2022
PROMISEDLAND FESTIVAL
Read Time: 16 Minutes
About This Talk:
I first gave this talk at Promised Land Art Festival in Poland in 2022, hosted by CD Projekt Red. Later that year, I had the chance to share it again at ICON Manila and LightBox Expo in Los Angeles.
At its core, this talk is about ambition, accomplishment, and what happens after we achieve the things we once thought would make us feel complete. It’s a reflection on my journey from artist, to game developer, to founder, and the lessons I learned about growth, fulfillment, reinvention, and building a life around work that can keep evolving.
I’ve made it available here in written form for anyone who wants to experience it. I hope it can be helpful in your own journey as you pursue your ambitions, reach new milestones, and keep finding new mountains to climb.
One of the questions I get a lot is “Why did you stop being an artist?”, and the quick answer is because I had a really unhealthy relationship with art. It didn’t bring me happiness or fulfillment, it honestly was very painful for me towards the end of my career.
It wasn’t always this way. In the beginning, I LOVED painting. I loved working at studios with great teams. I loved working on big projects. But as the years went on, and as I accomplished more and more of my professional goals, they kept making me feel emptier and emptier. Until I finally quit.
What I’ve learned over the last couple of years, is that Art had nothing to do with this. So much of the pain I experienced was because I didn’t understand accomplishment, or more accurately, what happens after you accomplish your goals.
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What happens after we accomplish our goals is something we rarely talk about and if you’re goal driven like I am, you are probably so focused on accomplishing your goals that you haven’t thought much about what follows.
Or maybe you’ve accomplished something big that you spent years pursuing. Maybe you’ve experienced what I'm alluding to, and wondered why? Why does something that should feel so good often leave us with a feeling of sadness, emptiness, or even the feeling of being lost?
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Think about what thrill it must be to perform on stage in front of a hundred thousand people singing along to a song you wrote? Think about how weird it must be to go home afterwards?
Chris Hadfield wrote a great book called “An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth” where he talks about what it’s like to land after being in space. He talks about how he spent his entire career training for a moment that’s now behind him.
Now I haven’t performed on stage to a hundred thousand people, but I have delivered a speech to a room of ten thousand. And clearly I have never been to space, but I have experienced many moments where it felt like I was returning to Earth with the pinnacle of my career behind me.
Originally I set out with a simple goal: I wanted to paint everyday. I hated school, I loved art. The idea of going to college seemed awful to me, and I wanted more than anything to be able to financially support myself with my art. I still vividly remember the day that I got my first job, and knew that I was going to have a career as an artist. I was so happy and excited, and relieved. This was a goal that I lived every day, and every day I went to the studio, I was in disbelief that this was now my life.
Eventually my goal evolved as I watched in awe of artists like Dylan Cole and Dusso doing the big establishing shots on these incredible films like Avatar and Lord of the Rings. I wanted to do the hero painting for a big summer blockbuster. Up until then I had been working on mostly tv shows doing small paintings, but I wanted to work in film. Not just on any films, I wanted to work on a summer blockbuster and do the most heroic painting.
It took me 5 years to accomplish that goal. In that time I changed jobs 18 times, completed 79 projects, and delivered 262 paintings before my hero painting finally came. These numbers all mean the same thing, I worked my ass off chasing this goal. And in 2013, I got the call from Digital Domain to come work on Iron Man 3.
This was it, the thing I had been working towards with every job, every painting, every day. I knew it as soon as I got the call and I threw myself into that film, taking on every painting I could. I worked every weekend, I stayed late every day. At first I was assigned simple set extensions, and every time I delivered something good, the studio would trust me with something bigger. And bigger. Until I got my hero shot.
After 6 months of work, we finally wrapped. I was full of energy and exhausted at the same time. I had thought about nothing except this project for 6 months, and really for 5 years. I remember opening my front door, dropping my bags and going straight to the couch. I sat there and just stared at the ceiling for hours. Not a thought in my head. I had dedicated myself fully to achieving this goal, and now I have done it. A sense of emptiness came over me. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do next, or what I should even think about.
A few weeks later the film was released, and I went to our crew screening. That’s the only time I’ve ever seen that film. The reception was exactly what I had hoped for, and my paintings were everywhere around LA and across covers of magazines and billboards, but in the strangest way, it didn’t matter to me anymore. That was all in my past. It was a box that was already checked. The moment was gone.
What surprised me about this whole experience was how painful it was to actually achieve my goal. The sudden downshift from racing towards something to aimlessly driving was disorienting. And yes, I took a couple victory laps and continued to work on big movies, eventually big shows and big games, but I often didn’t know why I was doing any of it other than sustaining. And that’s fine, for a period of time. But we as people need to grow. We need a direction to move towards and a goal to be our north star. But why do we chase a goal if the act of accomplishing it is so painful.
A few years later I started tinkering in Unreal. I would wake up early and play around before heading to work. It really started out as play time for me. I started to remember being a kid and dreaming of creating my own video game. I was working on it with a childhood friend, and that really became the theme of the game, our childhood. I wanted to do something completely different from my art style and challenge myself with something cartoony.
As I put more and more hours into this side project, a new goal started to form. I wanted to create and release a video game. Not work on someone else's game, I wanted to make my own. I started taking less freelance work and spending more time on this game until I eventually took the leap and went full time as an indie game developer. I learned programming. I saved up to hire concept artists, and modelers, and animators, and sound designers, and composers. I showed my prototype to Banks Boutte, and we decided to start a publishing company.
We learned everything about video game publishing, marketing, and PR. We made trailers and went on press tours. We went to trade shows in Los Angeles, in San Francisco, in San Antonio, in Boston, in Seattle. We became friends with people at Steam, at Microsoft, at Nintendo, at Twitch. We learned the names of all the big game streamers and threw parties to build the excitement. All leading up to the culmination of a 3 year intense journey when we live streamed to millions of people from our Las Vegas launch party for the game.
And then at the final moment, the game was released to the public. That one instant moment, at 12:01 the game went live, and it was over. This time instead of driving home, I jumped on an airplane to see my family, and my empty stares were at the back of an airplane seat instead of my ceiling. This time there wasn’t a feeling of emptiness, there was a feeling of loss. I mourned my project when it was no longer mine, it was now out in the world and it was everyones.
I spiraled into a really dark depression that last a couple months. I talked with a lot of other game developers and they started to confirm that this was normal. It was so normal that there’s a term for it: Post-Release Depression…
When I heard about this all I could think was… Why the hell would we spend years working towards something that we know is going to result in months of depression? AND how come no one ever talks about it?!?!? Seriously, I had to DIG to find these articles. Did no one think this might be a useful piece of information to have? Maybe we could even prepare for it. Or change our approach to goal setting to avoid it all together.
This started a new journey for me to try to figure out how to do this better. How do we keep the positive parts of goal setting, as in setting a north star that challenges us to grow, and keeps focused on the direction we want to move towards, and how do we eliminate the negatives of accomplishing a goal that often leaves us feeling empty, lost, and depressed?
I’ve now spent a third of my career working on KitBash3D. One of the big focuses for me when starting this new project was longevity. If I was going to give up a 10 year long career, I wanted this new passion to last me a lifetime.
And in the process of building KitBash3D, I’ve learned a lot about how to avoid the pitfalls of my past.
Right before we released Sleep Tight, Banks and I were reading Snowcrash. We were working in game engines, and the Metaverse became front and center in our minds. We knew we were 10 years too early, so we started brainstorming on what we could do in the mean time to contribute to this inevitable industry.
From his garage, we started building 3D model kits. We saw how important and expensive assets were for Sleep Tight, and we knew that this was going to be a key area of the metaverse. We also believed that the people who were going to create the metaverse were the amazing artists working in movies and video games.
In addition to assets, we started building a website, shooting promo videos, working with a PR agency, in preparation for launching our new company, KitBash3D.
The night before launch, our website still wasn’t working, and we knew the press releases about our launch were going out at 9am the next day. We worked all night, finally launched at 6am, and sat in anticipation for the hundreds of sales that were about to flood in.
Then… we didn’t get any sales. The first 10 sales on our website are me making sure everything was working because I was so confused that no one was buying our kits. Late that day, when we did get our first sale, we couldn’t celebrate it because we were so disappointed that our launch day wasn’t a home run.
The next day we got a couple more sales and saw the first piece of artwork using a kit posted on social media. The next day we had a few more sales and a few more pieces of art trickled into our feed. Banks and I started to realize that we had not crossed a finish line, that our launch was actually the starting line.
This was an “aha” moment for us. The goal for KitBash3D was not to reach some end point, it was to continue going. We needed to sell enough kits to be able to make another one, and another, and another. This already was a radical shift from the ways I had approached goals in the past.
If we weren’t trying to get to a finish line, it became even more important to clearly define WHY we were doing this at all. We need a reason good enough to last us for years to come, and flexible enough to allow for constant reinvention. And financial motivation was not going to be enough. If money was the goal, it would be alot easier to work in finance than art.
So when we were looking for what was driving us, we started to explore the things that got us excited or that made us feel fulfilled. We were really excited about the promise of the metaverse and new emerging technologies. We felt really fulfilled when we saw a piece of art that someone had made using our kits. The best feeling was seeing someone who had never used 3D before get excited about creating and have the tools to make something for the first time. Following this path, and asking this question of “Why are we doing this?” lead us to our mission:
To Enable and Inspire creators of the Virtual Frontier.
This mission was really carbonating for us and our team. It gave us a sense of purpose and a framework for making decisions along the way. Anytime we were at a crossroads with the company, we could always go back to this mission to help guide us on the right path.
This mission has led us to doing things like putting on our own online art festivals, where we’ve hit over 5 million live viewers.
And giving away free kits for art challenges, like our Bright Art Dark Times challenge which had over 60,000 participants.
And receiving amazing recognition from publications like Forbes and Fast Company.
None of these milestones have left us with the feeling of emptiness, because we know that they are not finish lines. We know ahead of the milestone what we’re doing next and why we’re doing it.
As we’ve hit these amazing milestones, we grow our ambitions. With that, we have grown our team. As we started increasing kit production, or building our own software we needed engineers, managers, operations, HR, finance, legal and a whole host of different skill sets to come together on this mission.
Bringing all the people with diverse backgrounds and skill sets together has been really eye opening. I love learning how each person on our team derives fulfillment, what gets them excited, what motivates them. And I can say with confidence, that for most people on our team, that is not our mission.
Many people in our Operations team, for example, love statistics, project planning, legal, finance, HR, and every other system that might drive an artist crazy. The thing that fulfills them is creating order in areas that have chaos. Or many of the people on our engineering team, they love finding elegant solutions to complex technical problems. I’ve seen our team smiling with excitement when it was time to fix bugs.
We all have different personalities, perspectives, passions, but what unites us is a common direction we’re all trying to move towards, and the ways in which we pursue it. Our team is full of people who take pride in their work, who have a sense of excellence, and a desire to be part of something bigger than themselves.
Being surrounded by a group of people like that every day makes it exciting to come to work. It makes it more enjoyable when we cross a big milestone, and makes it feel more manageable when we encounter a big challenge. More than anything, it makes it really really fun to be on this journey.
Next week will be KitBash3D’s 5th birthday. We’ve accomplished some really cool things in these last 5 years.
We’ve put out almost 100 kits.
We’ve contributed to some great movies and video games.
And we’ve built a community of 100,000 artists across 180 countries who produce an endless amount of art work each day using tools and education that we’ve been fortunate enough to create.
We are enabling and inspiring the creators of the virtual frontier every day, and at the same time, we are pursuing a mission that we know we will never cross the finish line of.
So what does this all mean?
My time at KitBash3D has taught me so much about success, growth and fulfillment.
When I look back at my artistic career with a different perspective, I can now see that my first goal, to do art every day, is a goal that I still feel the accomplishment of.
That goal has continued to evolve over time. Sometimes that meant creating paintings for a project I was excited about. Sometimes it meant creating my own projects. And other times it meant talking with other artists in the hopes of inspiring them.
So I’ll leave you with this. You don’t need to stop being an artist to learn this lesson, I’ve already done that for you. Whether you’re an artist at the beginning of your career, a senior artist who is looking for bigger and bigger projects, or a director leading a team on a beloved IP, if you want longevity in your career, try looking at your goals from a different perspective.
Every success comes with a need for reinvention.
This is how we continue to grow. We cannot continue to achieve the same thing over and over again and expect to get the same feeling. Instead, when we get to the top of a mountain, we need to find a new one to climb. This is because…
The process of growth is what leads to fulfillment.
We want to be challenged to become the best version of ourselves that we can be. And overcoming new challenges, and proving to ourselves that we are capable of performing at the highest level is what gives us that sense of accomplishment.
But in the end, happiness lies within the everyday.
No matter what, you will have more time in between accomplishments, than you will celebrating the milestones. So find the ways you can be happy in the present. Do that by understanding that the goal is to keep going, be clear on why you’re on your path, and surround yourself with quality people along the way.
I hope that each of you see your dreams become a reality, and that you’re able to continue to do that for a lifetime. Thank you.
