infinite.
Thoughts that guided.
When you work on an IP the first thing you need to do is understand why it was first successful. The second thing you need to do is protect the purity of the those reasons. It's usually a mixture of luck (!*), hard-work (2*), or talent (3*).
Be present.
Be devoted.
Be confident.
Assume you have the talent to be in the room. Assume you're lucky enough to be surrounded by peers maintain their talent in their given field. A challenge approaches. You all venture off being determined to tackle the problem with determination. If you're lucky the hard work you did pays off for all parties involved. The audience/customer feels heard, empowered,
Perspective is an interesting word. Experience feels neutral but perspective feels wrought with time. Perspective means observation. Observation often means teaching others how to see the world that they see. It doesn't mean it's the world as it is, but it's a vision of the world enamored with experience.
Case Study
THE ACT OF EXPOSING
Rise of the Skywalker made me realize that sci-fi needs to squarely focus on pacing and the concept of "exposing". Let's assume you can make characters that are likable, admirable, and show clear desire within their strengths and weaknesses. The next task must focus on a few things:
Continually pose questions consciously and subconsciously. What caused the damage? What will I see if I go further? What's hidden? What can I discover? What will (x) expose? If I push against the world does it push back?
When I crest over a hill does the framing leads the eye to want to know more about what is there? Leave more out than you show. Show enough that you want to know more.
Expose the journey. Allow everyone to go along for the ride. Don't leave anyone behind.
Don't assume prior knowledge.
Don't show something and then tell the audience what they're looking at.
Teach what you want the audience to anticipate. Give them the room to invoke their imagination. Then expose the question but leave room for interpretation.
Expose that the audience's assumptions are valid but still allow affordance for their expectations to be subverted.
MAIN IDEAS
The Last Jedi
"Let the past die. Kill it, if you have to."
Don't let the past bog you down. Down let expectation drive the story. Subvert expectation and forge a new path. Challenge your own beliefs about what you know. The past matters but your resolve to remove restraint and discover your own
"We're not ready. We’re never ready."
Human beings take on responsibility without knowing the consequences. We simply learn by doing, by observing, by understanding, by experiencing kindness, and by not stopping and not giving up on the ideal--on family. Growth comes from reaction. Preparation fosters perspective when pressure is applied.
We experience trials thinking we won't know how to react or even if we'll have the ammunition to cope. But our resilience, our ability for redemption, and our unimpeachable hope to make things right defines our spirit.
"They win by making you think you're alone."
We fail in our responsibility if we shoulder all the burden alone. We survive and thrive if we lean on a support system. The concept of 'community', a support system of survivors, becomes the new paradigm for family. That community or band of ragtag survivors and all that they bring into the world under the same auspicious for "good" is the ideal worth fighting for and the catalyst for change.
“And I am all the Jedi"
We are the sum of all the experiences, beliefs, and mentorship accrued over generations. The good, the bad, and the ugly.
Everything that came before you makes you the person you are today. You can either run from the past (kill it), or use all your teachings to power your future. Use the past as strength instead of an anchor.
The importance of Failure
Our failures are as important as our victories--they become the teachings worth guarding and passing down for others to rise to the occasion when called upon.
Cortana is Chief's ghost. She was once his conscious, but now she's the past he must face. She's the unanswered question that finds resolution. She knew the right answer to the ills of humanity but she failed in her mission. Why she failed doesn't matter as much as her acknowledgement of failure.
I wanted to show you the world as I see it. As it could be.
Her miscalculation is that we cannot make the world in our image--we can only protect, shepherd, and nurture. Forcing perspective forces emotion and creates rebellion. Ensuring security manifest creativity and creates ingenuity, progress, growth.
By the end the Pilot has to have the desire to become more and put the past behind him. His rebellion is his rejection of security.
Chief's reactions are selfless. Cortana's reactions are logical. The Weapons reactions are wondrous--she's seeking growth, approval, she's happy to be along for the ride. The Pilot is the manifestation of “fight or flight” weighted heavily on the ‘flight’ response.
It is a story about manifesting trust. Trusting each other. Trusting yourself. Trusting your ideals. Winning back the trust of your unit. Reconciling a lapse in trust and a plea to allow others in to trust more.
Trust comes when experience and action harmonizes into security. All the protagonists evoke that sentence. Their experiences and their actions form unbreakable bonds of trust. Being pushed against all they believe they can withstand creates an unshakeable bond.
We're pleading with the world for trust. We'll show them that we have all of the best of the past inside us. We're not fighting it, or killing it, we're embracing it. That's why your story structure and the idea of legacy shouldn't be misconstrued as weakness or as an anchor. It's what got us here. It's the power at our back that makes us feel secure.
The audience wants:
Authenticity
Clarity
Mystery
Wonder
Connection
Humor
Anticipation
Tension
Stability
Assurance
Empowerment
Respect
Relief
Good sci-fi provide the space to be reflective. Make them think you're in a corner and then expose that you have an army at your back. There's a reason we've endured and we're embracing it.
_
(1*) see also: timing, novelty, presence.
(2*) see also: devotion, determination, passion, exertion, execution.
(3*) see also: experience, confidence, planning, experience, perspective.
Us Ones In Between
Hello, 2015.
If you are like me, you are constantly looking for things to inspire you. This blog won't feature posts of my ramblings but rather the things that I find extraordinary.
The People Pushed Aside
Watch this 60 Minutes story about a new play in Harlem.
"[Alive and Kickin'] was created by a theater producer and former disc jockey named Vy Higginsen, who has made it her mission to preserve a special part of American culture: African-American music, both gospel and popular music like soul and R&B. She found a pool of untapped talent, men and women in what she calls their "second half of life" just waiting for their chance to shine."
It is one of the best stories I've seen because it speaks so profoundly to the resilience and heart of people. At first you won't agree, but by the end it's hard to disagree -- they are some of the most beautiful people you will ever see.
60 Minutes