I've had a sort of big-picture life quandary over the last several months, and then I saw Being Elmo.
Being Elmo is a documentary following Kevin Clash, the puppeteer who's always played Elmo. Even though it's a documentary in format and presentation, the story is heart-warming enough to be as good as the Oscar winners from a few hours ago.
Clash came from very humble origins - a house that could've passed for projects on the outskirts of Baltimore and no means to travel - but his passion for puppetry was spotted at a very early age. He put on puppet shows for local kids and survived constant heckling from classmates. That grew into a spot on local children's TV shows, which grew into a spot on the popular broadcast show Captain Kangaroo.
In his senior year of high school, he got his big break and met his heroes: Jim Henson and his entire crew. He succeeded before Henson and eventually settled into a steady career on Sesame Street.
Elmo is his creation, his character made from a spare puppet that was rarely used on the set. The real pivotal point in the film - spoiler alert (if such a thing exists for documentaries) - is the revelation that each Muppet character is based on a very focused character. Fozzy Bear is a Vaudeville performer, first and foremost. Elmo's character, on the other hand, is a concentrated and raw form of love. Elmo always gives hugs and kisses. Elmo loves you.
Everyone who was interviewed for the film, from fellow puppeteers to Henson's contemporaries to Whoopi Goldberg, pointed to that Elmo character as a hidden side of Clash that only gets to come out when he's in character.
While I'm glossing over a lot of wonderfully heart-warming details, the sum of the parts is that Clash had this passion for puppetry from his youth, and he followed it with such whole-heartedness and dedication that it led him to meet his heroes, become part of that tribe, and win great professional success along with it.
At 27, I've started to fear that I've missed out on my Elmo moment.
When I was 4 and first saw a video game, that automatic, natural connection went off in my head the same way it did for Kevin Clash when he saw the pilot episode of Sesame Street and Bert and Ernie talked to him by looking straight into the camera.
When I was 9, I tried to learn C++. When I was 10 or 11, I subscribed to Game Developer Magazine. All the while, I played with every level editor for every major PC game that was a part of my childhood: Doom, Descent, StarCraft, Quake, Unreal. I was trying to be creative, the equivalent of sewing my own puppets together.
Opportunity knocked for me, the same way it did for Clash. I attended Dallas gaming conventions and met heroes like John Carmack and John Romero. I worked in the gaming press - the dream job to end all dream jobs, if you were a young kid. I even worked at an actual game studio and had so much fun I preferred work to home life. I was invited to work - not just attend - E3 2009.
Yet in each case, things fizzled. The Dallas gaming empire collapsed, and my heroes fell from the spotlight. I lost my gaming press job after a couple months. I lost the game development job after mere weeks. The publisher that tentatively hired me for E3 backed out.
The games industry - my own calling since birth, as I saw it - chewed me up and spat me out multiple times. My desire to work a job that would last, and one where I'd be taken seriously, led me to Rakuten.
I feel good about Rakuten - it connects a lot of dots from my past including the Internet business, business strategy, working globally, and of course the Japan thing.
My ultimate, eventual goal is to be part of a creative place. The Pixars, Nintendos, Sesame Workshops and Apples of the world have in common one thing: love. As Al Gore put it at the global tribute to Steve Jobs, Apple has it. Pixar and Nintendo both have it, if you go read the books about those companies. Valve, too, has it, as its legions of fans will attest.
Kevin Clash has it in spades, obviously. And if you watch his documentary, you'll notice that the same Henson Workshop puppeteers from the 1970s are still around and have aged very gracefully in lives filled with happiness and passion.
My only fear about Rakuten - a company which is kindly giving me a job, a paycheck, training and a position with advancement capability in a sector where I have passion and experience in my favorite city in the world - is what happens to creativity in a business (and consequently a career) with success and failure defined by metrics.
"Suck it up," you may say to me. I should be thankful I'm employed at all. I should have to do some real work and pay my dues. Everyone else does "work work" and I'm not deserving of escaping that.
Feel free to say those things to me. Just keep the volume low enough that the four-year-old me can't hear.