My three weeks in Africa was a blessing. Not only did I see some amazing things (truly mind-blowing), but I had time to reflect (a lot) on just how lucky I am to have things as simple as clean water and a light switch. I also was gifted time to ponder what it means to be human, and I developed this mantra along the way.
The New Daily Affirmation:
I am a joyful father.
Joyful husband.
Joyful writer.
Joyful warrior.
Let’s go out and do the work.
That’s it. Plain and simple.
Or, seeing the world all at once.
I just returned from a 3 week safari to Kenya. Very little email or texts or to-do lists.
Just being. Just listening. Just trying to learn. Just trying to absorb the expanse of beauty, life, death, that rules the open savanna, where it truly does come down to cunning and strength. guile and the ability to outrun. We saw cheetahs eating their kill, vultures swarming over carcasses. sunsets that stretched across everywhere, birds the colors of spun kaleidoscopes, a baby elephant curl it’s trunk, giraffes spread out across the horizon, a hundred baboons cut across the earth, a purple grasshopper the size of the sun.
More. Much more.
I went with my family, which was the best part. By far. My wife Lisa, my daughters Quinn and Phoebe, Brad, my son-in-law.
We saw the infinite together, wondering how we got so dang lucky.
Sunrise on the Maasai Mara, July 5th 2023
There’s the horizon there, off in the distance, glimmering. Where we all have 1000 true fans. Where escape velocity has been achieved and the parade has already started. We hear about this unicorn, running untamed. This goal of 1000 connections has long been a great goal of business, has been a metric we’ve held a ruler to and examined. With 1000 true fans, it’s been said, you can melt entire icebergs and continents with your bare hands.
But most of us (me) aren’t even close. So maybe it starts today, that filling of a blank page. Those connections, built one by one. Not as a transactional goal, but as an emotional one. To truly bring value and mean something special to one another.
To that end, I’m starting a little group called Creative State. This will be a community of people hoping to build this value more deeply in 2023. If you’re into it, and want to learn more, drop me a line. Then, we can discuss what the future looks like.
Yogi Berra once said something like “If you don’t know where you’re going, that’s where you’ll end up.’
Which seems to be the state of many of us in the creative economy right now, from Netflix on down. The macro-economic compass has shifted, and the smartest people in the room are scrambling to capture profit over growth. For those keeping score, this is the same cycle we saw in 2001, 2007, and now again in 2022. It isn’t just about eyeballs or subscribers, it’s about actually having a bag at the end of the year you can hold onto.
To the small scale creator like me, the challenges are similar but maybe not quite as tectonic. I’m always amazed whenever I’m putting together a budget how quickly the numbers add up, and often we’ll get push back from clients saying they just can’t spend that much. So that’s where the balancing act begins: where do I make sacrifices? How do I scale back into scope? What do I, as a creator, have to give up? And most importantly, how can we hold onto the integrity of our vision around the project?
It’s the challenge of every client, producer, director, production designer, cinematographer, and artist out there, especially in a bear market. The question we’re going to be asked, now more than ever, is how we do more with less?
But it’s not all doom and gloom. If we can keep making and building and winding our way through the next 18-24 months, we have a chance of building a strong foundation around ‘making’ that will do us well once the economy cycles back around. Patience is teaching me how to become very friendly with the long game again. But let’s not kid ourselves, it’s not without a struggle. The last couple years have been unique in their own right, so I’m reminding myself again (and again) of perhaps the single best piece of advice I ever received along the way:
Keep your overhead LOOOOOOOOW and your eyes on the prize. Fly with the least amount of baggage. Carry-on + 1.
Flying to Colorado - September 2022
Optimism isn’t a cure all. Being a stoic doesn’t solve everything. Life can sometimes tie your shoelaces together.
I’m going through it myself a bit right now, chopping at the vines with a broadsword. Back in June, I was diagnosed with low-grade prostate cancer (on the cusp really - some argue my diagnosis is pre-cancerous) but to hear those words at all is pretty intimidating. The whole thing involved a prostrate biopsy (note to self: sedation next time) and now I’m rotating through an ‘Active Surveillance’ protocol. The first step of this protocol happened this week, where I had an MRI and this Tuesday I get a much clearer picture of where I really am. So I’m beginning to relate to everyone else out there who has heard the C word. It’s a real hairy thing.
Radical Optimism isn’t about pretending everything is going to be all right. It’s about believing change for the better can happen, and that we can be agents of that change. That’s a beautiful thought.
So as I go down my own path figuring out how to be a better participant in the Creative Economy, and writing/filming/building/sharing/being more, it’s good to have that fall back position: positive change is right here, waiting to be made.
Field in Montana, 2022
I’ve been exploring meditation again (I use Calm and Insight Timer, though you only need one), and one of the tenets I like is ‘Begin Again’. When you find yourself distracted by a myriad of thoughts, just take a deep breath and begin again.
Athletes talk about this all the time. They miss a basket? They wipe it from their memory and begin again. It’s the work of the artist and the builder, to begin again when things go sidewise or the canvas didn’t quite turn out the way we expected. Beginning again is a superpower.
It also relieves the pressure of not getting it right the first, second, or third time. The answer is pretty simple:
Begin again.
People like to talk about how we can all shape the world we live in, that reality is a subjective thing that can be shaped by what we believe and what we do. And this is true…
Except at the edges. There is a point in the subjective space where objectivity kicks in, and there is indeed a right and wrong, the yes and the no. This space is reserved for the axe murderers, the dictators, the pyramid scheme artists, the fascists and a litany of other (often times colorful) characters. These people have lost their privilege of shaping their own subjective reality.
But for the rest of us, for most of us, reality is a piece of clay waiting to be spun. Yes, we are all challenged by the obstacles forced on us by paperwork and To-Do lists, the laundry and the garage that is never organized. We’re pushed and pulled by the many obligations of work and everything else that tries to box us in.
But we can control that. We can slowly wrestle these realities into something that works for us if we’re intentional enough. We can make often make the world behave as we wish and not the other way around.
George Bernard Shaw had this to say about it:
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
Shape who you are. We’re all depending on it.
One of the challenging things about running a relatively new company (going on year 3 now) is taking the space and time to create stuff, like this blog. It’s not an excuse, it’s just a point of fact - the same point of fact that all content creators everywhere have to face, day after day.
Indeed, I want to hold myself more accountable around content creation, especially since that’s my business. It’s how I make money and is what brings me joy. The content can always be better and the grass is always greener for sure - but look for more stuff from me moving forward.
One workflow tip I’m going to implement: using this blog space as more of a personal notebook for drafting ideas, thoughts, sketches. A lot of it will be half-baked. There will be mistakes (always). But then I will refine this into the other platforms like LinkedIn, Radical Optimism, and Patreon. Using this space as a notepad and content engine.
Then distributing.
This space is my first step at getting rid of the Resistance (that voice in my head that likes to say I’m not good enough) and growing as an artist and maker from there. What sayest thou?
If you’re reading this - maybe you have some tips. Comment below.
During the fall of France in World War 2, Albert Camus wrote any essay called ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’. In my mythology, Sisyphus struggles to push a rock uphill, only to have it roll down, again and again. An infinite loop of struggle and misery. A curse of existence.
From Camus’ perspective, this struggle is exactly where the meaning of life is found. It’s not getting the rock to the top that matters, because that will never happen. There are always human setbacks, and there are always moments when we have to start from Square One again.
Camus says: The struggle itself ... is enough to fill a person's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
We often talk about the journey being the destination. In times like these, when the world is seemingly hanging on by a thread (just as it was in WW2), maybe it’s good to remind ourselves that yes the struggle is real. But that in itself can provide its own profound message and meaning.
The answer then is simple: keep pushing. This has many times in the past been enough to change history.
There are two maths we can decide to build our understanding of the world on.
The first is a math built on scarcity. This math believes there is only a finite amount of joy, happiness, money, jobs, and infrastructure to support us all. So if someone else has something else, it by definition means that there is less of that in the world for me now.
That’s why a lot of us scramble to get as much as we can as fast we can, because there is a limited supply.
The other math is built on abundance. This math believes joys generates more joy, happiness generates more happiness, more jobs create more jobs, and more money creates more money (for all of us). In this world, there can be plenty to go around and be shared, especially if we (me and you) take it upon ourselves to create more, which in turn creates more, which in turn creates more. The flywheel spins and spins.
Which math should we teach our children?
It often takes a tragedy to remind us that life is fragile. It goes away in a blink, a vapor. Rides the breeze of chance. Is permanent, until it’s not.
A friend of ours passed away this weekend. Unforeseen. Mysterious. Just gone. That finality is one never returned, or understood.
But in the meantime, we can reach into the middle. We can grab life right there at the heart of it, and keep it beating as long as possible.
And this, from Dylan Thomas:
I ran an experiment last year where I said ‘no’ to just about everything for a few weeks. I clarified my boundaries around one question: if I say ‘yes’, will it take time away from writing?
This approach worked great for a while. I was able to protect my time, and in fact create more of it for the things I really wanted to do. I was more productive and my pages got turned in. Goals were achieved.
But I also learned quickly that I had to careful. Saying no is a dangerous default. Opportunity doesn’t like no. Serendipity is repelled by it.
So though our boundaries must be clear (for this often defines who we are), there has to be space for Yes. Saying Yes to the universe, that’s where the magic is….
Join me in reclaiming our existence.
I re-committed this year to write one page a day, every day. I was going to see how long I can keep the streak alive, inspired by Jerry Seinfeld, and as I gain momentum I thought I'd share some of what I'm learning. Here's 4 Things:
I Decided What I Wanted to Do - Write. I’m trying not to worry about the outcomes, I’m just writing.
I Picked a Day and Started - Yesterday I committed to 100 days of writing (others are joining me in this). Then I’m outlining what the perfect week looks like to me - hour by hour - so I can dedicate the time I need to get the 1 page done. Every day.
Download this Sheet - See the picture above. Jerry Seinfeld was once asked how he created so much, and he said he NEVER broke the streak. He wrote jokes every day. No exceptions. And he uses a sheet just like this. (This has done pretty well by him.)
Go. None of us need permission to make it happen. We just need to start. Pick up the pencil or the guitar and create something. Don't judge, just do. Write a poem to yourself.
A lot of people have talked about the power of INTENTION. That's all this is, I'm no mastermind. But whenever I dial in on ‘making time’ - a lot of good things happen. A lot of pieces that would not otherwise exist, start to exist.
Go.
The most overused cliche perhaps in history we given to us by Confucius, who said ‘The Journey of a 1000 miles begins with a single step’.
But like most cliches, this holds truth. Anything we choose to build takes time and one single step forward, again and again.
When people talk about being an artist, that’s really what they mean. Making the commitment to put one foot in front of the other.
Again and again, again and again. This is the promise we need to make to ourselves.
Hey everyone,
I’m still learning the mysteries of FB apparently.
If you want to join our 100 Day Challenge (see description in previous post), go here:
Hope to see you on the other side.
~ Chris
