Colin Marshall

Beautiful impudence

Charlie Hoehn seems to be a pretty cool dude. I first learned of his existence when he cut together my Think Different TV conversation with Ben Casnocha. I had to send him my recorded half of the program, and so obligingly tossed an uncompressed three gigabyte file his way. I blame, uh, the unfamiliar gear I was using. Yeah, that's it.

But he managed to roll with my blunders — just astounding how far my skill with video has come since then — and and get the thing uploaded and available to the teeming millions. I later heard murmurs about some sort of "e-book" he'd written. Something to do with getting a job after college? Yeah, yeah. The same stuff early-to-mid-twentysomethings like me are always hearing about, at or against our will. I said I'd get around to it.

As it turns out, Recession-Proof Graduate: Charlie Hoehn's Guide to Getting a Job Within a Year of College, which you can read free at that link, is somewhat misnamed. Its advice strikes me as sound even if (a) you graduated college more than a year ago, (b) there's no recession on or (c) you didn't go to college at all. In fact, it's probably even more effective if (c).

The core of Hoehn's job-getting method is what he banners as "free work," and it's just what it sounds like: finding people or organizations on the rise, familiarizing yourself with them, then offering to perform free work for them. This free work, so the theory goes, makes up for its lack of a paycheck with more opportunity for connection, exposure and career-relevant experience than any non-free work could provide at such an early level of the game.

You can tell that doing free work is a sound strategy, because it comes endorsed — indirectly, anyway — by two of humanity's wisest sages: Baltasar Gracián and Jordan Morris. In The Art of Worldly Wisdom, Gracián urges his readers to "never compete," and offering your work for free — at least initially — puts you in a situation where you don't have to compete as competition is normally understood. (I'm definitely down with this. I'll put myself against all free-working sound-and-video-making interviewer/essayists out there who dare to challenge me.) And I've quoted Morris here before as advising fellow aspiring comedy professionals to make the much smoother, easier step from "Can I work for you for free?" to paid work than the crazily more difficult step from "Give me money!" to paid work.

I quite like how Hoehn conveys the mindset needed to take this route: "The recession is not the obstacle. The obstacle is to abandon conventional job-hunting methods." These Fight Club-style declarations pop up every now and again in this brief book; my favorite is probably "We are not all winners. We are not unique snowflakes. We do not deserve paychecks," though I'm also partial to the bit where he announces that "I'm about to mess you up with the truth."

The most vivid mental image, though, comes in the section where Hoehn dismisses sites like Career Builder, Monster and Craigslist — "where mediocrity thrives":

Job postings are like city bars. There are typically only a few really hot "offers" in the huge crowd, while the rest are fairly lackluster. And no matter which one you're looking at, there are a bunch of other guys with Ed Hardy shirts competing for them. It's exhausting, so you need to rethink your strategy.

All this echoes stuff I've written oven and over again here, though, so I suppose I'm predisposed to give it the thumbs-up. Lord knows I champion doing stuff for free until people jam kleenex in their ears to block my pounding, repetitious sound waves. What Hoehn makes more explicit than I usually do is that you should be prepared to come up against some solemnly nodding heads when you talk about conducting your career like this, that you'll be given loads of unsuitable advice by those who want to "justify their own [bad] past decisions."

I can also get behind Hoehn's warning against "shotgun blasting your resume to dozens of companies you couldn't care less about" in a desperate bit to get on some track — any track — to the middle class. As a friend's dad once very sagely observed, the real job market doesn't post want ads. It's underground, and thus you'll need to put your ear to the ground to get tapped in. What's more, it operates socially. "Decide what kind of work you're interested in, and TELL PEOPLE about it," Hoehn writes. "If you really want job offers, look through your network."

But what if, like me, you get squicked by the notion of a regular job? Hoehn suggests figuring out what sort of lifestyle you'd prefer first, and only then determining how work fits into it. This sounds simple but strikes me as critical: I see a lot of people attempt, typically with little success, to cobble their desired lifestyle together around the immovable hulk of the job they landed in. It ain't pretty.

My ideal is to achieve total life-career integration. I don't claim to know much, but I do realize that a severely compartmentalized life — and that's more standard than it might at first glance seem — ain't for me. (I can understand why some people opt for a certain "work" and a certain "life" and never have the twain meet, but I guess my cognitive profile is different or something.) This approach demands you answer a series of possibly uncomforable questions: what do you want to make? Who do you want to work with? How do you want to live? These sound like cake, I know, but when Hoehn writes that you'll have to "be mercilessly honest about what you really want," that's quite a bit more soul-searching than one normally does in the course of a day. How many people are as clear and upfront as possible, even to themselves, about their own desires?

In any case, I heartily endorse this event or product, but I can't say much for Slideshare, the service on which it's hosted. As far as I can tell, it offers two viewing sizes: way too small and way too big. And clicking "full screen" inexplicably advances the slide, so I moved around in circles a lot while reading. I feel like Recession-Proof Graduate should be a PDF. Is there a PDF somewhere? Or should I maybe compose an experimental novel just for Slideshare that will slowly but inexorably prompt me to understand and thus come to love its quirks?

Hoehn is, according to his blog's about page, 23 years old. By all rights, a man of 25 such as myself should never deign to admire the work of his juniors, let alone learn from it. But I've never paid much regard to all rights. I never want to become one of those A-holes who makes bloated claims about the advantages of his additional "life experience" — i.e., "time spent in involuntary biological persistence" — because he's got nothing else. I make a point of learning from those younger than me.

But because I'm young myself, there aren't that many people younger than me to learn from. Nevertheless, if you take a look at, say, who I've interviewed, you'll find plenty of dudes whose birthdates come a slight few years after mine but from whom I've learned much: Andy McKenzie, Alex Mann, Ben Casnocha. But they're all in their twenties, and I'm constantly on the lookout from even younger people to from whom to learn. I've learned from the Foodie at Fifteen. I would learn from a twelve-year-old, given the chance.

An anonymous commenter left this on my above-linked double-barreled interview with Alex Mann:

Textbook case: Delusional college grad spawns masturbatory 'wisdom' before even landing both shoes on the battle field.

Beautifully impudent, really. A young, aspiring marketer scribbles 'artist' on a digital crown and boasts it with a smile fueled by the prospect of commercial ascendancy.

I cannot tell you how big a smile that put on my face. In two words, the phrase "beautifully impudent" captures exactly what I want to be: completely heedless of the "rules" yet always aesthetically aware. Though I do not believe that I have yet achieved fully beautiful impudence, I continue to strive for beautiful impudence with each passing moment. (Beats beautiful impotence, I suppose.)

And while we're talking perfect summation, one of Hoehn's posts was just the other day quoted by Jason Kottke:

Why do you think I’m such a huge proponent of free work? Doing work for free forces you to find jobs where you can honestly say, “I would do this even if I weren’t being paid for it.” That’s an expression I took a bit too literally, but it is spot on.

My favorite part of The Dark Knight is when the Joker is talking to Harvey Dent in the hospital, and he says: “Do I really look like a guy with a plan? You know what I am? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it! You know, I just DO things… I’m not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are.”

And therein lies the best career advice I could possibly dispense: just DO things. Chase after the things that interest you and make you happy. Stop acting like you have a set path, because you don’t. No one does. You shouldn’t be trying to check off the boxes of life; they aren’t real and they were created by other people, not you. There is no explicit path I’m following, and I’m not walking in anyone else’s footsteps. I’m making it up as I go.

It’s harder, for sure, and kind of scary sometimes. But it will allow you to look at yourself in the mirror and know you’re playing by your own rules.

Hell, that might even be more valuable than what's in the book!

No such thing

Damien Hirst, also known as "that shark guy," "that spot guy," or "that skull guy," has taken a lot of heat for his latest exhibition, No Love Lost, in which He Actually Paints. Many art critics I admire — including, I think Robert Hughes — seem to regard it as his waterloo. I'm not quite sure.

Granted, I don't find Hirst's by-his-own-hand paintings, which have been widely derided as uncreative and amateurish, aesthetically engaging in any meaningful way. And granted, too. he's drawn what in the realm of living artists qualifies as a firestorm of bad publicity. But on the other hand, he's drawn a firestorm of bad publicity. Because there is no such thing as bad publicity, that simply means he's drawn a firestorm of publicity, which equals victory.

I just flatly dropped that "no such thing as bad publicity" line, and people might nail me on it, but I do feel that it's true. My own view on publicity deals only with absolute values of brain space attained: either you have attained brain space, or you have not. Whether you have attained any given quantity of brain space for something "good" or "bad" doesn't matter, at least to the publicity itself.

Though I've written before about my own ineptitude at publicity-generation in general, I do find that I'm particularly ineffective at generating the "bad" kind of publicity. If I could somehow move a couple dozen popular bloggers to begin hating me and publicly slagging me off on the regular, I would gain immense amounts of brain space. (I need this brain space, because I have nothing else to trade on.)

I actually aspire, in some moments, to become one of those people irrationally hated because bitter people regard their existence as some sort of "injustice," something "gotten away with" — that is, they're all, "How could anyone be allowed to earn a living/become well-known/get satisfaction in that way I find offensive and/or insufficiently painful?" Kind of like Damien Hirst!

What it is

A partial list of categories about which rigid thinking routinely gets us into trouble:

• interesting/boring
• novice/expert
• fiction/nonfiction
• clarity/opacity
• amateur/professional
• art/business
• high art/low art
• sound/music
• girl friend/girlfriend
• outsider/insider
• narrative/nonnarrative
• one/many
• representation/abstraction
• true/false
• experimental/conventional

I got to wondering about this while visiting part two of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art's California Calling, an exhibition of works from this humble state's modernists over the past 60 years. I overheard, as one often overhears at modernist shows, a visitor complaining that they "don't understand" piece x. This called to mind a bunch of similar utterances I've heard or heard about over the years, including but hardly limited to demands for the symbolism of Chris Burden installations and exasperation from a friend of Madelaine's who, employed at a museum's gift shop, was constantly asked what the sculpture outside means.

But I also worried. As a museumgoer who happens to enjoy abstract modernism over perhaps all else, I fear that I might come off to those who complain about not understanding, getting, grokking the work that I regard myself as having successfully grasped it, having incisively Gotten To The Bottom Of It, where all the appreciation lies. This is not the case. As with the best narratives, song lyrics and publicity stunts, I find that the most enjoyable visual art is not, in any final sense, graspable. It has no Bottom to Get To.

Permit me to re-quote Jonathan Jones, as his relevant observation merits many more quotings than even I plan to provide:

The easier it is to say what a work is about, the less interesting that work becomes. The greatest art takes a lifetime to understand; the slightest takes a moment. And if it really is reducible to an explicit message, is it actually art at all?

It seems obvious to me — dangerously obvious, almost — that an artist, or most any class of creator, wouldn't want to simply dream up a message, encode it in layer upon layer of obfuscation and thrust it onto an uncomprehending public for the grappling-with. Infinitely better, though infinitely harder, to craft a work with just the right pitch of ambiguity that gives it as many meanings as it has viewers, listeners, readers.

Yet I've never mustered the courage to tell this to my fellow Steely Dan aficionados, nor to any observers of anything who insist on determining precisely what a work is "about," or, more hubristically, what a work "is." The procedure of figuring out what a work is appears to be nothing more than the identification of a category or of categories to slot it into that no further thought will be required. Permit me to now re-quote Doris Lessing:

I wrote a story, The Fifth Child, which was at once pigeonholed as being about the Palestinian problem, genetic research, feminism, anti-Semitism and so on.

A journalist from France walked into my living room and before she had even sat down said, “Of course The Fifth Child is about AIDS.”

An effective conversation stopper, I assure you. But what is interesting is the habit of mind that has to analyze a literary work like this. If you say, “Had I wanted to write about AIDS or the Palestinian problem I would have written a pamphlet,” you tend to get baffled stares.

My third re-quote is, naturally, of Douglas Adams, responding to someone who asked for the "message" of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

No message. If I'd wanted to write a message I'd have written a message. I wrote a book.

I have thought, written and bitched about this much before, but I hadn't considered the categorization angle. If you can categorize a work as "a story about AIDS" or "a series cautioning against the tyranny of bureaucracy" or "a song about Owsley Stanley," you feel satisfyingly "done." You have received the "I know what this is" impulse, as if you had resolved the shape of a distant sweet fruit or vicious cat on the savannah, and thus completed your task. But you're probably wrong, or at least missing out on the work's interestingness.

Hence my high enjoyment of my csn-prompted Friday visit to Los Angeles's Museum of Jurassic Technology. Here is a museum that eschews all categories, presenting an experience that's almost literally indescribable. Fact mingles with fiction, past with present, representation with abstraction, metaphor with the concrete, high with low, narrative with nonnarrative, experimental with conventional, outsider with insider, clarity with opacity. In its face, all conventional museumgoing practices fail, forcing the visitor to kiss the "I know what this is" impulse goodbye, at least for a few hours. Plus, their gift shop stocks almost every available Andrei Tarkovsky film on DVD, so hey.

To round things out with a fourth re-quote, I come to a man known for his repudiation of excessive categorical thinking, Mr. Alan Watts:

If you weren't thinking, you wouldn't notice the passage of time, and as a matter of fact, far from being boring, the world when looked at without chatter becomes amazingly interesting. The most ordinary sights and sounds and smells, the texture of shadows on the floor in front of you. All these things, without being named, and saying 'that's a shadow, that's red, that's brown, that's somebody's foot.' When you don't name things anymore, you start seeing them.

So it's not as if I understand the art I enjoy most — I just avoid burning mental bandwidth by fruitlessly trying to fit it into more categories than it actually fits into. I should extend this habit of mind, this awareness of the danger of what I'll call "category dependency" (though that sounds like the name of a concept some social scientist already invented), to non-art stuff as well, leaving aside the fraught question of what, exactly, constitutes "non-art stuff" for another day.

One example might be the very way that one leads and constructs one's life. It's an area where I've been ultra-category dependent in the past, and I'd be surprised to meet anyone who hasn't. Remember the questions you faced as a kid about what you wanted to be in adulthood, and how responding felt like picking from a limited, predefined list: doctor, policeman, fireman, butcher, baker, what have you. This illusion seems to persist for many well into adulthood — hell, well into death. When I think about what I want to do now or in the future, my impulse is to put it in terms of other people. If I refer to a career that's "one quarter Werner Herzog, one quarter Charlie Rose, one quarter Brian Eno and one quarter David Foster Wallace," it's descriptive in one way but probably quite suboptimal communication in another. If you're imitating someone who's come before, after all, your greatest possible victory is to come in second. Why bother?

I've realized that charting one's own course in terms of other, previously-charted courses hurts as much as it helps. As much as claiming that you're working toward becoming like Joe Icon satisfies others' questions about your slightly unconventional aspirations, it's no recipe for originality. It certainly does you the dishonor of expressing no bolder goal than slotting yourself into a category, albeit a small one defined by an individual rather than a large one defined by an industry. Some people — a lot of people, myself included — get spooked when they lack an example to which to adhere. Sometimes they even discard their ambitions for lack of a predecessor. I'm considering adding "avoid adherence" to my list of heuristics.

The turkey sandwich lifestyle

For Thanksgiving, Tyler Cowen twote:

The plain truth: Turkey hardly ever tastes good.

That, I have long thought, is this holiday's elephant in the room. You think up recipe ideas for what could be months, prepare for perhaps weeks, spent at least a day actually cooking, and what's it all revolve around? Turkey, quite possibly the least appealing meat commonly eaten in the developed world. Its blandness is well-documented, but I haven't read much about what I consider to be its fundamental sadness.

I don't know about you, but I've never chosen to eat turkey unless all the other available options are truly repulsive. (Vegetables, for example.) Having come to regard the turkey sandwich as a symbol of wan resignation, I cannot fathom the mind that possesses enthusiasm for it. I find few images sadder than that of the sad-sack who, given all of the world's brilliant culinary variety, actively chooses to eat a turkey sandwich. Glumly he pulls the defeated meal from his rumpled brown lunch bag, biting softly in as the smothering clouds of pedestrianism engulf him.

Hence the expression "turkey sandwich lifestyle," which I mainly use in my internal monologue. A turkey sandwich lifestyle is, you might have guessed, the lifestyle equivalent of a turkey sandwich: limp, featureless, willfully bland. I have what might be called a lengthy list of goals, near the top of which sits "don't live a turkey sandwich lifestyle." If you find yourself resigned to turkey, Mistakes Have Been Made.

But turkey's problems, I suppose, constitute the relishable challenge of Thanksgiving. You have the fixed component of your meal: the turkey. Now make it good, if you dare.

24

I re-watched James Marsh's Man on Wire in editing class class last week, and I first-time-watched Tyler MacNiven and Ayumi Meegan's Kintaro Walks Japan (available in full on Google Video here) last night. These two documentaries are not entirely without connection in my mind, as they both chronicle efforts to do something interesting not for the payoff, and not for the lulz, but for the pure bettering-of-life of all involved.

In Man on Wire, Philippe Petit and his coterie of shady pals sneak into the still-under-construction World Trade Center in order to string a wire between the towers, on which Petit walks for 45 minutes. In Kintaro Walks Japan, Tyler MacNiven walks from Japan's southernmost point to its northernmost point. Both walks, both documented, both impressive. But what makes them impressive? I would submit that the components of impressiveness, in the sense of what happens to impress me, are (a) unusualness, (b) life bandwidth demand and (c) risk.

It's not unheard of to take a walking journey, but it's quite a rarity to take an epuc walking journey, sleeping wherever you can pitch a tent, across an entire foreign land which doesn't really speak your language — and making a movie out of it nearly by yourself. Can we treat the unusualness of wire-walking 1368 feet over New York City as self-evident? Traversing his south-north improvised footpath across Japan ate 145 days of MacNiven's life, and that was just for the journey itself. Petit's epic stunt demanded intensive preparation, at least a couple false starts and, ultimately, no small degree of subterfuge. Going it alone for over 2000 miles on foot with a 45-pound backpack, exposed to the elements and bunking with whatever strangers one finds along the way, is a roll of the dice even in as docile a country as Japan. And can we also treat the risk of wire-walking 1368 feet over New York City as self-evident?

A couple more data points resonate even stronger with yours truly:

• Tyler MacNiven's age at his Japan walk: 24
• Philippe Petit's age at his WTC walk: 24

And they bring to mind the following others:

• David Lynch's age at the release of The Grandmother: 24
• David Foster Wallace's age at the publication of The Broom of the System: 24
• Brian Eno's age at the launch of his solo recording career: 24
• Apichatpong Weerasethakul's age at the release of his first short: 24
• Jesse Thorn's age when Public Radio International picked up The Sound of Young America for distribution: 24
• Tao Lin's age at the publication of Eee Eeeee Eeee: 24 (I just read Shoplifting from American Apparel, so he's been on my mind lately)

Which all combine to contrast with the following figure, which will show you where I'm going with all this:

• The age Colin Marshall turned three weeks ago: 25

I realize this smacks more than a little of Robert Rodriguez — who, I can't help but note, shot El Mariachi at 24 — freaking out about about what Steven Spielberg was doing at his age in Rebel Without a Crew. And I'm not normally into treating life as an age-of-accomplishment race against one's admired figures. I'm actually against thinking that way; I've tried to talk more than a few friends out of it in the past. But damn.

Choice thoughts: Jonathan Jones

Not a bad piece to forward to your friends who keep asking, "But what does it mean?":

Art doesn't have to be about anything to be good. In fact, the easier it is to say what a work is about, the less interesting that work becomes. The greatest art takes a lifetime to understand; the slightest takes a moment. And if it really is reducible to an explicit message, is it actually art at all?

I love the scene in DA Pennebaker's 1967 documentary Dont Look Back, where the young Bob Dylan is interviewed by a journalist who demands to know what his message is. "Walk tall and always carry a lightbulb," he replies.

[ ... ]

The most deadening influence on art in our time is the belief that content matters more than style. If you look back on the artists who have won the Turner prize since the 1980s, or the artists most often mentioned in the media these days, what they have in common is a message. Artists like Marc Quinn, Antony Gormley and Tracey Emin – all have very clear points to make. Once you've understood them, what's left to say?

Real art doesn't have a message, doesn't necessarily say anything. It is an arrangement of shapes, a pattern of words. If you want an antidote to this idea of art, watch Bob Dylan manically arranging and rearranging words on a shop sign he and the band spotted one day. That is art.

I should probably go to New Zealand now.

Back tattoo

peristaltor reminded me of an elegant, useful and — best of all! — useful Raymond Chandler quote: "There is no art without resistance in the medium, no success without the possibility of failure." Now, I've never read any of Chandler stories, but I have read my Kafka. Therefore, I will soon acquire the following back tattoo:

THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE

Except picture that in Olde English script. Let me know what you guys think!

Profit

Kinda trippy that I've biologically persisted nearly to the age of 25 without any idea whatsoever of how to make enough money to buy a car, isn't it? It's not even not the cash right on hand to stroll down to the dealership and pick one up that bothers me, but that I have no functional concept of how to generate the wealth needed to do so. At the end of high school I figured I'd be back in a sweet ride in no time, but now, over six years on, a Craigslist 1993 Celica might as well be Xanadu. I react to the mechanics of moneymaking with the same befuddlement that many of these well-heeled vehicle owners do when they stare at the dark, occult forms under their hoods.

How did it come to this? Not by design, certainly; I've long held no small degree of contempt for the voluntarily unmoneyed twentysomething. ("I'm a free spirit, man.") And I wouldn't say I've reached this sorry point out of sheer ignorance or delusion, either. I've seen money made, I've read about how money is made, I've talked to people who make money. I understand, on many levels, how money-making works. But I still perceive it as a mystical substance that only comes to me in unpredictable quantities on the eve of its choosing, when the stars have aligned just so, the four humors have fallen into balance and the Great Magnet points due north. We laugh at South Park's underpants gnomes, but my life plan is, in form, identical to their business plan:

• Collect skills
• ?
• Profit

I'm no fool, though. I've dutifully read my Paul Graham. I know that, to make money, you have to Make Something People Want. This, in itself, is perfectly acceptable: I'm a person, and I know what I want, so I should theoretically be able to make what I want and offer it to the wider public. The problem is that what "people want" seems, in practice, to be a dog's breakfast of "packet authentication," "advanced micropayments" and "e-commerce," none of which I could sustain enough enthusiasm for to spend a 120 hours a week grinding away on. Even if I could — and I don't find those things totally uninteresting — I'd be robbed of the time I need to work on stuff I actually care about, and thus stand a snowball's chance in hell of doing a decent job on.

What do I actually care about doing well? The answers come surprisingly easily: writing essays, making radio, working with sound and music, making film and video. All fun stuff, though I can't help but imagine that if "grubbing my way to the nearest professional degree and leveraging it" or "starting a business intensely focused on improving the procedures of some minute sub-sub-subregion of an industry" or "painstakingly designing a slightly improved paper clip," I'd have been in my ideal 300ZX — or any 300ZX — years ago.¹ But at what price?

Though I generally look back on my teenage self admiringly, surprised at how much he actually got right, my greatest youthful delusion turns out to be far from small potatoes. Back then, I thought I wouldn't mind doing work I didn't give a rat's @$$ about as long as it paid enough — after all, I couldn't have cared less about school or The Gap, my dual icons of work in those days. (I did do an unpaid radio internship for a while, and there I cared about performing well. It didn't offer any financial compensation, but it was at least tangentially linked to a form that mattered to me.) But this turns out not to be the case.

I've seen more than a few people fall into this basic scenario: get some McJob or cultivate an unengaging "fallback" career to support whatever it is they "really" do; grow dependent on the entity providing said McJob/fallback; build up a lifestyle whose monthly expenditure requires said employment; gradually, imperceptibly forget about real endeavors in the name of shorter-term concerns; become some hideous institutional creature, like a blind fish that feeds whatever nutrients happen to float across the ocean floor.

I could do that. Easily. I'm subject to the same human psychological pressures and bizarro incentives as everyone else, eternal vigilance their only counterweight. However, my own life's "not worth living" threshold seems easy crossable. There are those who argue that sometimes you just have to do lousy work, and they've got a fair point, but the notion that one must perform unrelated gruntwork for the paycheck to support the real work cuts both ways. It's easy to let the real projects slip or get smothered, and without it you can't justify your existence — or at least I can't justify mine.

And hey, I'm only barely justifying my own use of Earth's resources as it is. Perhaps my breathing of air and eating of food is just slightly less instinctual than other peoples', but I'm perpetually asking myself if I'm working on something important enough to keep willing myself forward. "I'm alive, therefore I live" has never quite played. If I simply started working full-time at whatever job happens to be the most lucrative available to me, life would quickly pass both the "not worth living" and "not justifiable" checkpoints. I've come to value immensely the counterintuitive revelation that it does not, in fact, all come down to "you gotta eat." It actually comes down not to a statement but to a question: "Why eat?"

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¹ Once, when I was 17, a coworker 20 years my senior told me confidently that she was sure I'd be "in a Bimmer" by the age of 25. Sorry to disappoint, Cheryl.

Lessons from "Exec"

This was intended to be one-fifth of a linkage post, but it grew much more substantial than that along the way. On Reddit's often-gripping "I Am A" page, a "former executive of a large famous company in the computer industry" makes himself available to all questioners. (I have no idea about the identity of, as he refers to it, "Big Company", though my more Valley-savvy readers could probably nail it.)

This former executive not only reveals himself to be super-sharp, but quite possibly the most reasonable man who has ever lived. Here he is, for the first of several excerpts, on people skills and that most important kind of work — the free one:

The way to further grow your people skills is not with books, but with people. It takes practice and exposure to numerous scenarios and experiences. How do you get experience when no one will yet hire you to do it? Work for free. Find someplace where you can volunteer — and/or a hobby — where you get to interact with lots of people and try to get things done.

On making friends:

I didn't make nearly enough real friends while at Big Company. Acquaintances by the dozens, but I didn't make the time to socialize and, frankly, to really care about many of the people around me very much. That was a mistake. I eventually turned that around, and literally have made more friends in the past 5 years than in my whole life prior. So, a person can change how he does things. Whew. I sat around bored for a long time and started to think "hey, if I'm so successful, why is my life so boring? I didn't work so hard for just this." It wasn't a single breaking point, but a thought that kept coming up.

Along the same lines, on his greatest mistake:

Greatest mistake was not putting enough emphasis on building great relationships with people outside of the short-term project environment. Life is long; get to really know people and maybe years later you'll be very glad you did.

On investment bankers and management consultants:

Investment bankers perform a real service in directing vast amounts of money to people who actually might be able to do something constructive with them. They are far too likely to give money to the in-crowd than to innovators, they know less than they think they do, and they charge far too much.

Management consultants? Not impresed at all. Get out of my office.

On renaissancemandom (essentially) and the building of oneself:

While working on getting technically strong, consider ways to diversifyyour skills and experiences. Knowing the latest version of Ruby or Haskell won't make you a better management candidate, but knowing how to throw together an inspiring 30-minute lecture about your latest technology, or how to organize a bunch of people into an enthusiastic team, will. One summer, instead of working in an IT lab, go to Indonesia and teach kids math — build yourself into a cool human being whom others would like to follow.

His list of favorite books:

• How to Win Friends and Influence People
• Programmers at Work
• various Zen books (keep my head on straight)
• The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (cool dude)
• and of course various domain-specific technical books

On mentors (which I really don't think enough about myself):

A mentor is best grown gradually. First, email your target person and ask if they can join you for lunch or coffee and share some advice. No big deal. At the end, if they were helpful, tell them so, express your profound gratitude, pay the check, and ask if you might contact them again some time for additional advice should something come up. Repeat this process from time to time, always at their convenience. Show genuine interest in them, ask questions, and listen more than you talk. You need not ever formally call them a "mentor."

On the acquisition of cool shit (and the superiority of cool experiences):

Oddly enough, through overexposure I've become a little less interested in impressive possessions. When you're a rich businessperson you end up meeting more rich businesspeople, and I and the majority of my friends could pay cash for nearly any car made. For a while that's super cool, and then you kind of get over it. Stuff like travel and outdoor activities and fancy restaurants — experiences, rather than possessions — ends up being a lot more appealing.

I often look to learn from entrepreneurs and other people who are good at business, but 90% of the time they turn out to be completely unable or unwilling to communicate — or think — about subjects outside of their current project's core mission. (And may the good lord have mercy on you if you ask them any "why" question.) How nice to see a counterexample.

The success guide

I published the following success guide on Twitter:

Success guide:

1. Cultivate risk tolerance.
2. Cultivate endurance.

This has been the success guide.

The commercial implications are staggering. Or at least they would be, were I to pad the thing out to 3,000 times its size or so. The market just can't handle my caliber of concision. But lost potential fortunes aside, I think there's some merit to the content, given that (a) the people I observe seem to have achieved what they've achieved by taking on tasks with a significant probability of failure or at least an unclear probability of success, then grinding away beyond normal human limits and (b) whatever meager, tiny-scale accomplishments I've accrued myself have all, in large part, amounted to miniature risk- and endurance-tolerance tests.

It would seem to follow that the cultivation of pure risk tolerance and endurance benefits anybody interested in accomplishing anything. By this I mean general risk tolerance and endurance, applicable to any and all trying and/or risky business that arises. The only means I can imagine to affect this, though, is simply doing things that draw on both resources regularly. It's the weight training ethos: break oneself down to build oneself up. Weight training itself, in fact, provides a decent example: those who develop the endurance to habitually hit the gym and the risk tolerance to keep pushing themselves forward in it gain, I suspect, n automatic leg up in other, unrelated risky and endurance-y endeavors.

I sometimes talk to people who think they've got this endurance thing down because their lives have played out like Lifetime Original Movies^TM. But is repeated victimization at the grabby hands of fate really an effective endurance-builder, compared with deliberate, regular effort on one's own part? The same goes for those who live their lives ever on the precipice of ruin: unless you own the risk, what does it generate but fear?

Over the last few months, I've pondered the usefulness of the heuristic "always improve." On one level, it's no more than a rule for enjoying life: how much fun can one draw from a pursuit at which one doesn't or can't improve? (Think of the runner who drags himself out in the street every morning to "do a mile": with no real way to proceed, the exercise quickly turns Sisyphean. The runner who adds even one percent to the distance each day is presumably a different story.) "Always improve" seems to contain "always build your endurance" and "always build your risk tolerance," since improvement demands a continuous rise in the levels of both.

What I've found hardest to keep in mind — and therefore most important to keep in mind — is that choices meant to build endurance and risk tolerance are worthwhile in themselves. Despite sometimes feeling that I look and perform well enough to go without, I should remember to bear in mind that exercise is an endurance-building tool no matter what level of fitness I've already reached. Despite knowing that I'll have time open to finish some stage of a project in the future, I should complete it in the present, gaining endurance (and a layer of buffer) thereby. I should recognize the risk-tolerance benefit of working with the unknown — launching new ventures, attempting unusual things, engaging with different people — even aside any other benefits I might accrue more directly.

Hmm. Maybe grinding through the aforementioned padding-out of the success guide and flinging it into the choppy, unpredictable waters of the open market isn't such a bad idea after all.