Sorry for the trouble! Comments now work again. Weird, random database corruption. No idea why, but… works now at least.

“You can’t learn art.”

Have you ever heard that?

“You’re just born with it.”

Or that?

“Oh, that looks just awesome, don’t change a thing! It’s perfect.”

How about that?

People that say that are poison. I call them the Anti-Learning Brigade. The snobby intellectual \ artsy elite. They’ll play both angles… tell you that it’s impossible to learn to do what you’re trying to do, or that you can’t or shouldn’t try to get better at it.

Why? To grant themselves a false and unearned sense of superiority, and to cut off your legs so you can’t compete. They may not realize they’re doing it — I’ve seen plenty of examples of that — but the result is the same.

The reason I dismiss them is because of this simple question:

What does “You can’t learn it” offer to help people that want to learn it?

That’s not knowledge. That’s not wisdom. That’s not any kind of help. That’s ANTI-KNOWLEDGE. That’s the most destructive, least constructive, most useless piece of advice that can be imparted to another that’s trying to learn.

“Stop trying. Stop putting forth the effort. You’ll never do it. No one can do it… except me, I was born with it. Some people have just been born with the skill and have done it all their life. How could you possibly compete with that? It’s inborn, a gift, not something that can be trained. Just give up. Don’t try. You’re wasting your time.”

I’ve made my life and career out of ignoring people like that, to my great benefit. I’m past the point of thinking anything they say holds weight, but when I see them telling eager young kids that are just starting out that they’ll never be good and can’t learn, I get angry.

Very angry.

Because if I’d listened to them when I was at that stage, I’d be nowhere. I think about where I was then, and where I am now, and I imagine everything I learned and everything I became in that time DYING. All that existence unravelling, just because someone was insecure and trying to hold me down.

By what right can one human tell another that his efforts will never matter? That his hard work will amount to nothing? That he’d be BETTER if he GAVE UP and STOPPED TRYING?

Never listen to these people. Ignore them. Cut them out of your life. Treat what they say as a challenge to try harder, get better and improve. “Can’t learn it, eh? Watch me crush you.” It does happen. People can make themselves out of nothing. You can learn anything. You can get better at anything.

You don’t even need to start out being smart! You just need to be willing to learn and have the determination to BECOME smart. If you’re persistent enough, never give up, keep trying and constantly adapt to new ideas and throw out your favorite old ones, you can do absolutely ANYTHING.

If no one could learn anything, no one could DO anything. And look around you. See how the world works. Cars move, airplanes fly, skyscrapers are erected, electricity flows, computer systems whirr happily, and the gears of the world go on grinding. If no one can learn anything, how does any of that work? I haven’t seen many infants assembling airplanes lately.

Explain that, Anti-Learning Brigade.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about personal inertia and change, and how no matter how hard you try, some things about yourself you can never change. And what to do about it.

This past week or two I’ve been wrestling with myself over how best to spend my time, and how I naturally lean toward goofing off and wasting it. I know I’m going to do it, and I know beating myself up over it isn’t going to make me WANT to get better at it. In fact, that’s the worst way possible.

So I’m trying to get down and nitty-gritty and understand myself better, warts and all. Based on my past behavior and my natural inclinations, I have learned the following:

1) If I have the choice between doing something challenging and productive and doing something easy and fruitless, I will probably do the easy thing.

All the self-discipline I’ve used on myself to try to get better at it can only go so far. So my solution? Forcibly remove all the easy and fruitless activities. Bye bye internet. Bye bye cable TV. Bye bye DVDs. Bye bye beer. Problem solved.

Basically, I’m looking at myself as a rat in a maze, and I’m just removing obstacles and changing the maze myself to achieve the result I want. :) I know I’m going to act like this. I know I will probably goof off, despite my best intentions. So the only logical answer is that I should completely remove the choice to do something easy and fruitless.

That ties into something else I learned about myself:

2) I have a highly addictive personality.

When I find something new and interesting that I love, I will absolutely exhaust it.

• If I get something awesome and fun to do at work, I will work myself to death with insane hours until I’m done with it.

• If I find a new exercise routine that I enjoy, I will repeat it until I can’t move.

• If I find a new book I like, I will sit down and read the entire thing in one sitting, then buy three more books by that author on Amazon.

• If I find a new kind of beer I enjoy, I will buy and drink cases of it.

• If I find a new restaurant I like, I will go there every day for a week.

• If I meet a new girl that I’m interested in, I can’t get her out of my head and I have to fight the urge to spend all my waking time talking to her.

And so on. I keep going until I hit some sort of wall and HAVE to stop. The incredible thing is that I never notice that I’m this obsessed, because I’m having so much fun.

And I never realized how intense I was in that regard until recently. And it’s funny (and scary) how totally involuntary it is. So this ties into the personal inertia concept… what can I do about that if I’m such a slave to my own whimsy? Surround myself with the kind of things I SHOULD become obsessed with and hack away at for a year until I get tired. :) That’s why my apartment is becoming spotless. That’s why I’ve been eating healthier and exercising and why I’ve lost another four pounds just this week. And that would be why I am at work on a perfectly nice Sunday afternoon.

So the whole point of this is… know yourself. Understand your strengths and weaknesses. Find ways to turn your weaknesses into your strengths. People all fall into specific patterns of behavior that are VERY easy to recognize and take advantage of. Learn to understand your own, predict how you’re going to act and react to the things around you, and learn how to play yourself just like a game to get better performance and BE better.

Ultimately, we’re all just machines. Thousands of little systems that act together in very precise, predictable patterns. You don’t even have to think about them, because they simply work the way they do automatically without you ever realizing it. Hitch a ride on that! At that point it’s not even effort, it’s like totally free bonus time in which to kick ass.

Come on, just IMAGINE how much better you can be if you can just add or remove one little factor to turn your inborn unconscious quirks and weaknesses into happy, puttering little engines of success! :)

So, loyal readers, I’m curious! Have you ever turned a weakness into a strength? What was it and how?

Ever wonder where all your time goes? You get home from work, then practically before you know it, it’s bedtime. Where did all that time go? You sure didn’t get anything done, did you?

I’ve been finding that happening to me a lot lately, and I decided to crack down.

A few months back, I threw away most of my worldly possessions. Then I sold off most of the rest, including almost my entire DVD collection. I also downgraded to basic cable so I could spend more time doing things I cared about.

When I moved to Austin, I never got cable TV or internet. I just stole wifi from my neighbor, being the morally upstanding gentleman that I am. :)  Since I got here I’ve been spending a lot of time at home messing around on Youtube, Myspace, online dating sites, watching DVDs on Netflix, drinking beer, etc. I found that all of my evenings were relaxed, but mostly wasted on things that weren’t terribly important to me. Just pure time sinks. Unproductive activities with no tangible results or benefits to me. Just something to do to pass the time for the sake of passing time. One day, my neighbor locked their wifi connection, so I was internetless. So I decided to use that opportunity to make a change.

No more internet at home!

Not permanently, mind you… this is really just an experiment to see how long I last, and to see what I actually DO when I have no TV or internet. And to sweeten the mix, I poured out all my alcohol and stopped drinking alcohol at home. I never did it excessively, but I want every last bit of mental sharpness I can get.

So this past week I’ve been getting better, and I’m pretty amazed at what my body and mind automatically do when they don’t have an ‘easy out’ to spend time on. I’m only going to be on this earth so long, so wouldn’t it make sense to maximize what time I have and spend it wisely, instead of squandering it?

I still view time as a currency. Something you spend. You will never get any more time than you have, so it would make sense to allocate it wisely, no? But there are so many things out there that can just suck it up without you realizing it. And it’s easy to do. You don’t have to work hard at it, or learn anything to do it. You just let yourself get whisked away by it, and you wonder where all that time went. And you shrug, and keep doing it.

I hate that and it drives me crazy.

I guess I’m what you might call a Type A Personality. Very hard-working, impatient, hyper, always moving and improving and optimizing and trying to get things done. When I see waste in any form, or a problem, I get agitated, often visibly, and I want to correct it. So when I saw how much time I wasted, it really got under my skin.

So once I banished alcohol from my home, got rid of my TV, DVDs, music and internet access, I found myself with lots of very interesting ways to spend my time.

Mainly I’ve spent my time reading, cleaning my condo, cooking for myself, working out, and spending time with my cats and sugar gliders. Since I don’t have anything going on in the background to distract me, everything I do seems richer and more focused. It has more meaning. I’m not thinking of something else when I’m doing it, and every action I take seems to have more purpose, just because I’m more consciously willing it to happen. The intention to act is there, undiluted and beautiful.

It’s funny, because time seems to move a lot slower now. I bust ass at work (I love my job) and go 120mph all day, go home, and it all slows down. I get so much more done at home, I take care of all my bills, chores, and obligations, I feel more at peace with myself, my pets love the attention, I get to bed earlier, I get up earlier, and everything just starts falling into place.

So I’m going to see how long I can keep this up. I know not having internet access at home will start to bother me as time goes on, but I’m in a really sweet spot right now and I want to maintain it as long as I can.

Everyone should try this. Identify the least productive timesinks you have, and cut them out of your life. Don’t even leave them there to be an OPTION. Cut it out like a tumor. Then see how it goes. :)

What are your biggest timesinks?

Apologies for the lack of posts lately! Been very busy at work and spending lots of time out enjoying life and having friends.

Work so far at NCsoft is completely kick ass. For this game, I am the art department. We’re outsourcing all of our game’s art, which is terribly exciting for me since that’s been one of my biggest interests for my whole career. So lately I’ve been looking at artists of all kinds, sending out art tests, art directing, building a budget, scheduling, organizing data, putting new art into the game, writing documentation, etc.
It’s an incredible amount of work, and I’ve never done *all* of this at the same time before, but it’s an absolute blast. Learning to go from creating hands-on art from a micro level to starting to manage, lead and direct from a macro level is an INCREDIBLE perspective shift for me.

EVery day I come up against interesting and difficult problems that I have no idea how to solve. Finding the solutions to those problems is a thrill for me. I’ve found that, ultimately, all it comes down to is looking at a problem, breaking it down into easily digestible chunks, prioritizing those chunks and blazing through them one by one.

So far it seems like a skill, like riding a bike. I’m getting better at breaking down problems and solving them bit by bit. I’m even learning to apply that to my personal life… like how to improve upon things I wish I was better at.

I’ve never really seen this type of problem solving as a key life skill before, but it really is. No problem is so big that it can’t be broken down into smaller, more discrete elements and solved. The bigger the problem, the scarier it looks until you disassemble it into easily understood bits, and then it’s just like anything else.

It’s been a thrill to train my mind to look at a problem and start seeing it as a series of steps to a solution. And the fact that as many people rely on me as they do, and that I’m responsible for all the art on the project, is that much more incentive to get better at it.

So in short, yeah, NCsoft is kicking ass. I’m learning so much, so fast, that I barely have energy at home to read or kick ass on personal projects, just because I feel like I’m going 120mph all the time at work. And I LOVE that!

And the best part of all? No crunch!

I’ll get back to posting more soon, stuff like details on how I’m doling out work, organizing the project, directing artists, developing my tasklists, etc. I think I have a really great opportunity here to provide a unique perspective over time of how a mere artist ascends into management and figures out what the hell to do and how he’s doing it. Because if there’s anyone else writing from this perspective, I’ve yet to hear about him. :)

Here’s a selfish little “me me me!” post. I try to avoid those but I’m just so tickled. I just re-dyed my hair, and let it grow out a couple more inches – but not in that order. Here’s a quickie shot I took of me last night with my cel phone:

It’s gotten pretty tall, no?

Since I’m in a position where I actively screen, interview and hire artists now, I’ve been trekking across the net to find the best artists I can. Here’s a few artists I’ve really been enjoying:

Skottie Young – This guy has an amazing cartoony style. Love it.

Daryl Mandryk – Amazing action-filled fantasy and sci-fi paintings. Absolutely gorgeous work.

Guild Wars Factions – Arenanet team post – This is concept art from NCsoft’s latest expansion pack for their ridiculously successful Guild Wars. Keep scrolling all the way down. The quality of art here is phenomenal, and there’s SO MUCH of it!

I’ll post more as I find it. :)  This stuff is so much fun. Been spending the last couple weeks sorting out our art needs, writing documentation and style guides, mobilizing to hire contractors, getting ready to issue art tests, digging into my contacts, and basically wrapping my head completely around this game’s asset production. I’ve never felt so challenged or alive!