We recently had the chance to connect with Craig Sefcik and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Craig, thank you so much for joining us today. We’re thrilled to learn more about your journey, values and what you are currently working on. Let’s start with an ice breaker: What is something outside of work that is bringing you joy lately?
So as strange as it may sound, one of my goals has been to finally organize my music collection; for literal years, I’ve had my files stored in whatever state they were in when I first downloaded them, and as a person who prides themselves on organization this has been a pretty obvious thorn in my side but always seems like such a colossal undertaking that I could only manage to chip away at it for an hour or so at a time before getting overwhelmed.
Granted, I was doing this the old fashioned way; opening Shazam in a tab, sourcing the details and manually inputting everything (I have a LOT of local and regional music from the Scene days of the early aughts lol), but I finally wizened up and did a quick bit of research and found an excellent tool that scrapes the data from music databases online and auto-fills the metadata (it’s called AudioRanger, it’s great) and now after SO long, I have as close to a fully organized music library as one could hope for. There are still some unknown tracks here and there that have just been lost to time, but that’s way more tolerable than the state it was in prior.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
Certainly! My name is James Craig Sefcik, and I’m a technical creative professional with a ton of irons in the fire. On the professional side, I do contract IT consultation, freelance design work via my Lockehart Design Ltd moniker, run a couple of AirBnb properties with my lovely wife Sandi, and am pivoting into a Digital Asset Manager focus in hopes of landing a full-time position.
My skillset is VERY wide; I’ve had entire careers in several industries that some people would spend their whole professional life in, and although I’ve sacrificed security at times to do so, the knowledge and skills I’ve gained have made me incredibly well-rounded and tenacious. I’ve worked for both Fortune 500 companies as well as local businesses with less than 10 employees, I’ve been an IT director, a creative director, a multi-unit manager, an email/digital marketer, a freelancer, a content creator, a newspaper editor; heck I was even a bingo caller for a couple of years (and that job was awesome!)
Outside of that, I’m a long-time musician and currently have a solo gothened melodic metal project called Noctivagist (available on all music streaming services *shameless plug*), I dabble in content creation with my LOCKExHART Gaming channel, I run a Discord server of 300+ members about a video game called Destiny 2, I refinish furniture and sell locally, I ran an import car club that I’d like to get back up and going again, and am in the process of learning 6 languages: German, Spanish, Italian, Irish, Swedish and Greek.
Greek is brutal, man.
Thanks for sharing that. Would love to go back in time and hear about how your past might have impacted who you are today. What part of you has served its purpose and must now be released?
As hard as it is to admit and embrace, chasing the dream of being a ‘professional’ musician is no longer interesting or alluring to me. In all honesty, that industry has never held many legitimate perks compared to many other sectors, and the older I get the worse it sounds to spend my nights hawking merchandise and sleeping in a van trying to get my name out there. I assume those that have never made a real run at trying to be successful as a musician probably have a pretty skewed perspective of what the actual day-to-day and ‘career’ portion of it is; I’ve worked FAR harder at that than I probably ever have at a salaried job, and for way less benefit.
Even though the reasoning is there, it’s still a bitter pill to swallow because since I was 17 years old, my persona and who I was/am has always been a musician. I always considered my ‘professional’ career as backseat to that ambition, essentially what I did when I wasn’t playing music, which looking back is unfortunate because I’ve had several very interesting careers in my time that probably deserved more focus than I gave them. Somewhere along the line, that balance started to shift, but it’s been a difficult journey trying to rectify that realization in my heart and mind due to how strongly the inclination once was to pursue music.
Now that’s not to say I’ll ever stop playing completely; that would never happen, as music is my most powerful creative outlet, but the push to do that solely as a career? That flame has extinguished, and I’m okay with that.
What fear has held you back the most in your life?
The same as most people I know; failure.
I was raised, along with my generation, being told that we could do literally anything we wanted if we worked hard and put our mind to it. The world at large quickly taught us that was NOT the case, as the odds are carefully and formulaically stacked against us by those with the knowledge, wisdom, and agenda to further their own aims.
I know that sounds super pessimistic, but it’s really just factual and something you have to learn as quickly as possible; life is NOT fair, and there’s no reason it should be when you start deeply analyzing how things work. You have to learn to operate within the confines of this system, or you have to be willing to break it, and there are VERY few individuals with that kind of drive and luck to do so; I don’t care to be one of them, and I’m cool with that. I found out who I am through my experiences and observations; at the end of the day, I mainly want to be left alone to pursue my own machinations, and to help anybody that I am able to help with the knowledge I have.
But yes, failing is literally physically painful to me; I am a competitive person and I don’t like to lose, at all. I’m much more graceful about it than I used to be however, so hooray for personal growth!
Next, maybe we can discuss some of your foundational philosophies and views? What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
That personal responsibility is absolutely paramount to leading a life of value and substance.
Now I, like most people, struggled with this when I was young; especially considering what the message of the collective consciousness was back then, that if you worked hard you would get ahead and things would just work out. I had moments where I was relatively entitled, but I’m a very introspective person and I have a fundamental urge to try to make sense of situations and feelings and ultimately realized the lesson that so many people need to learn, which is that I shouldn’t expect anyone to do anything that I wouldn’t be prepared to do myself, and of course the earlier mentioned ‘life isn’t fair.’
I’ve worked with so many individuals whose modus operandi is to pass the buck; they complain ‘that’s not my problem’ or ‘I shouldn’t have to do that’. Sure, sometimes those concerns are founded (I’ll get to that in a sec), but it’s far better to accomplish something than to whine and complain and actively make the situation worse, full stop.
There’s a lot of nuance here, however; there are many companies, ‘leaders’ and people out there who understand that this stance is exploitable, and will happily do so in order to extract more work and effort than is morally or ethically sound. This obviously leads to burnout, which leads to turnover, which leads to inefficiency and ultimately a hit to the bottom line. It’s such a simple concept, yet still runs rampant in the workplace typically due to poor leaders, a complete lack of proper and useful training, and to be honest, laziness. It’s important to have a personal set of ethics, and to set proper boundaries to mitigate that behavior; just like the age-old addage says, ‘if you give someone an inch, they’ll take a mile’, and that is something that can be very challenging to exhibit depending on your situation but absolutely necessary not just for your own mental health, but for the health and well-being of those around you.
This statement isn’t limited to professional dealings, either; it extends to every facet of life. To know and to be responsible for your own actions, that is what it means to be an adult. It’s distressing that so few people seem to understand this objective truth, but I continue to hold out hope.
Thank you so much for all of your openness so far. Maybe we can close with a future oriented question. What do you understand deeply that most people don’t?
That being grateful and content for what you have AND what you don’t is the most powerful outlook one could ever possess.
Again, this is wisdom that took me time to acquire. When I was young, I always wanted to have expensive things and brand-name items and such, because I wanted other people to WANT what I had. I hope I don’t need to expound on why that’s such a terrible outlook, but that’s where my mind was for a good portion of my lived experience.
When I started to really break this mindset down and get to the underpinning logic, I realized how stupid, vapid and irresponsible I was being, and that’s pretty much all it took to eliminate that behavior. Turns out being content and having an 800+ credit score and no debt is far superior to being in debt up to your eyeballs with a bunch of useless junk that still doesn’t alleviate your underlying problems lol.
I am fortunate in that even as a kid, I could recognize the beauty in small things and could actively appreciate the time I was in for what it was, rather than looking back and realizing ‘oh wow, that was a great time in my life and I’m just now able to acknowledge and appreciate it so many years later’. I have a lot of nice items and possessions these days, and I certainly don’t believe that anyone should actively deprive themselves of something they want (as long as it’s something that will actually add value to your life), but I could also be content without any of it if it were suddenly all gone.
Literally the only thing that I don’t feel like I could overcome is if I lost my wife. She’s my soulmate, and everything about her makes life worth living. (No, she didn’t pay me to say that lol).
Contact Info:
- Website: https://lockehartdesignltd.myportfolio.com/
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/lockexhart
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craig-sefcik/
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/@lockexhart
- Other: https://open.spotify.com/artist/5z08qVADrvagghURIzEyz4?si=R-zjKnEUQA-i13xFLmrc9w
https://noctivagist.bandcamp.com/album/noctivagist
https://discord.gg/XQMHVtm
https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/606738003978871488
