2013

Shadowboxing

I just wrote the stupidest blog post in the history of text being transmitted across the internet. Seriously it was a nightmare of epic wtfness. What’s worse is that I wrestled with it for hours. Hours! I was thinking about it while walking around yesterday and started typing it up last night and then hit a wall and thought I’d go to sleep and clarity would hit me and then I could polish it off and post it in the morning. I woke up still stumped but I forced my way through and turned it into something that at least had some kind of clear start and finish then then I went to have breakfast and came back to reread it and wanted to punch me in my own damn face for wasting a second it it. Or at least on the approach I was taking. Delete!

Because I know I’ve piqued interest now and I don’t want to leave anyone flustered wondering if what I’d written was dramatic, or somehow impacted them, or what I’m hiding I assure you it was none of the above. It wasn’t a big tell all or anything scandalous. The post was about how isolating being in Japan can be, but in a good way. Good for me anyway, I can certainly see how what I feel when I’m here could be interpreted as loneliness to some people and it might bother them, but I really enjoy it. I talked about how not understanding the chatter around me, being ignored by marketers, having only the most basic of conversations with employees at establishments etc means that there are almost no distractions inside my head, the only conversation is the one I’m having with myself all day long. It allows for some fantastic focus and clarity.

And at the same time because I do have a network here, people and place I know and enjoy visiting it’s almost like my own personal secret society. There was much more to this and I rambled on with a bunch of useless references and then I realized how masturbatory the whole thing was and that’s when I killed it.

Trust me, it’s much better for both of us this way.

fuckitshipit

Sometimes you talk about something and then every other conversation you end up having that day ends up back at theme you started with. My post yesterday about getting shit done resulted in a day full of discussions about just that. You could interprete that as lack of imagination and inability to think of other thing to talk about or you could decide it’s just that important and useful that you can’t push it out of your head and you know it needs to be focused on. I’m choosing the later. Fuck it. Ship it. We say this a lot. It means quit worrying about all the details and get it out the door. Deliver something.

I’ve linked to Bre’s Cult Of Done a hundred times in the past and I’ll link to it 100 times in the future because it’s that good. Getting something done trumps not get getting something done, and if you don’t get something done because you are worrying about this or that – that’s still not getting something done. The reason Woody Allen said “Eighty percent of success is showing up” is because eighty percent of people don’t show up. They will find a reason and talk them selves out of it. So by just being there you are ahead of the game already, use that to your advantage. Just go.

Almost 3 years I wrote this motivational post to myself in regards to writing because I was doubting and talking myself out of it. If I want to write I need to write. If I convince myself that I don’t have anything to say and then don’t write then I’ve lost. If I write – if I write anything, then I win. If I write something good then even better, but just writing is already putting me ahead of the game. I need to remind myself of that all the time. I’m really good at convincing myself it’s not worth trying. I’m full of shit about that, it’s totally 100% worth trying. 2013 is the year of trying everything. Doing everything. Delivering everything. If not now, when?

Fuck it. Ship it.

GSD

I’ve been semi-consciously avoiding linking to Shane – who is a super awesome guy that I’m lucky to call a friend, who also recently got back on the blog wagon – only because I didn’t want go full bore into the “conversational” blogging just yet, where one blog post is just a reply to another. Which has it’s merits of course, but I wanted to get this in motion a bit on it’s own first. That said, I just landed in Tokyo after a day of delayed and the blog post I began to write was just a bitch fest about the people who sat next to me on the plane, which no one wants to read.

Shane posted today asking how people get things done and noting that is own MO has been less than satisfying. I’ve been thinking about this a lot for a while actually so I thought I’d run with it, which is probably more interesting than the “omg dude won’t give me any of the armrest!!” that I running towards.

#3 on Shane’s list is “Tell someone idea before it’s fully hashed out” which is an interesting bit here. I’ve heard the philosophy that you should never tell anyone about your projects until they are finished, because the mental reward of someone saying “oh yeah, that sounds great!!” is often enough to reduce your desire to finish it. It’s fulfilling in the same way on a neural level so it’s kind of like picking up a snack on the way to dinner, when you get to dinner you are less motivated to eat it. Or something.

I’m sure that is the case for some people. Did I just type that? How many people are there on this planet? Whatever case you can think of certainly applies to some of them. I’m such an idiot. Anyway, what I was saying is that I don’t think there is a universal policy here. For myself, I know very well that I’m really good at starting things and really bad at finishing them. I’m pitifully reliant on motivation from outside feedback. The exciting spark and first steps draws me in and I can go full bore on something like crazy, but, and especially on projects I’m working on with other people, if I feel like the overall enthusiasm is waning, or people aren’t that interested, then it’s really easy for me to get distracted by something shiny.

So for me, telling people about the things I’m working on is kind of paramount. Some people are great at going “into the garage for a month” and then coming out with an awesome thing they’ve created. Not me. I need to keep showing the progress to people and keep getting assurance that it’s worth my effort to keep working on it. I think that’s part of why I stopped blogging on a regular basis before – I just didn’t get the sense that anyone was listening so why should I keep talking?

I don’t want this to sound like an entirely negative trait, I think getting feedback is crucial and can help you see which direction to take things and can help you decide where to focus your efforts. I have shitloads of unfinished projects, but they are mostly projects that I’ve either never told anyone about. The stuff I put out into public as a much higher completion rate than the stuff I keep hidden. Not all of it of course. How long have I been talking about writing a book, or several books for that matter? How many of my books do you have on your bookshelf? Right. But generally.

I also noticed when I was digging around in my head over the last year that at some point in my life my approach shifted. When I was young I’d have an idea and I’d work on it and then I’d release it and then I’d run with it. It was exciting and it kind of made me me, if that makes sense. Around college I started “partnering” with people. I figured two brains were better than one. Double the efforts, double the rewards, and stuff. There’s a very clear point in my life where until then all my efforts were solo, and then after that everything was with other people. I don’t know if I lost confidence in my own ability to deliver, or if I thought I needed others to justify it… I don’t know. Not that there is anything wrong with that. I’m super proud of many of the collaborations I’ve been a part of. But it’s different. I’d like to do something on my own again – maybe this year – if I can remember how. And if I can stay motivated.

Baggage

Today is a travel day.

I’m heading out in a moment to catch a flight to Japan for 10 days. A few days in Sapporo for a conference and then to Tokyo for a Safecast hackathon. I’m bringing one small suitcase that fits in the overhead compartment of the smallest airplanes and a very thin backpack. This is almost identical to the baggage I had with me while we spent December in Europe. Truth is, packing for one or two days is difficult, for anything over 4 days is easy. In fact, I never pack clothes for more than 4 days. I do laundry in my hotel room every night so at any given moment on my trip I have the clothes I’m wearing, a set of clothes drying in the shower, and one or two sets in the closet ready to go. You never need more than that. For this trip, I might even have more gadgets than clothes.

Checking luggage is one of the biggest headaches in air travel. It costs more, you have to wait around for ever to get it, you have to deal with dragging extra bags all over the place, lost or delayed luggage is common and throws giant wrenches into your plans. It’s not worth it. When you have carry on only, checking in is a breeze. Getting out of the airport is lightning fast. Getting from the airport to wherever you are staying is painless. Carry on only is the way to go.

I’ve been preaching this gospel for years and I’m still confronted with people who scratch their heads in awe of how someone could travel without bringing their entire wardrobe with them. The worst thing you can do when you travel is bring too much stuff. If you get home and there is something in your bag that you didn’t use that is a fail. If you are traveling to any kind of a city, chances are you can default to bringing less stuff and in the worst case you can buy something there if you really need it. Think closely about everything you pack – is this something you are going to use every day on your trip, or just once – maybe? If I can avoid it I never pack a “maybe” item. A mental game you can play is to threaten yourself – if you pack something and you don’t end up using it, you aren’t allowed to bring it back. With stakes like that getting choosy is a little easier.

I put 90% of my stuff in my suitcase, and keep a very small bag for under the seat. In that bag the only I have is my laptop and power cord (in case I’m lucky enough to get a seat with an outlet), my kindle, my camera, an eyeshade, earphones, ear plugs, my geiger counter (for logging in flight) and a flashlight. Maybe a snack bar. That’s pretty much everything I could need. Jackets never got in suitcases – just shove them in the overhead.

As nailed as I have my travel set up, my real life is a disaster compared to that. Boxes of stuff in the closet, in the garage. Mental clutter. I think about how painless and awesome my approach to travel makes my life, and try to take those lessons and apply them elsewhere. I’m not quite as good at that, but I think it’s a worthwhile goal. We need the stuff to get through today and tomorrow. Worrying about next week doesn’t help at all. It’s all about today. It’s all about right now.

2012: The year in review, in photos

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while you know the drill, 6 years ago I did a post looking back over my previous year by looking through the photos I took and posted online. My thought being, if I’d posted it online it was important enough to remember – so I restricted it to that as opposed to crawling through personal libraries as well. It was cathartic to say the least, so I’ve done it every year since then. (Feel free to take a stroll through my visual time machine… 2007 & 2008 & 2009 & 2010 & 2011). I find it to be kind of wild looking back at a full year in one shot like this, so here we go for 2012….

The first thing I noticed as I began this is that I posted considerably fewer photos to flickr at the beginning of the year than I had previously. I think I was going through some question about the future of the service – I’ve been a long time user but Yahoo! had all but abandoned it and over the years my friends had slowly dropped off as well. That changed by the end of the year with returned enthusiasm from both my friends and Yahoo! but for a good chunk of 2012 I was trying out lots of other photo sharing / storage options and trying to find something that fit. Disappointingly, I don’t even remember everything I tried and thus whatever I might have posted has drifted away to forgotten land. Which is a bummer, and makes me again realize how important flickr has been for me and why I keep using it.

At the same time, I started shooting a lot of photos on film rather than digital, which when you add in developing and scanning times and my own habits of waiting until I had 10 or so rolls to make a trip the lab, means something that happened in January might not have been documented online with my photos until April. It seems like even some digital stuff I shot didn’t end up on line until months later for some reason. Every year that I’ve done this I’ve searched through my archive using the “posted on” date, but this year “taken on” became much more important. But even that is confusing.

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Connections

Sometime in summer, 1991 I guess? I was hanging out at Rob Sexton’s house in Tampa. He’d offered to teach me how to silk screen t-shirts and we’d ended up talking about records. He pulled out a box of I don’t even know what anymore, a stack of 7″s he’d traded for an equal stack of the recently released Slap Of Reality 7″. This was how you sold records then, you’d press 300 and then trade 10-15 at a time to other people for records they released and soon you’d have a mini record store, a distro that you could take around and see off one by one. The records weren’t important, the story was. Rob told me how pissed he was at the guy who sent him the records because he’d shipped the records in a box but hadn’t included any kind of note. In punk rock / hardcore at the time, this was an unparalleled dick move. Who sends an order and doesn’t include a note? That wasn’t punk at all.

It’s funny what sticks with you, but Rob’s reaction that day definitely did and a few years later when I started my own label (Toybox Records, which I shut down around ’97 I think? ’98 maybe.) I took that to heart and went out of my way to include a note, no matter how short – just something personal, in every order I shipped out. It was important. This personal connection we all had with everyone else in the scene, even people we’d never met. There was this thing that tied us all together and we knew it, and a little note in an order, a “thanks, hope you like it” or whatever made all the difference in the world.

This was a long time ago. I communicated with people online via BBS’s and #irc and wouldn’t have my first email address for another 2 or 3 years when I moved to Gainesville and took over my roommate Anatol’s email account because he couldn’t imagine ever having a need for it himself. Anyway, point is back then we wrote real letters to people and when you ordered something getting a note in the package said “you aren’t just a customer, this isn’t just business” and we all knew it.

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