Daily Inspiration: Meet Nick Raven

Today we’d like to introduce you to Nick Raven.

Hi Nick, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
When I was 8, I wanted to direct the very first computer-animated film. My dad was a huge fan of early computer animation, so we’d go to Blockbuster and watch computer animation festivals. Turns out that Steve Jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars allowed Pixar to do it first when I was only 11, but I still wanted to go to school to become an animator and then a filmmaker.

I went to The Art Institute of Colorado in Denver for nine months and as the economy collapsed following the dot-com bust, my parents couldn’t continue to co-sign for my loans to stay, so I didn’t. Instead, I bought tools and learned design on my own. I did short films, made a documentary at a point, and did lots of other things in a creative generalist capacity, but I could never find any actual creative work to get into and none of my projects ever took off.

I worked crappy jobs in warehouses, call centers, and retail, but I never stopped working on my craft of writing, recording, editing, designing, and more. This allowed me to build my YouTube channel with long-form video essays about games to 15,000 subscribers (not a lot, mind you) over a decade and land a job at the Colorado Springs Indy as their arts reporter and self-initiated podcast producer.

Financial troubles and a bad rebrand hindered the site and I was laid off once, brought back, and laid off yet again this past November. I’ve been working freelance since as the job search continues…

We all face challenges, but looking back, would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Pfft, no. A lack of formal education, a lack of networking, undiagnosed anxiety, deep insecurities, an abusive marriage, miscalculations, and more have delayed me from producing the large-scale art I’ve always dreamt no.

I know I speak from privilege as a white man and I know that the road is rockier still for others, but if I knew in high school that this would be my path forward, back when I started to take my task of self-determination seriously and not enlist in the military like my parents insisted I do, I don’t know how I would’ve responded.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I guess I specialize in everything. Or I don’t specialize in everything. I like to see things from a wider perspective, understanding how they fit together holistically.

When I worked as a store-level associate for Best Buy, my very first job until they let me go in 2010 for violating social media policy (it was a very different world back then), I assembled a white paper on how to make gaming an optimal store-within-a-store concept. I ran it up to corporate and, two years later, I was sitting next to Brian Dunn, who was the COO at the time, then later CEO.

It was just ahead of the 2008 recession, so nothing got done and everyone I knew up there took severance packages as the company trimmed costs, so ultimately I was back to square one, but I learned a lot about processes and corporate bureaucracies. This in turn has helped me understand government bureaucracies more through my local advocacy for multi-modal transit and the arts.

That said, it makes it hard to find a job without a degree and experience in an era where employers want pre-cast unicorns for complex job listings. I currently write a local arts newsletter called The Raven Express and my work can be found in the Manitou Springs-based Pikes Peak Bulletin, but I suppose I can stock shelves again. I did okay at that.

What makes you happy?
Getting stuff done, whether creatively or civically or what-have-you.

Like anyone else, I’ve got a billion half-finished projects just sitting around incomplete, but to button something up and ship it out into the world… makes me happy.

Contact Info:

• Website: nickraven.substack.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/nthelegend
• Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/mrnickraven
• Youtube: youtube.com/@nthreview

Image Credits
Mayor Yemi Mobolade and Kristina Adams