Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Mike Walker. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Mike, looking forward to learning from your journey. You’ve got an amazing story and before we dive into that, let’s start with an important building block. Where do you get your work ethic from?
My entire family has always believed in hard work. My father was a college professor and scientist and had a fairly large staff of laboratory assistants and graduate students, plus a unit administrative assistant, but I know he would often carry packages and things to mail himself when he could have easily asked someone else to do it and I once asked him why he didn’t ask his staff to do these things more and he replied that “doing such would interrupt work they were doing already and I know if I do it then it’s done”. That stuck with me: always be prepared to do what needs to be done when it needs to be done.
Another source of my work ethic has been sports: you see a very immediate and literal relationship between the effort you personally invest in your sport and the return you obtain in personal performance and thereby also team performance.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
I have several occupations in a sense: I am a journalist, sports coach, and composer of film and game music but my graduate education was actually in visual arts so that’s something I do, too. The most difficult part of my life is balancing all these things because I’m determined to do them all and I cannot imagine leaving one behind or regulating it to simply a hobby status. However, there are ample people who have really inspired me: the composer Suzanne Ciani in example while a renowned musician and composer also was a key player in the development of early synths. She had the technical understanding of these instruments as well as the musical understanding. Another inspiration is the professional surfer, visual artist, and musician Ford Archibold. Another pro surfer, Andrew Doheny also is involved in the arts and is a surfboard shaper as well. I think people like this are testament to the ability to be productive in a variety of fields at the same time if you have the coordination and drive to make it happen.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
I would say the following have benefited me the most:
—Learning to be a good writer. I cannot stress this enough. I have also taught college as a professor and the area I saw the most of my students really struggling was in writing ability but sadly, writing is something you’ll use in most any career. We all need to be quality communicators.
—The ability to listen. As a journalist this is perhaps the greatest skill you need, actually. The stories you tell are other people’s stories and you need to first hear and understand them.
—Languages. I am fluent in several and my fluency in Russian and Serbo-Croatian in example has opened doors for doing journalistic work about these nations which would not have been possible without such fluency. Our world is becoming increasingly smaller.
We’ve all got limited resources, time, energy, focus etc – so if you had to choose between going all in on your strengths or working on areas where you aren’t as strong, what would you choose?
I think in today’s society and job market the more well-developed skills you have the better, however, I stress the term “well-developed”. Like an athlete, you really have to work on these skills and bring them to an expert level in most cases for them to be truly worthwhile. That’s something I learned from sports. I’m a platform and springboard diver in example and correctly making your dives requires great technical precision and focus. It requires a lot of practice and that’s true of many skills. It’s true in example of photography or most anything technical. So it’s useful to have diverse skill sets, but they need to be high enough in quality, well enough developed, to be of actual benefit to employers or clients, too. In example years ago in college I worked part-time in information technology but it’s been so long I’d not dare list those skills now because I’ve not kept up with IT much yet I know the technology and therefore the knowledge base has greatly changed.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://mike-walker.format.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/traaaaack99/
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/user_details?userid=xj3u-L1K5Dhq511eA2Z6Gw
- SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/thiscloudboy
Image Credits
All images were shot by myself or for which I hold full copyright.
