A lot of people ask me what I did before working in game audio.
Well, it was all smooth sailing for me.
I kind of rolled out of bed one day, dusted off about a dozen Werther's Original wrappers that were stuck to my face and had a couple thousand gigs waiting for me.
…
Minus being covered in sticky candy wrappers on a daily basis, that's not even remotely true.
I was actually a public pool janitor.
Yes, that's right my lovelies, I used to mop up piles of (mostly human) feces every day starting at 5AM.
A question I asked myself every day...
Again, these were public pools.
That means that PEOPLE used them.
The amount of dark necromancy that went on in those bathrooms would make even Bellatrix Lestrange cringe in terror.
The smell got so bad that I eventually had to wear a respirator every morning to prevent from vomiting instantly.
Seriously. It was that bad.
It goes without saying that that wasn't my dream job.
When I wasn't excising the foul spirits that lived within each urinal, I would read.
Book after book about audio production, DAWs, Harry Potter, music theory, Harry Potter, positive psychology, self development, public speaking, Harry Potter, and anything else I could get my hands on.
And that small act made all the difference in the world.
I know a lot of you are just getting your game industry careers off the ground.
That's why I have my blog, newsletter, Youtube channel, and my online courses - to make that incredibly difficult journey as easy as possible.
While your peers will be focused on showing off pictures of their Logic projects on Instagram, realize that all of your biggest dreams, goals, and achievements will be the result of your most consistent habits.
I had the skills to do a TED talk because I spoke publicly, twice a week, to a small room of Berklee students for 3 years straight.
My good friend Ryan Ike was ready to write music for the indie mega-hit Gunpoint because he wrote a small piece of music every single week he called Microjams. Not for fame, not for glory, not for some pat on the back, but for himself.
Film composer Hummie Mann (composer of Robin Hood: Men in Tights and one of my mentors) trained his ear by humming every single mode to himself over and over during his daily workouts, which gave him an incredible ability to put his musical ideas down on paper instantly.
I'm extremely fortunate to come from a small middle-of-nowhere town pool janitor to where I'm at today
But I am by no means special.
Now that it's 2017, many of us will set huge bombastic goals, which is great.
But whether you're scrubbing toilets, or making seven figures as an international Harry Potter fan-fiction icon, just remember that it is the small, insignificant, modest acts that make all the difference.