The Learning
Project by
Lincoln StollerMatt Forbeck, author
Interviewed in Las Vegas, Nevada. April 24th, 2007.
Born: 1968 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
“I have failed more often and in a
greater variety of attempts than anyone I know. I also have had some spectacular
successes that I would not have experienced if I had not been willing to risk
failing. I'll take that a step further and admit that I've learned far more
from my mistakes and failures than from any of my accomplishments. You cannot
learn without risking failure… Learning requires failure; you won't learn if
you are not willing to make mistakes and fail."
— Curtis M. Faith in “Way of the Turtle,” (McGraw-Hill, 2007, p. 239)
MF:
The most important skill I’ve learned is typing. As a writer the best class I ever took was my typing class and I didn’t do very well at it.
When I went to school — this was before computers in a lot of ways — my Catholic high school only had enough electric typewriters for half the class and manual typewriters for the other half. So for half the year I was on the manual and the other half I was on the electric, and I actually sucked at it. I was a straight-A student except for typing; I got C’s in typing.
When I was about 14 or 15 I was more heavily into computers than anyone I knew — I had one at home that I’d bought with my own money — but learning how to touch type opened up the world for me.
I can type 80 to 100 words a minute, and I write somewhere north of 1,000 words an hour when I’m cooking, and if I didn’t know how to touch type I couldn’t do any of that. My interaction with the world on a daily basis is through a keyboard, so that skill has proved to more useful to me than anything else I’ve learned.
All the other stuff I learned in school: math, science, reading, writing, literary analysis, all that kind of stuff… the most useful thing on an everyday level has been typing by far. Strange! [laughs]
LS:
Tell me how this segued into what you became.
MF:
I was a computer geek early on, and I was interested in telling stories, but I’m also frustrated by doing things slowly. For instance, I had some artistic skills but I never sat down and developed them because I knew that the amount of time it would take me to develop those skills was more than I wanted to put into it. I could not sit down and paint models because literally watching paint dry just kills me. I just don’t have the patience for it, although I appreciate it when it’s done well. I appreciate it a lot.
Learning how to type allowed me to create stories quickly. Without that it would have been too slow and I would have been frustrated: I would have been pulling teeth the entire time. If I didn’t have that I don’t think I would have gone down the road as far as I’ve gone, which is mostly telling stories in different ways.
LS:
How did that start?
MF:
When I was a kid I liked telling stories. I was an early reader, my mother tells me I was a reader at 2 years old. I was reading The Jungle Book when I was 4, and not the Disney version but the original Kipling. I read all of Sherlock Holms when I was 5 or 6, that kind of stuff. I was intrigued by stories, loved stories, loved to read.
In 4th grade my teacher had an essay contest and I just came up with a silly-ass Star Wars parody called Food Wars — it was just completely goofy, goofy, goofy — and I won it and I’m, like, “Heh! This is stuff that I could do!”
People appreciate it if you write well. I started pursuing that by getting involved in games: Dungeons and Dragons, which is a story telling game at heart. I knew that eventually this is what I wanted to do.
I was very fortunate that I always knew that I wanted to be a writer, or a storyteller of some sort. I know a lot of people who were absolutely confused all the way through high school and college about what they wanted to do with their lives. I was never confused about what I wanted to do, but I was confused about whether I could actually do it, whether I could pull it off.
Being a writer is a very risky thing: there’s no clearly defined career path. People don’t say, “I’m going to go out and hire writers!” If you get your liberal arts degree in creative writing you’re basically a more highly qualified burger-flipper. [laughs]
Writing is something where you can take every class you want, but if you don’t have any talent the skill doesn’t do you much good. You have to have raw talent, and then learn the skills to apply that talent. I felt very happy that I could do that.
I had many crisis moments in my education — no, not many, a few — where I was listening to my parents, and my parents were saying, “You should do something with engineering, or law, or medicine, or business.” That was because I had straight A’s in school. I was adept at a lot of different things and I actually started out in college as an electrical engineer by taking four terms of calculus. My parents wanted me to become an electrical engineer, to do that during the day, and then have writing as a backup.
But you know how this goes: you wake up and you go to work and you come back and you say, “I’m tired! I’ve had a long day doing electrical engineering and I want to sit back and watch some TV, play a game with my buddies, see my girl friend, play with my kids, whatever.” — and you never get around to writing.
I had actually set up a 5-year degree program at the University of Michigan where I was going to do the BS in electrical engineering and a BA in creative writing at the same time. I woke up one morning about half way through my 2nd year and I said, “I just can’t do this to myself.” I called my parents and told them I was dropping everything and they said, “No you’re not. It’s past the Drop-Add deadline and we’ve already paid for the credits!” [laughs]
I sat down and I said, “OK, let me figure this out.” I looked at my schedule and I said, “If I finish this term, doing what I’m doing, and take these classes next year, then I can get out of college in 3 years total with the creative writing degree only.” I said, “I’m going to do that!”
I pitched it to my parents as saving them money. [laughs] I was going to the University of Michigan, which was not cheap since I was out-of-state. It cost 12 to 15 thousand dollars for tuition alone back in 1990, and I had six siblings behind me, three “bloods” and three “steps.” My parents were happy to hear about any money that I could save them.
LS:
It sounds like you were a salesman from early on.
MF:
Exactly. Well, I try to make it easy for people to see it my way!
[laughs]
So I ditched out of electrical engineering, after having done two years, and focused on the straight creative writing degree. I never regretted it.
A creative writing degree doesn’t provide an obvious career path, and most employers don’t care if you have a creative writing degree or not! [laughs] If they’re looking for a writer they’re looking for someone who’s talented, they don’t really care if you have a degree in it. The degree is just a label to indicate that I got a BA from the University of Michigan. Once I had the BA I went on to get an education in the real world.
My writing professor, Warren Hecht, was also my student advisor and I looked at him and I said, “Should I go on to get a Master’s now?” He said, “No. If you want to be a writer, then you go out and do things. You live your life and you see what’s out there. If you want to you can come back later and get your Masters, but first you need to have something to write about! Go out there and do something!” OK, that was good advice, so I did that.
I was trying to figure out how I could make a living using and developing my writing skills. That’s how I got in to games as a professional, because roleplaying games involve a tremendous amount of writing. They involve creative writing, and also a lot of something that’s similar to technical writing. Games spoke to me both ways because it got both sides of my brain working: the mechanical parts and the more ephemeral parts of the game. In the gaming industry it’s called “crunch” versus “fluff.” I like them both so it suits me pretty well.
When I got out of college I wanted to go to Europe to visit a buddy of mine named Angel who was an exchange student from Spain, but I didn’t have any money. My parents gave me this speech when I got out of college: they paid for my education — and I really appreciate that — but when I was done, I was done, that was it! [laughs] They weren’t going to pay for me to go to Europe.
So I said, “How the hell am I going to get across Europe?” I looked into it and got a student work visa — because I was going to have to work my way across — but Spain didn’t have one of those, they didn’t have a student work program. I decided to go to the country that was closest whose language I spoke. So I got a UK work visa and went to England.
I flew over in September of 1989. I had $600 in my pocket, which was my life’s savings, and a one-way ticket, because I didn’t know when I was coming back or where I was coming back from. I didn’t know anybody in the entire country. In fact, outside of Angel, I didn’t know anybody in the entire continent! But I figured I was young and stupid and I could balls my way through! [laughs]
I called up Games Workshop when I landed in London. I’d seen an ad in White Dwarf Magazine many moons before — that was their “house” magazine — that said they were looking for an editor. I said to them, “I’ve done a little freelance game design when I was in college, can I have a job interview?” They said, “Yeah, sure. Can you come in Monday?” This was a Wednesday and I said, “Sure.”
By Wednesday night I was already running out of money, so I called them up Thursday morning and said, “Can I come in… tomorrow?” They said, “Sure!” The next day I come in and they’re all very casual in T-shirts, blue jeans, shorts, and ripped pants. I show up in a business suit and get laughed at.
They gave me an editing test to take home and said, “Of course you know proper British editing marks, don’t you?” I said, “Of course I do! But the American ones are a little different so it’ll take me a little time to catch up.” I went back to London and bought myself a Queen’s English dictionary and a book on editing marks. I went over the thing with a fine-tooth comb and basically learned the skill on the spot! [laughs]
LS:
How did your writing progress after you started as an editor?
MF:
I started out editing. Not many people can pull off being an editor because it requires a very strong command of grammar, spelling, punctuation, and a committed eye to detail. Anybody can string together a sentence and think they can be a writer. It’s like everybody thinks they can be on American Idol because we all think we can sing, right? Of course everybody’s got that basic level of skill, but to be a professional is entirely different.
I figured a good back door into writing would be editing. I did a lot of editing for TSR when they published Dungeons & Dragons. Every time I edited something I’d go, “I could write this. I could write better than this!”
The thing about being a creative soul is that you have to have an ego about it. If you don’t think you can do better than what other people are doing, then you probably shouldn’t be doing it. Don’t waste your time and everybody else’s time. Move on to something that you are good at.
LS:
Is that sort of like saying that the first person that has to have confidence in you is yourself?
MF:
Yeah, definitely! If you don’t believe in yourself, then why should
anybody else? You need to find something that you love, and that you can
develop skills for, and passion for, and just follow it.
There are other things that I could have done for a living. I could have been an electrical engineer; I’ve got friends who are literally rocket scientists. I’ve got a buddy who I went to college with who does compression algorithms for the Mars program for NASA. These are brilliant guys. I could probably have gotten into the same kind of thing, but it didn’t speak to me in that way.
LS:
But you’re also a lot more now than just an author. There’s a secret life of Matt here…
MF:
Which one! Hey wait a minute, what are you talking about? [laughs] I
have lots of secret lives.
LS:
Well, give us one.
MF:
I’m a father — which is not much of a secret — a father
and a husband. One thing that has shaped my career and that has made me a
freelance writer, as opposed to a contract writer on staff someplace, is that I
always followed my heart more than my wallet.
When my visa expired at Games Workshop they offered me a full-time job and they were ready to help me work out the immigration details. But my girlfriend back home wanted me to come back to Michigan. That was the choice: either my job or my girl; I can’t leave her hanging on forever. This was back when trans-Atlantic phone calls were, like, 50 cents a minute and the phone bills were just killing us. We were writing letters everyday because email hadn’t really kicked off yet.
It was a choice between my girl or my job, so I said, “Screw my job, I’m going to go be with my girl.” I can get another job, but finding another true love is not going to happen, I know that. She meant a lot more to me than any job.
We ended up getting married before she graduated with her Master’s in social work. Originally the idea was we’d married when she got out of college but we’re, like, “Aww, screw it, it’s taking too long, let’s get married now!” [laughs]
Because she was still in college I was restricted geographically to that location: I couldn’t just rip her out of school and take her someplace else. I can’t tell you how many job offers I turned down because I had to say, “I can’t leave, I’m here with this woman, this is my love, and I’m not going anywhere.”
That’s informed a lot of my decisions career-wise, and life-wise, over the years. I think that has always done me well. Your job can be very fulfilling, but if you break your heart doing it, then it doesn’t mean a damn thing.
My wife and I really wanted to have kids and we struggled with infertility issues for a long time. After four years of trying, and pissing around one way or another, she became pregnant with our eldest son, Marty. That was eight years ago and we wanted to have more kids: at least two would be good, maybe three.
We said, “Let’s see if we can be a little more aggressive at this point.” We were getting older and we didn’t want to wait forever for this to happen. We decided to pony up some decent money and find a fertility doctor who could help us out.
At first my wife had a horrible reaction to the fertility drugs which caused her ovaries to become overstimulated. The doctor said to us, “We’re going to check your ovaries to see that you’ve only got two eggs that are possible to fertilize.” It turned out she had more.
We went in for an ultrasound before Christmas and the Doc finds one egg that’s been attached, and it’s just barely hanging on. She goes, “You’ll have to prepare yourselves. This might not work out. Come back after the holidays and our regular ultrasound technician will be here and she’ll make sure we get this down right.”
We come back after the break and the ultrasound tech says, “Yeah, that one’s doing fine, and this one is doing fine, and this one over here is doing fine, and this one over here looks pretty good too!” Suddenly we had quadruplets on the way. Oh my god, what did that do to our lives!? [laughs]
It will be 5 years this June 5th that our four babies were born and that was the most incredible year of my life by far. We are the luckiest people to have these kids in our lives, and my wife is my hero.
LS:
How did
it go?
MF:
The first thing they tell you when
you’re pregnant with quadruplets is that you should do what’s called selective
reduction, which is to abort one or more of the fetuses by sticking them with a
needle and injecting them with saline. The theory is this makes it so the
remaining fetuses are not competing to survive. Anytime you’re talking about
triplets or more you’re talking about a very high-risk pregnancy. They say,
“You need to go in and kill a couple so that the ones that are left will have a
better chance.”
We’re not terribly religious people, but we struggled with that. And another thing is that you have to wait until 13 weeks to do this, so you’re at the point where you’re actually looking at the ultrasound and seeing… oh, my God! And if you stick a needle into the womb injecting saline there’s also a 10% chance that everything will die.
Here we are — having struggled long and hard, and really wanting these kids — facing the option of losing them all to make one or two of them live, or trying to keep them all and running the risk of having them all die. It could turn into a horrible experience either way.
And also there’s the fact that if they’re born, then they’re going to be born premature…
LS:
Is that certain?
MF:
Oh, definitely. I think the record for quadruplets is 34 or 35 weeks
(A normal pregnancy has a gestation of 40 weeks. – Ed.) The average is
28. At 28 weeks you’re talking about very small children. My wife made it to 29
weeks.
We decided to go through with it, to keep them all. I was reading medical journals that were being published the previous month. We’re doing all the research, and we both came to the same decision independently.
Although we’re not big believers in God or anything like that, we decided that we’d let fate take care of it: we’re not going to kill these children. If it happened that they died, at least we would know that we did our best to make them live.
LS:
Is that a form of trusting yourself?
MF:
I don’t know about trusting ourselves because, you know, a lot of it
was out of our control. We were going to do the best we possibly could.
The other horrible options were that the kids could be born deaf, blind, or with horrible cerebral palsy. We could end up not only dealing with having four children at once, but having four severely handicapped children. That was a risk as well.
You don’t want that to happen to your kids, but on the other hand if my kids were handicapped I would love them just as much. It’s not that they wouldn’t be more difficult, but you can’t make a decision like this base on your own comfort. You can’t say, “I’m not going to have this kid because it’s going to be inconvenient for me.” Ah,… I can’t do that.
Anyway… umm… I’m getting choked up.
LS:
Yeah, I appreciate it! It’s great story.
MF:
This is my big story. It’s my life’s story.
My wife was on bed rest, at home, for 16 weeks. At first she was working half time as a school social worker and we rented a wheel chair so she could go to work. I brought her to work everyday, picked her up in that wheel chair and put her to bed. Then she went to full bed rest. They sent us home with a uterine contraction monitor, something that you put around your waist that detects premature labor that you can’t even feel.
On Easter Sunday of that year we sent the data in over the phone line and they said, “You have to come to the hospital.” She spent the next 10 and half weeks in the hospital in full bed rest, flat on her back, unable to move, drugged up to her eyeballs with magnesium sulfate. This is a muscle relaxer. The idea is to relax the uterine wall so that it doesn’t contract. The kids are only 19 weeks old — they don’t survive at 19 weeks — they’re not viable children at that point. So, in the end, she was on full or partial bedrest for about 26 weeks.
The trouble is that when they give you a muscle relaxant it relaxes every muscle in your body, not just the uterine wall. She couldn’t even focus her eyes! It was just horrible, horrible for her. And every time they’d mess with the dosage it would make her loopy. I would drop everything I was doing and just sit with her in the hospital.
Then at 29 weeks, pretty much to the day, we had the babies. Pat, Nick, Ken and Helen came out at 2 lbs 12 oz, 2 lbs 9, 2 lbs 8, and 1 lb 8. My little daughter, she was just a wee bit of nothing. And there were some medical issues.
My son Nick had his lung collapse at 60 hours and had a chest tube put in. I watched them do that. I’m not a very emotional guy — well, I am emotional, everybody’s emotional but I don’t show my emotions all that much — but this time I actually got shook watching them do that to Nick. “Oh my God, I don’t know if he’s going to make it!” He’s doing fine today.
Great kids. Fantastic kids.
My father said, “Why the hell did you watch that!” [laughs] Like, you know,… true: he’ll never know that I was there, he was too young, he was barely able to see at 2 pounds 9 ounces. But it meant something to me to be there for my kid, no mater what. I wasn’t going to back away from it even though it was traumatic for me. I’m sure it was worse for him! [laughs]
After anywhere from 8 to 11 weeks in the hospital we got to bring the kids home. They had grown to 4 or 5 pounds at that point. Once they get out of the woods they call them “feeders and growers” in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.
My son Nick came home on oxygen and an apnea monitor. My daughter Helen had this thing called a hemangioma that was growing on her upper lip, that’s basically a wild strawberry birthmark that grew to be larger than her nose and cut off her air supply and her ability to eat. We had to bring her home on an oxygen tank, an apnea monitor, and a nasal-gastric tube, which is a tube that went down her nose. We fed her through a pump that went into her stomach. So while we have four babies we also have to carry around monitors, oxygen tanks, everything else. [laughs]
Helen was on that tube for her first year, and eventually they installed a port in her stomach. A little pop-open thing in her belly that we used to feed her with for the next year. Now she’s our best eater. She’s still the tiniest thing. I think she’s in the 3rd percentile for her age, but she’s just a ball of fire. She doesn’t let those boys run around at all. She’ll be 5 in about a month and a half.
One of the most amazing parts of the story is that our entire community came out and helped us. Fortunately, when Marty was born we decided to move back to my hometown because we wanted to be closer to the grandparents and the cousins. That worked out really well for us.
Since we’re not church-going folks we didn’t have a church to draw on, but in Beloit my parents put out the word that we needed help, and we had 35 to 40 people coming in our house every week to bathe, feed, change the kids, and clean the house. We had this maid service that donated weekly cleanings for the first year. Our neighbors got together and bought us a pallet’s worth of diapers: just wonderful people.
LS:
This is such a big event, how did this tie in to you life?
MF:
Yeah, it’s huge. It busted my life down to its barest essentials in
many ways.
I ended up taking a job with somebody, which I don’t ever do because I like freelancing and being my own boss. I needed a steady paycheck and I needed benefits. Being a freelance writer you don’t get benefits, so I took a job with Human Head Studios, a computer game developer in Madison, Wisconsin, for about 2 years. I had turned that job offer down before, so I had to call them up and ask, “You still got that going?” [laughs]
I headed their paper game division and I had a great time. I learned a lot about computer games, but I was eager to go back to being my own boss, charting my own destiny, doing my own thing. I prefer to write novels as opposed to manage projects.
As soon as we realized that my wife was able to go back to work, and our insurance would cover us, I quit. I quit as soon as I could, basically. [laughs] I didn’t leave them hanging of course; they were buddies of mine.
LS:
Something that I thought was interesting — that you might comment on — was your comment that you felt you could do just about anything in the game industry because it couldn’t be that hard…
MF:
One of the good things about a liberal arts education is that it teaches you that you can learn things. Right? If you understand how to learn things — if you have the skill of how to learn — then you can do just about anything you put your mind to.
I know how to research anything I want to find out about. I can learn anything I want to learn about. I can develop skills — I know that I can develop skills, even if I don’t have them at the moment — I can figure them out. If there’s something that I’m not particularly good at, like say singing or art work, then I can hire people to do that. So I’m not shy of doing just about anything.
I spent four years as a publisher. I was co-founder and owner of Pinnacle Entertainment Group, which was a game company. We did a game called “Deadlands”, a zombie cowboy game, that was our big thing; it was a roleplaying game. It also spawned a bestselling miniatures game, a bestselling card game, and a collectible card game. It won awards in every category. We did some good, quality stuff.
If somebody gives me enough of a budget, then I’ll pull together any kind of project they can come up with. I know how to project manage, and that’s part of it too. During the four years of running Pinnacle we produced sometimes 40, 50, or 60 products in a year, and I managed all that, shuffling all the different freelancers and everything else. Once you’ve learned those kinds of management skills you can pull off just about any project. Even when you’re working as an independent: as long as you know how to learn things you can pick up whatever you need.
LS:
How did you develop this confidence? It’s not what you’re taught at school where you’re rated in terms of specialties and you’re directed into one area or another.
MF:
I hate being afraid of anything. I don’t let myself be afraid of
things. That’s what does it. Also, I’ve done a lot of stupid stuff as a kid:
I’ve jumped out of airplanes, I’ve done hang gliding, I’ve taken piloting
lessons, white-water rafting. If something scares me I make sure to go face it
right away and take care of it.
LS:
Where did that attitude come from?
MF:
I don’t know! [laughs] I think it’s just a character trait,
something you’re born with. I know people who are just terrified of everything,
and it rules their lives. There are people in my family for whom fear is the
main motivating factor in their lives. It’s fear of this or that happening.
Our nation right now, because of 9-11, runs on fear; we’re motivated by fear. I think that’s a horrible thing. You need to face your fears and conquer them and then you can do something positive. If you do things out of fear, then you’re doing only negative things. You’re never going to be building anything; you’ll never do anything hopeful.
That is where I got my confidence: if I was afraid of something I made sure that I stood up to it. Then you learn, “Hey, it’s not that bad!” It’s almost never as bad as you think it’s going to be.
The thing that always scared me the most when I was young was talking to girls! [laughs] People who know me think that I’m bullshitting them because I can talk to anybody. But with the first girl I was interested in my heart beat like hell, I had a stomach full of butterflies, and it just paralyzed me.
Fortunately my wife was a very kind and forgiving lady. [laughs] Through all of my bumbling and stumbling and letting her know that I loved her and finding out if she would love me back. You can’t let yourself be controlled by fear because it paralyzes you.
I was a very sickly child, I had horrible asthma and I never thought I was going to live. I never thought I’d make it past my teenage years; I thought I’d be dead by the time I was 17. This sort of colored my reaction to a lot of things. I said to myself, “I may not have a long life… “ I never knew, I never really planned for much, I figured I was going to be dead so screw it: I’d do as much as I possibly could in the time I had. This also meant that I couldn’t say, “I’ll get to it later,” or “I’ll let it slide for now,” or “I’ll just have a regular life and not worry about it.”
I always wanted to do something exceptional, be exciting, and do cool things. You only get one life, right? So what’s the point of sitting back and letting it happen? You have to take charge.
So, like, what did I do last night? I was out until 4 in the morning with my friends. I do that every time I come to one of these trade shows even though the smart thing would be to go to sleep at midnight. But I’m not here that often, and I don’t see these people that often, so I squeeze every damn bit out of it as I can.
I don’t sleep that much, period — having the quadruplets trained me that way. I’m lucky if I get 5 hours of sleep a night. I just hate the idea of having that down time, time when I’m not able to do anything! [laughs] I’m just kind of crazy driven that way, I guess.
LS:
The flip side of being courageous is learning how to land on your feet when the inevitable teaching lesson knocks you down.
MF:
Yeah, that’s part of the learning process. Actually, failing helps.
I hate rejection, I absolutely hate it, so I try to hedge my bets. As a writer you get rejected constantly, so you try to hedge your bets to make sure that you get rejected as little as possible. But part of life is failing, that’s where you learn your best lessons.
In many senses my company Pinnacle Entertainment Group was a failure. When Shane and I were running the company we never turned a profit. But I can’t tell you how much we learned doing that. I managed to apply what I learned to a lot of different things. In that sense I think it was a better education than anything I got in college, or high school, or anything else.
You learn by your failures, but I try not to fail too often!
LS:
Tell me the story of one of your failures.
MF:
Oww,… I don’t concentrate on my failures. I can tell you a story
about how I almost killed myself parachuting! [laughs] That was stupid!
I had gone parachuting once, and then two years later a buddy of mine decided to go parachuting again. I didn’t want to pay for the ground school again, even though I’d forgotten everything I’d learned. I was too cheap to pay the 50 bucks. So when they said, “Have you done this before?” I said, “Yes! I’ve done this before!”
When I jumped out of the plane and looked down from 3,000 feet — I’m on a static line, so it pulls the cord automatically — I was totally disoriented. I had no idea where the fuck I was. “Where is the target!”
They have a little radio on your front so they can talk to you, but you can’t talk back to them. The woman on the ground is speaking to me saying, “Go to your left. Go to your left.” I spot a target and I go for it. It turns out to be the expert target, but I didn’t realize it. The beginners target is way over here on the other side of the field, and I’m going for the expert target.
The reason that it’s the expert target is because it’s smaller and it’s right in front of a line of trees! [laughs] As I get closer to this target I realized that I’m going to miss it by, well… enough to hit the trees: “Oh shit!”
The problem is these stunt chutes that we use: you pull the brakes on your parachute and it steals your downward momentum and converts it into forward momentum, but when you take off the brakes that stolen momentum comes back and whacks you right down. If you time it just right you can tip toe away like James Bond, but if you fuck it up you smack into the ground and break your legs!
So I’m like going toward these trees and I’m thinking, “I can’t hit the trees!” So I flared hard — braked hard — and I literally had to pull my legs up so that I didn’t get them caught in the tops of the trees. They’d normally be giving me instructions over the radio about when to hit the brakes, but they can’t see me because I’ve gone for the expert target and I’m on the other side of the trees. I’m thinking, “Oh shit!” [laughs].
I make it over the trees and I’m come down as close as I possibly can to the ground before braking. Then I brake as hard as I possibly can, and I end up getting dragged across half of a cornfield by my parachute. The last thing they said to me when they saw that I was not dead was, “Whatever you do, don’t let the jumpmaster see you: he will kill you!” [laughs].
That was a bit of a failure. It taught me that I should have paid for the refresher course. Don’t be cheap when it comes to your life! [laughs]
LS:
What can you tell kids these days — in the schools they go to, with tests and the kind of future that they’re looking at — about how they might take control of their lives?
MF:
Learn what you want to learn, take control of your own education.
I was what they called a “Gifted and Talented” student in school, which meant that I was always done with everything before everybody else. That meant that I got in trouble because I was always bored out of my mind. I’d be caught reading science-fiction paperbacks instead of the bible in my Catholic school.
If something interests you follow it. Don’t wait for your teachers to bring it to you. Chase it yourself.
You have down time, you have off time when you’re not doing their stuff, you can even work with your teachers to set up independent study programs or projects that you want to work on, or whatever.
When a teacher finds a student who’s enthusiastic about something they’re usually happy to support them. It’s hard to get kids enthusiastic in school.
Follow your gut. Follow your heart. See where it leads you.
