Back in the Saddle

Advice is interesting. Often given, rarely taken. Generally speaking the person who is giving the advice (the “advisor”) is doing it with the sincere intention of influencing the recipient of the advice (the “advisee”) into acting (or not acting) in a more thoughtful way than they are intending, but usually, in my experience at either end of the advisor-advisee continuum, the advisee will do what they were going to do anyway.

Does this mean that the advice was useless? No! Now when everything goes to hell the advisee will be more easily able to determine the reason. Instead of lying there whimpering “I don’t understand! What went wrong? It hurts!” they will be able to say “Well, I guess [advisor] was right! I sure learned something!” (if they are still alive).

I feel more and more unwound with each passing day, and my thoughts are starting to turn towards my future. I had planned to avoid thinking about this for a while, to just allow myself to enjoy being free for a month or two before diving back into the anxiety of trying to make a living. But now that I am here and starting to grow back some of my atrophied perspective I am starting to think a little differently.

I have been thinking of my life as being divided into two distinct parts – working, which is stressful and unpleasant, but a necessary evil; and being unemployed, which is awesome, but unsustainable for very long. But this is a false dichotomy – it doesn’t have to be that way. In reality in my working life I have been extremely fortunate in consistently having had jobs that were challenging, interesting and rewarding, tempered by just the right amount of unemployment to recharge my batteries and pursue other interests. That balance has gotten out of whack in recent years, but there’s no reason it can’t be retrieved.

And so to advice. The best advice I have ever heard was not delivered to me directly, but rather incidentally through the medium of song – to be specific the song “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” by The Rolling Stones. It goes a little something like this:

You can’t always get what you want, no!
You can’t always get what you want (tell ya baby)
You can’t always get what you want (no)
But if you try sometimes you just might find
You get what you need
Oh yes! Woo!

You get what you need–yeah, oh baby!
Oh yeah!

I have consistently found these words of wisdom to be borne out by my own experience (particularly “Oh yes! Woo!”). Looked at in one way my life has been a constant stream of disappointments as I continually fail to reach my goals. But it has never felt that way, because even though I may not have achieved my aims the striving has always led me to interesting places.

When I was a teenager I wanted to be an auteur, like Hitchcock or Welles. That led me to take various film courses and eventually attending the National Film School of Ireland (although it wasn’t called that then).

Along the way I figured out that I was much more interested in editing than directing, so I focused on that. Then when I left I tried to get editing work, but I failed. I did a sound editing course because I thought that would make me more valuable as an editor. But I found it very easy to get a good grasp of the sound editing process and I really enjoyed it, so I pursued that for a while.

I was lucky there, as I got in pretty close to the ground floor of a somewhat burgeoning Irish sound editing industry and I found myself working at an unexpectedly high level on some great projects quite quickly – far more quickly than I would have done as an editor. Then I gave that up and decided to move to New York and become a sound editor over here.

Once again I failed at my stated goal. I decided to give up looking for sound work and decided to be a writer. I devoted myself full time to writing a screenplay. That didn’t really pan out (although I do have a credit on a produced movie!). I gave up – and got hired at Rockstar.

It may seem to break down a little here as I was hired to work on San Andreas as a sound editor, not a writer, but my decision to give up sound editing meant that as soon as I got established I was looking for chances to expand my role and, bless them, they gave them to me. By the time I left I was writing and directing background dialogue and working with the main writers to help define AI speech and other cool stuff.

My constantly thwarted ambition has become a pretty interesting career!

I have been assuming that my period of rest and relaxation would end when I started to feel a growing panic about running out of money. I would send out résumés to various video game companies and wait to see if any of them bit. Maybe I’d talk to a recruiter, or an agent.

Now I’m thinking – no. Go for the gusto. Pick a lofty goal and aim straight for it. Both experience and the Rolling Stones suggest that I won’t succeed, but the attempt will take me somewhere fantastic.

But I need advice. In order to implement this still-coalescing plan I will need to have more of a financial cushion than I currently do. I’m thinking about cashing in my 401(k), as this will give me up to an extra six months of not feeling overly financially pressured.

Of course, this is a terrible idea. The financially minded among you are probably still staring disbelievingly at the last paragraph, mouths agape in horror. Only a fool would cash in their 401(k). The taxes! The penalties! Your retirement!

As far as the taxes and penalties go my feeling is this – it’s already money I don’t have, why should I worry about losing it? As to my retirement, two points: firstly I plan to be fabulously wealthy by the time I retire so any kind of pension is irrelevant; secondly I have been paying into a pension fund in Ireland monthly for about ten years so I have a backup.

All of the available advice about cashing out of your 401(k) plan early can be summed up in one word: don’t. I expect this post to generate some more (although it is a long one and maybe most people won’t have read this far). I’m even going to put up a new poll to make giving me this advice as easy as possible. I’m probably going to do it anyway, but rest assured…

Your advice will be invaluable in helping me to understand why I’m spending my twilight years in a cardboard box!