Welp, my last day at Ready At Dawn was Friday, and I start my new job tomorrow.

I’m going to work for NCsoft Austin as an Art Production Manager.

It’s a MASSIVE step up career-wise from a mere artist, with a huge (and admittedly unearned ;) amount of responsibility over Dungeon Runners, their new free-to-play casual MMORPG. I’m unbelievably psyched. NCsoft is capitalizing on all my outsourcing experience to help build and manage a team of external contractors and help get the game out the door. I haven’t been this excited in a really long time.

I know art is my bread and butter and I do love it, but I’ve felt for a long time like I have a broader and more interesting skillset that I wasn’t in a position to use. And now not only is it being used, but it’s the primary focus of my job. :D I really couldn’t have found a better job for so perfectly aligning my biggest interests, ambitions and career goals with what they want me to do. As I said before, super SUPER happy.

Also great is the fact that Austin itself is a totally kick-ass city. I’m on cloud nine… everything now is so good, that none of it feels real yet. Good things just don’t happen to me, especially not in the last couple years. I’m afraid I’ll wake from this dream. :)

My last day at Ready At Dawn was last Friday, and Saturday morning I set out for Austin. 19 hours of travel over two days later, and I’m in Austin, waiting on the condo I picked out to open up so I can move in. I start my new job Wednesday. Exciting times! Announcement coming soon.

Here’s a fun little life strategy: Make friends everywhere you go.

Since I’ve been interviewing, setting up the move and calling dozens of people asking all sorts of questions, I’ve started getting in the habit of treating people like people.

It’s very simple. I’ll show you how to get the most out of every person you meet. This is all you need to do:

1. Smile, make eye contact, shake their hand and get their name. This is SO important! You’d be surprised how few people will bother with this, and how much better service you can get.
2. Show an interest in them. Find some way to relate to them. Even something as banal as the weather can work. Be a little self-deprecating, or funny. “How are you?” “Fantastic, I’ve almost waken up! Noon’s too early for me. How about you?” Try and find some way to connect with them and wake them up from whatever dry, boring routine they may be stuck in, and lure out the living, breathing, thinking human being inside.
3. Give them a chance to utilize their experience. Ask your airplane seatmate what they do for a living, and what’s involved in it. Ask the nice lady at the deli counter what her favorite kind of meat is and if you can have a sample. Ask the customer service tech what he could do to save money on what you’re paying. Ask the waiter what his favorite drink is.

Be it a cashier at a supermarket or a voice on the phone, be friendly. Ask for their name, write it down and remember it. While you’re waiting on something, ask them something about themselves. One of my favorite things to do on the phone is to ask someone where they are. Because call centers are so spread out, you could be talking to someone in Phoenix, New York, Washington, Florida, Canada, or, of course, India. You can get peoples’ entire life stories out of them, and it’s often hilarious and interesting.

My favorite experience in that was talking to a Cox cable tech that used to work at a nuclear power plant. He told me all about what it was like to work there, the incredible dangers they faced, all the ridiculous safeguards, and how engineers late at night were able to create perfect synthetic diamonds in the reactor, on the side, just to make extra money. Fascinating stuff. AND he fixed my problem! You can enrich any experience, and calling tech support is a great place to start.

Showing an interest in them can make a huge difference. Once you stop treating people like objects or drones, they can really open up and be incredibly pleasant, and get you favors you wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. This week, through simply being friendly, remembering names, showing an interest in people and making a friend, I saved $450 on one of my moving costs.

It’s incredible what people can do if they like you enough to bother, and if you’re bold enough to ask what THEY would do, or what THEY think. Give them a chance to utilize their experience.

See, I believe that, deep down, people really do like interacting other people, and being good at their job. It’s just that most people never give them a chance to do either one of those. When I went to get a new cel phone, I chatted with the salesman for a while, asked him questions about his own personal preferences in a phone or a plan, and we established a little camaraderie of sorts.

But when it came to getting a text message plan that was right for me, I was stuck with a bunch of choices I didn’ tlike. So I asked him if there was anything else he could think of that I could do, and he paused a moment to think it over. He remembered an old, obsolete plan that was barely left over in the system and was only very rarely offered. He found it and gave it to me, and I ended up saving HALF what other people generally pay. And I still enjoy it to this day.

More anecdotes: When I still drank coffee, I’d make friends with the Starbucks baristas and ended up getting free drinks all the time. When I ate out more, I’d eat Quizno’s religiously and get them to give me free extra meat, or custom-make sandwiches for me not on the menu, or give me free food and drinks anytime I wanted.

In fact, just this morning I was in a hurry, shopping for high-top shoes for the motorcycle riding classes I’m taking tomorrow. I was friendly with the salesman and got him to start really THINKING, and putting his expertise to work. He knew which kinds of shoes ran narrow, the conversion rate of shoe sizes between brands, and the best price for what I’m looking for and what stores to check out if I couldn’t find what I wanted there.

He made some strong recommendations to me, and I ended up going with a pair of shoes I’m VERY happy with that he recommended. How many times have you been in a shoe store where you just pointed at the shoe you wanted to try on? Give them a chance to utilize their experience.

Almost every time I get on an airplane, I’ll start a conversation with the person in the seat next to me, and we’ll end up talking for the entire flight. A couple months back I sat next to a cute girl, chatted with her a while, then we grabbed lunch together at the airport and chatted for a couple hours while we were waiting for our planes. I got to kill a couple otherwise boring and empty hours and meet someone new and interesting. :)

I even got my own travel agent out of it. I started talking to him, and he told me all sorts of amazing stories about the places he’d traveled all over the world. The incredibly deeply ingrained socialism of Sweden, inadvertently rooming with the US Olympic skiing team in Norway, and personally visiting the highest point of every state in the USA. He even clued me in on the best way to find great deals on travel, the fastest and cheapest way to get a passport, which airlines to avoid, the best times of year to fly, etc, all for free. He also gave me a huge list of sights to see and places to eat in the place I was traveling to. All for showing an interest in him. :)

Another example: At my local Target, I’ve made friends with the guys in the Electronics department. Anytime the lines up front are long, I can walk up to one of them and have him check me out at the never-manned cash registers hidden in the back of the Electronics department, and I NEVER, EVER have to wait in line.

Also good to make friends with: Human Resources. They’re the lifeblood of most companies, and the hub of most high-level information flow. Whether you’re inside or outside of a company, the HR rep can be a valuable ally. And I don’t mean this in a manipulative way… not at all. You can simply increase your chances of getting to the top of the pile, or getting advance warning of a layoff, or really any kind of information you might like to know. They tend to be incredibly connected, pleasant people, so it can really only benefit you to be nice to them. ALWAYS befriend HR people.

And the same goes for the office tech guy. If you need something difficult done to your PC, how much faster do you think he’ll get it done if he enjoys your company?

And don’t even get me started on the number of job opportunities I’ve had come to me just by being friendly and outgoing wherever possible. :)

In summary, BE OUTGOING! Make friends wherever you go. You should do it simply because it’s fun to do, and the bonus is that the rewards can be incredible!

Earlier today on a web forum I frequent, someone asked other people what they do to be more efficient at work. I gave him a short list of what I do:

For me, it’s a few interconnected things.

ENVIRONMENTAL
1) Either completely close IM apps, or turn off window blinking notification of a message
2) Put on headphones and crank up good concentration music at a reasonable volume
3) Close web browser and relegate browser icons to desktop only (no quicklaunch!)
4) Remove anything distracting in your field of view from your workspace.

HEALTH:
1) Get at least 7 hours of sleep.
2) Wake up 3 hours before work and eat a good, healthy, balanced breakfast
3) Drink LOTS of ice water. It’s good for you, keeps you awake and forces you to take fairly regular restroom breaks, which is a good way to get you up and moving.
4) Try to minimize your carbohydrate intake at lunch, lest you later succumb to Food Coma and try to bail yourself out with coffee and sugar.

PROCESS:
1) Make a master to-do list for the next two or three days in no particular order, then blaze through each task until you finish or get sick of it, then move onto another
2) Classify my tasks, roles and responsibilities and devote specific time blocks of one to two hours each day to focus SOLELY on each facet.
3) Work on a timer for 15 or 30 minutes at a time, uninterrupted, then take a short (timed) break to answer messages, browse the internet, etc before returning to work.
4) Whenever possible, make decisions within the space of seven breaths.

As for getting up before work, I usually get up around 5 or 6 every day, and I feel like I have SO MUCH MORE TIME during the day when I do that than when I get up five minutes before work. I get to make my own breakfast, let it settle in my stomach, read, check email, check all my news sites, clean up my apartment a bit, play with my cats, and generally get a better feel for the day before I head into work. By the time I get there, I’m totally awake and alert, and I got all my goof-off bullshit done before I got in. So I’m ready to kick it into high gear and get shit done!

The idea behind all this is that I understand that I can’t really change my core behaviors. But I can erect my own little barriers that take advantage of the way I act naturally, and funnel it into doing something productive.

In other words, I create my own path of least resistance. If I can RAISE the barrier to entry of doing goof-off bullshit like IM and web browsing and playing games, and LOWER the barrier to entry to getting work done, I’ll do whichever takes the least effort. If I make web browsing some big bother, I just won’t want to do it.

Same for goofing off at work, checking news sites, IMing people, and so on. I know I’ll wanna do it. So I just force myself up earlier, get it out of my system, then shift into Work Mode even more easily.

Basically, I acknowledge Jon’s Inner Idiot so I toss him some shiny baubles to make it as hard as possible for him to distract me.

I call stuff like that a “hack,” as in a cheap-fast way to circumvent a problem rather than fix it outright. My own mind is held together by duct tape and rubber bands. :)

Because, face it, changing yourself is hard. I do it all the time, but sometimes my Inner Idiot fights back so hard, I decide it’s easier to trick him and give him an outlet for his energy than to try to tear myself up trying to ”cure” myself.

Do you use any hacks?

Just a quick post. I gave my notice this week at Ready At Dawn, and my last day there will be Friday, June 23rd.

Here’s the deal, really… I hate living in California. I love the company, love the team, and especially love RAD’s next project (which will totally fucking rule), but I’ve been really, really unhappy living in this place the entire time I’ve been here. I’m just not into the people, the culture, the cost of living, the weather… nothing. I’m really just not a California kind of guy.

I’ve had a very, very hard time of living here after living in a truly horrific apartment complex, the crunching on Daxter, marrying my fiancee \ best friend of six years during crunch, gaining thirty pounds, then two months later having her get fed up with my crunch and leave me for our best WOW guildmate during the week of beta, driving her to the airport that same day and shipping all of her stuff to Connecticut, trying to ship a game and sort out a divorce at the same time, losing thirty pounds, getting stuck on an expensive lease I can barely afford, and generally just trying to keep my head above water for a few seconds at a time. Considering the amount of stress I was under, I’m pretty amazed I didn’t just have a heart attack and fall over dead.

Don’t get me wrong… I’m proud of what I did on Daxter and I’d do it all over exactly the same way if I could, without hesitation. But frankly, once I realized that I had completely stopped caring if I woke up the next day or not, I realized it’d probably be for the best if I washed my hands of California, severed all my ties no matter how painful and got the fuck out. :)

I told the RAD founders about this a couple months ago before I had anything lined up, and they’ve been gentlemen about it. They’ve been totally understanding, they gave me as much time as I need to find something else, and said I’m welcome to stay on board if I change my mind. They’ve been completely thoughtful, understanding and accomodating about all this, and I respect them even more for it.

So it’s the best terms you can get, really. I’d still recommend Ready At Dawn as a place to work to anyone, in a second. Everyone there is a fucking badass that knows what they’re doing and is committed 110% to their craft, and I know their next game is going to be universally loved. I’ve got nothing but respect for the management there, and willingly followed them into hell to get Daxter done because I knew they were just as committed as everyone else to shipping it. And I’m damned proud of it. Just, fuck California. :)

So I’ve accepted a position at a company in Austin, Texas, and I’ll be starting there in two weeks. I’m INCREDIBLY excited about it, and I’ll announce who it is soon. The crazy part of the new job? I will no longer be a mere artist.

More to come soon!