How My Brain Reacts To New Challenges
This blog is not exclusive to 3D and game art. There are times like these where I will wax intellectual and talk about serious life stuffs.
One of the biggest reasons I love game development is that on any given day, the process of making something new quite frequently awards me with an opportunity to tax my mental capacity. This often leads to incredible amounts of frustration at first, but if I let myself ease into problem solving mode, it gets to be an extremely fun and gratifying experience. And when I do figure out what I have to do in order to work past it, I am filled with an almost overpowering sense of accomplishment and I wish I could just share my findings with the world. This feeling passes rather quickly as I am just as driven to push forward and find the next new challenge.
This process is not limited to game development or any of the work I do. This might sound strange, but I take this same approach with everything new. When faced with a challenge, I view it as a puzzle. A puzzle that needs to be analyzed and torn apart in my head. It’s like taking apart one the toys I had as a kid, find out why it stopped working after throwing it across the room, and reassembling it in order to improve my understanding of it. This rarely ever fixed the underlying problem of the toy no longer working, but it did give me understanding. I assume most kids would have figured out that throwing a plastic electronic toy against a hard surface results in lack of function without all of that, but I preferred the scientific approach. It got to the point where I would take things apart even f they were not broken, just to appease my curiosity.
Recently I have been faced with a new challenge. What to do when you feel as if you’re staring down the face of your own future. This is a challenge that happens very rarely. In fact, I can only recall 4 times this has ever happened to me in my life. Yet something different happens when faced with such a unique situation: I am not haphazard about it. I am calm, not frustrated, and most of all, I feel confident that I already know the answer. I let my mind go through the motions, but clarity and lucidity often takes over.
When you make important life choices, there are no wrong answers or wrong decisions. There are simply paths that lead to one outcome or another. One path might be less ideal than the other, but making these decisions defines your life and ultimately, you. The best you can do is research every angle, every possibility, every little thing that might or could happen, and assume they won’t come to pass. I’m serious. Planning is the bane of your future. The best laid plans of mice and men oft go astray. Too fucking true. Choose a path that feels right to you and run with it, taking the curve balls that life throws at you right in the face. There is no ‘undo’ key, so you gotta keep moving forward. Each new bruise or scar just adds to who you are and your understanding, allowing you adapt faster and more easily to the next one. This is what I have learned since making the life choice to move away from friends and family and into an area where I had very few friends with me. My original plan for the move went haywire and ended up not coming to pass, but I stuck with my decision anyway. Turns out, I am REALLY glad I did!















