Fair warning, I'm taking the scenic route. I guess I like to reminisce more as I get older, so just bear with me for a while.
I'm very lucky to have had the life I had growing up. I went to school, played sports, learned percussion, and many other things. What I spent a large chunk of my time doing growing up was playing hockey. I loved it and still do.
My parents always supported me with it. From select camps, tryouts, games, practices, and other things that went along with it. That's all I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to play hockey for the Badgers and the Blackhawks. There was only one problem, it was me.
My whole childhood, I told my parents this dream. Then we went through life, and inertia carried us forward. I said I wanted these things, but I honestly lacked the drive to do it. I did too little to ever think I could compete with that caliber player ever. I just didn't understand it at the time.
My parents gave up so much for that, but I didn't understand. At the same time, I was cultivating other interests, but I never shared those interests with them. For example, I had a book to learn to program games in VB.
I got through a chapter or two of this book. I hit a point where it wanted me to load files from disk. I had no clue what the hell to do. I could've asked my mom or dad, but I just never did, so they never learned of this interest.
It's pretty easy to play the blame game. I was between 12-14 at the time. Things always came so easy for me in school. I wasn't used to being challenged. I wasn't used to really learning on my own. So I did what I did all too often when I was younger. I gave up...
I hated this about myself. I knew that I never really finished anything of substance in my life. I was not a closer.
I went to college and started in business. Then I had a call with a family friend walking to my car for hockey practice one day. She didn't understand why I was doing that. She said to me, "I always thought you were going to make games."
At that point, I thought back to that book. It still bothered me years later, but I knew that she was right. Next semester I signed up for the closest I could get, Computer Science.
I graduated with my CS degree in 2010. I had a lot of fun, but the most useful part for me was my senior capstone project. It was a solo project where I solved a problem for my CS professors. This was my first deep-dive into actual independent research.
I dug around everywhere, working on parts one-by-one until I had a decently working product. It was only later that I realized how awesome that independent research was.
I never really had to work that hard until then. I was always told what to learn, what to know. I took direct ownership of the learning. I controlled what I did when. I held myself truly accountable for the first time in my life. It felt like I found this key to a room that held an item to defeat the dungeon boss.
My personal research is what has really helped get me to where I am today. I did so much research while working on developing games, that I was actually able to land a great job.
Looking back though, that's what I had been missing my whole life. I didn't see what my dad and others had been telling me. If I had done this stuff earlier, I would've come into development sooner. I also lacked the understanding of what it meant to sacrifice. I just wanted everyone to TELL me what to do. I needed to take more of that responsibility on myself.
Ultimately, we are responsible for ourselves. If we want something we have to be willing to grind through it; go through hell before getting to heaven. It all starts with research. Starting is probably the biggest hurdle. Just start. Chunk it up and you'll be surprised how far you get. This research is a marathon with sprints sprinkled in.
No matter what it is, most people who are stars, don't just happen upon it with skill. It's filled with blood, sweat, and tears. I see it as experience forged in fire. It's not paying your dues (if you think that, you'll be pissed to find out that people really don't care about your "dues").
As human beings we are a collection of experiences that mold us into who we are. I'll leave with a quote from a guy named Zig Ziglar:
