Me, Myself, and this blog

This quote by Steve Jobs has been flying around recently even though it’s a few years old but it’s really good and I wanted to talk a little about it. Here’s the full thing:

“To design something really well you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to thoroughly understand something – chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that. Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask a creative person how they did something, they may feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after awhile. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or have thought more about their experiences than other people have.

Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. They don’t have enough dots to connect, and they en up with very linear solutions, without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better designs we will have.”

This isn’t just really good, it’s really, really good. That’s 2x the really. Really. It’s so good because while it’s specifically about design it actually applies so much more, and actually goes a long why in helping me describe what it is that I do – even though that answer might still be confusing to some people.

Steve is talking about design, and likely product design at that, but I think the essence of this is the need for lots of points of reference and lots of dots to connect. And the need fully digest something to be able to isolate those points worth connecting. Think about your favorite movie, how many times have you seen it? I’ve talked to people before who when mentioning a movie say something like “oh that is one of my absolute favorite movies ever! I’ve probably seen it 5 or 6 times!!!” This doesn’t make any sense to me because movies that I simply enjoy a lot I’ve seen over 10 times, and movies I really love easily over 100. I couldn’t even tell you how many times I’ve watched The Big Lebowski for instance, but it’s enough that I know almost every line by heart and have stared at each scene and studied how they were put together for hours. This is the difference between just watching something and really getting it. Of course Steve isn’t talking about watching movies, and neither am I really, it’s just a simple example of how really getting into something means different things to different people.

It’s no secret that I’m a very obsessive person who has to regularly fight the compulsion to collect things. I’ve been this way my whole life even if I only realized it in the last 5 years. I find something interesting and for some chunk of time that becomes my entire world. I fall asleep and wake up thinking about it. I dream about it and day dream about it. I endlessly research it and try to find the people who know the most about it and try to soak up as much of that information as possible. I immerse myself in that world until I feel like I get it. Sometime I get it in a few weeks, sometimes it takes years. And once I do feel like I’ve really “groked” something, I rarely leave it behind, even if it doesn’t continue to be my all encompassing daily routine. In fact, often it continues to expand – usually because of bits and pieces I fine in later obsessions.

In many cases my obsessions take up so much of my time that I end up needing to find a way to justify the time I’m spending on them and end up turning them into businesses. If you look at my history this becomes pretty obvious. My record label spawned from an obsession with punk rock in general and subcultures like youth crew straight edge hardcore movement specifically. My record distribution company spawned from an obsession with how those subcultures grow and manifest themselves. My design firm spawned from obsessions with advertising in general and the emotional responses imagery can provoke in people specifically. While I never actually started a real business from it, it was my obsession with old Japanese toys in general and Jumbo Machinders and Sofubi Kaiju specifically that drove me to the web and got me creating things there. Before these toys and the community I found around them online I mostly used the internet for one off communication and minor games, the toys gave me a reason to write articles, do research, take phones and try to actually build something. (My first “blog post” predates blogs considerably, and was a guest article in the mod 90’s on Alen Yen’s Toybox about an 18″ knock off Getter Robo figure I’d won on ebay.) Continued obsession with arts, and my growing connections to visual artists as the creative director led to my involvement in the art gallery world, and continued obsession with web communities and relationships led to the launch of blogging.la.

Not everything has had a justifiable business come from it – lots of the things I’ve collected have been from obsessions that lasted only as long enough for me to track down a bunch of them, learn enough about where they came from and what was drawing me to them. Sometimes I just collect images of them. Some of those things stick around, some are sold to make room for the next thing, but the info and knowledge I amassed from studying them carries on into everything else. I learned print production from designing concert flyers at kinkos. I learned product design from seeing the difference between how Ark and Popy designed toys for the same robot characters with vastly different results. (image above is a rendition of Baltan by Popy on the left, and Ark on the right) I learned marketing from touring with punk bands. I perfected trend spotting by hanging out in fixed gear bike shops in LA and Tokyo. I sharpened attention to detail by watching baristas at Intelligentsia craft the perfect cup of coffee again and again. I learned business best practices by sitting in the lobby of technology conferences and listening to what people said about others -who did they have respect for and why, and who didn’t they. Most recently my obsession with the D.I.Y. culture that fueled much of my punk rock years has drawn me to hackerspaces. I spent years hanging out in European hackerspaces before attempting to open one myself. It’s a different world for sure, but many of the underlying themes are constant. That chapter in my life is still being written.

Travel has also been a massively important piece of this – going to many places regularly and surrounding myself with interesting people gives me a much better perception of who is doing what and why, and where similarities pop up and dots that need to be connected. When I talk to people and companies, I’m able to draw from all these experiences. Otaku level knowledge only comes from immersive obsessions, and I’ve spent a lot of my life collecting obsessions.

This existence isn’t all roses and sunshine – part of the trade off with always trying to find new and exciting things means to make room in my head for it I often have to leave less shiny uninteresting things in the past. In means I need to see a pattern developing before I recognize new threads. It means I’m rarely content with my surroundings and when I have 5 free minutes I need to find something to fill them with. It means I go through cycles of insomnia because something I’m so excited about something new that I can’t shut off my brain to sleep.

But I wouldn’t have it any other way. I can’t imagine looking at the world through any other viewpoint and I love being able to help people see their projects from another perspective. I love tying things together. And these things all become part of my repertoire, part of my arsenal. I know that doesn’t really answer the “what do you do” question any better, but hopefully it sheds a little more light on the process.

The more I write the more I write. When I slack off I lose the motivation, it’s almost like the tubes get clogged and it’s much harder for me get going again. I was on a really good streak there for a while with the 750 words thing but then the technical problems and self inflicted criticism conspired to work against me and I fell off that wagon never to return again. I have this fantastical idea that if I hadn’t missed that one day I would still be doing it and kicking so much ass but the thought of going back is like having to admit that I failed before and that is a shitty way to start something new so I just abandoned it. But I need to write, and I need to feel the need to write, and so this post is filler. It’s just me flowing whatever comes to my head to try and clear the tubes and get things moving again. If you think of a sink in an old house that hasn’t been used in 10 years or something – you turn it on and wait, you hear something gurgling but still nothing comes out, you keep waiting, and then finally there’s a little sputter of rusty brown shit water that is filled with bits of gunk and is really the last thing in the world you’d want to touch, that’s what starts flowing. But you keep waiting and the brown becomes tan becomes cloudy becomes clear and then all is right with the world and you can fill up your glass or take a shower or whatever you were intending to do. The next day when you do the same you still have that rusty shit but not for nearly as long.

That’s what this post is, it’s the rusty, cruddy shit that is clogging up my pipes that I need to clear out. Of course I could just write something privately but for whatever reason, call it masochism or exhibitionism or just plain egotism I need the audience. The audience of the 3 or 4 people who actually read my blog, but it’s the exposure that works for me. If I know ahead of time that no one is going to see what I’m writing then I just give up and feel like I’m wasting my time. Knowing that in a few minutes I’m going to hit publish means I do have to try and make real sentences and convey some kind of tangible idea. So if you are reading this I appreciate you being my muse, even if you weren’t planning on doing that today.

So I need to write because I have decided to take the plunge and full on really write a book for the purpose of writing it. Not just collecting shit I wrote before and calling that a book. But starting from zero with a final goal in mind and working towards it. I thought this trip would be a good venue for that since I’m writing what is basically a life philosophy manual pretending to be a book about travel, with traces of self help. Though the help may be one sided, I’ll benefit from writing it but who knows what kinds of take away you’ll get from it. I’m writing about the multibasing idea and how, in addition to that being a shitty name, it’s more than just travel and taking less luggage with you. It’s about a way of life. A perspective. And a suggestion or two about how the perspective you hold decides what you see. If you think the whole world is nothing but the single room you live in, then chances are you aren’t going to spend much time trying to get out of that room. However if you think the whole world is the house which is filled with many rooms that you bounce between without any real decision to do so, well then you have a bit of a bigger world view, but it’s still limited by the walls you built yourself. See where I’m going with this?

One of the things that set me off was a friend, actually several friends, hearing about the trip Tara and I were about to go on and calling it “the trip of a lifetime.” I thought about it and realized that most people would be excited to go on the trip of a lifetime, but hearing those people say that was very depressing for me. It made me feel like this trip is some big built up one off thing that could never be achieved again. And of course I didn’t want to think that because I see this as a continuing step in a direction I’ve been heading for a long time. And those people knew that, they know about other trips I’ve been on and they know about my penchant for being transient and mobile, so WTF? But then I realized they were projecting – if they were going on this trip it would be the trip of a lifetime because, some of them anyway, hadn’t left their own counties in many many years, if ever, and hadn’t left their cities in a pretty long time as well. So them looking at the itinerary we had laid out was overwhelming and impossible, where as to us, it’s cool for sure, but it’s just the trip we’re taking this year, and there will be more like it later, just like there were some like it before. For me, this isn’t the trip of a lifetime, it’s the trip of the moment.

Realizing this changed my thoughts from being bummed that the idea was I’d never do something like this again, to being bummed other people thought they could never do something like this on their own. And that’s why I decided to write the book, because seriously anyone can do this, and they only reason they don’t is because they have convinced themselves it would be too hard. They couldn’t get the time off work, couldn’t save up the cash, couldn’t just leave things behind. Fuck that. It’s not that they don’t take big trips because big trips are too hard to take, they don’t take big trips because they have convinced themselves big trips are too big to take.

There is a saying about trying and not trying. If you don’t attempt something, there is a 100% chance you won’t pull it off. The only way to ensure you never go on a trip, is to tell your self going on a trip is too hard, expensive, time consuming, etc. I’ve never thought that way, I always assume if something is too hard I’ll fail somewhere in the process of trying. I can’t stomach the thought of not trying and then wondering what life would have been like if I did. I don’t want to think about the memories and experiences I could have had. Trying and failing is much more rewarding than playing it safe. So while the book is about traveling, and about traveling regularly to several places – maybe even “living” in some of them simultaneously, it’s also about how to use that same way of thinking in life in general. You’ll only ever pull off what you try, and if you think the world is only the one room you live in, then there is 100% change you’ll never walk out of the room and see the rest of the house, or the front door and see the outside.

So I’m writing this book while I’m on the road. Trying to write a little every day. It’s going, not as fast as I’d like, but it is going and if I just keep chipping away by the time I get to the end of it I know it’ll be something I’m proud to have done, even if only the 3 or 4 people who read this post read the book. Wish me luck.