The Many Jobs of Nathan Pedde – Restoration Industry

In the years after I gave up on the film industry, I needed a career where I could earn enough money to support my new family. My wife and I had a one-year-old with another child on the way. Living in Vancouver BC made things even more difficult. The cost of living was high and would only go higher. I needed a solution to this problem.

My solution was to get a dirty job. Working in retail wouldn’t work for me, and I had no real skills. The film industry didn’t earn me anything marketable.

I moved back to Prince George where I grew up and got a job at a restoration company. The job comprised me working long hours cleaning up messes. If a house flooded or burnt up, then we would clean up the mess.

It was a hard, stressful job where I spent a lot of time away from my family. It wasn’t a career my sixteen-year-old self would be doing. I cleaned up sewer backups for a living.

After years of working in the field, moving from a laborer to a crew supervisor, I moved into the office estimating the jobs. After seven years of working the job, a slowdown in the industry forced me to reevaluate my job options. In short, I got laid off.

This was the longest career I worked at, the one where I grew the most as a person. It is one where I have no interest in going back to.

This journey is not something I can do alone. It takes support from many people for it to become a reality. The easiest way is to visit my Amazon Author Page and purchase one of my books. They are available in all countries and for free in Kindle Unlimited. I have a tip jar set up at Ko-Fe, where you can buy me a coffee. Or you can also visit me on Facebook. Your help and support are much appreciated.

The Many Jobs of Nathan Pedde – Film Industry

In the seventeen years since high school (everything sounds horrible when you do the math) I have worked at many jobs. When I graduated, I thought I was going to be the next Steven Spielberg. So I applied to Capilano University (then Capilano College) up here in Hollywood North, I entered their first year Film Program, then the ELTC Lighting Program. I was going to get into the film industry and become a director.

The problem was that I discovered I had an issue working with actors. I couldn’t talk to them, and they pissed me off. Which is why I went into film lighting. I worked as a lighting technician for a few years. You can even find me on IMDB.

I worked on projects like X-Men 3, Battlestar Galatica, the L-Word, and countless others. The glamour of the industry quickly faded into a cold reality.

This was fifteen years ago, and I have been told the industry has changed. Back then, the film industry is not viable employment for those with families. The hours are long with twelves being the standard. The industry also uses an on call system, which makes it hard to have additional employment waiting for the calls. A day on a film set would net me three hundred bucks. But if I only worked two or three times in a month, it was impossible to pay rent to let along being able to have a career.

The union was also designed not to help new members get employment, but to keep the lazy-good-for-nothing-old-timers on easy street. Every third project I got a call on, I saw an old-timer (one with a low number and therefore all the calls) get sent away from a set collecting the minimum time. The scam was that they knew no production liked them, but as they got called when they wanted a job, they went to set. Because they showed up, they got the two-hour minimum. Then they called the office and informed them they were available and went directly to an original set. Rinse and repeat.

For me, it was impossible to get all of my hours to get full membership in the union. After the struggle, I gave up and went to do other things. Film was not and is not for me.

I will talk about the other jobs I have had in the coming weeks. I have many. Perhaps I will even revisit my time in the film industry. I have stories to tell.

This journey is not something I can do alone. It takes support from many people for it to become a reality. The easiest way is to visit my Amazon Author Page and purchase one of my books. They are available in all countries and for free in Kindle Unlimited. I do have a tip jar set up at Ko-Fe, where you can buy me a coffee. Or you can also visit me on Facebook. Your help and support are much appreciated.

The Digital Revolution

No, this isn’t a call to action of some radical revolutionary group. This post is about something more substantial. It’s a history lesson and a brief talk about current trends. As a student of history, I see patterns in events that are shaped by and shapes the world around it.

In the last 250 years, the world has changed. It has gone from being the height of empires and imperialism to a global trade network. It has also changed from being agricultural in nature, to being industrial.

With the discovery and invention of steam power, the factory was created. This pulled people to urban cities. Steam power replaced many agricultural techniques, which pushed people away. The steam plow replaced the worker at the farm, but the worker still needed to eat. This factor drove them to the city.

This trend was spread over 250 years as the world became more and more urbanized. Cities have gotten more massive as the population of the world exploded. The pattern doesn’t seem to have any sign of stopping. Or has it.

In North America today, the big city has many pulls. City services, access to luxury goods, access to high paying jobs, and the internet. But these pulls have been eroding over the last thirty years. The high paying jobs are being moved overseas to China and Vietnam. With Amazon and the Premium shipping, those luxury goods are a day away. No need to go out of the house to get them. City services are becoming less relevant as many smaller towns are bolstering their services. The internet is available in most places. The big cities are also pushing people away. The high cost of housing, high crime rates, the lack of community, and the lack of jobs to pay for it all.

One trend worth noting is the change of jobs. Manufacturing jobs have moved out of the North American city. This has left people filling low paying service-level positions. There is no way to earn a living working in the service industry. They have been trying to make it work since the 1990s and still haven’t been successful. One type of jobs that have been created is the digital job.

Twitter. Patreon. Ko-Fe. Youtube. Amazon. These are just the glamorous new digital jobs people are making use of. Added are virtual call-center and customer service jobs. Coding, graphic design, and other software design jobs are also fueling the revolution. These new digital jobs are hard to find. Most times, it requires the worker to work for themselves. This is a scary aspect that tends to keep people from signing up. The term scam is often used. Yet, I know of many people who have successful digital jobs.

This new trend has removed a big pull of people to live in big cities. Jobs. Being a digital job, most of them are worked from home. This creates a push from the big cities. Why live in a tiny expensive house, when the worker can spend the same amount of money and live someplace smaller and more rural getting a whole house.

This is the trend. The removal of high paying jobs from the city, coupled with the creation of a digital economy, has given people the freedom to be able to move from the highly polluted city.

This is my end goal. A digital job where I don’t have an office to go to. Where I can work from home, see my kids more, and all that jazz.

This journey is not something I can do alone. It takes support from many people for it to become a reality. The easiest way is to visit my Amazon Author Page and purchase one of my books. They are available in all countries and for free on Kindle Unlimited. I do have a tip jar set up at Ko-Fe, where you can buy me a coffee. Or you can also visit me on Facebook. Your help and support are much appreciated.

Expanding your Comfort Zone.

Habits, by definition, are comfortable. They become convenient for that very reason. If they weren’t comfortable, they wouldn’t become habits in the first place.

In the career of a creative, there is always the threat they will sink into a rut. This is where the creative will work a job, not in their field, or they will work in their field, but in a more corporate setting. Both of which are soul-crushing and will end with them in a rut. Once in the rut, a creative will end up spinning their wheels, getting nowhere.

For a creative, the rut is comfortable and soft. At least at first. The corporate job will pay the bills, the work not in the field gives the freedom to not work too much at their craft. All of this will become a habit, and habit is comforting to people.

But the rut and the habit are death spirals to creatives. They will end up with either the creative’s soul being crushed or them giving up and throwing in the towel. Either outcome is bad for obvious reasons.

However, there is a way for a creative to do soul-crushing tasks while still staying sane. For example, they can use the soul-crushing job to pay for the creative endeavor they genuinely want to do. This is hard as it takes determination and willpower to keep moving.

This will usually take the creative to expand and get out of their comfort zone to get out of their rut. It is not a natural thing for people to do, and it takes them to seek it out. The creative has to consciously make a move as it won’t just happen on their own. If they leave everything alone, nothing will change. They will blink three times and discover a decade has passed in the meantime. Staying in the comfort zone creates a complacency which hinders a creative.

What do creatives need to do?

Take on something outside of the comfort zone just cause its outside of it. Ignore the voices that say it’s not going to work. Or that it’ll end up in tears. The important part is to step up and acknowledge the need for growth. This growth will create the ability to get out of the comfort zone.

If you like what you are reading and wish to support me in my endeavors, please sign up for my newsletter, visit my Amazon Author Page and purchase one of my books. Or buy me a coffee. You can also visit me on Facebook. Your help and support are much appreciated.