Nobody cares about your talent.

I wrote this in response to someone asking career advice regarding having a hard time being hired. It may sound like hippie dippy mystic crap, but it’s the truth. The path of least resistance to getting paid is to be a good human to your fellow humans. You know, the people with the power to pay you:

At the end of the day, nobody cares about your talent. The only thing people really care about is the experience of working with you, and if you’re worth the investment of time and energy. Watch these couple of minutes of George Clooney talking about working with “batshit crazy” for a short period of time, versus working with someone who has less talent but is more amiable for a long-term project. He does a great job of illustrating the point. Replace the word “audition” with “job interview,” it’s the same thing.

To take the analogy further, think of your job interview process to be similar to dating. If you stink of desperation, nobody wants you. If you seethe with self-righteous entitlement, nobody wants you. If you have a date (or job interview or job experience) go badly, and you blow off steam about it online, the information will spread (or a screenshot of it will end up on a website), and nobody wants you. You have to look at yourself and your accountability in what happens in your life. If it seems like everyone but you is lucky, you have to be honest with yourself about what you’re doing to affect your own luck. You can’t fix your dice rolls but you can certainly work towards weighting the dice a certain way.

Things will never change for you, state of the economy or industry or otherwise, if you don’t take the time to make sure that you’re not getting in your own way. I hope you can turn your “luck” around and arrive to where you want to be. There are a lot of people in the tiny pool of the games industry who would have much stronger careers if they just stopped and asked for feedback and support. The fact that you stopped yourself in your tracks specifically to do that shows that you are already more self-aware than most who are beating themselves into brick walls but don’t want to understand their own life mechanics. I wish you the best and a long career of your choosing.



-Maya Angelou