How do we walk?
Our lead leg leaves the ground first, swinging from the hip, our balance shifts and we fall forward. We catch ourselves when our heel hits the ground, then our foot rolls onto its toes. The trailing leg leaves the ground, and we fall forward again.
We do it so casually day in and day out, we never notice ourselves falling.
And yet, that’s what we do – lose and regain our balance thousands of times a day.
The Perfect Relationship
A friend told me about an online discussion she read on ‘the perfect relationship’. It sounded like most people define perfection as a place where they can stop struggling – where everything stays pristine for now and ever.
It also sounded like a fantasy.
She asked me what I thought a perfect relationship was, if there ever could be such a creature.
When I was a design student, there was a particular sketchbook I loved to use. You could only buy it at two places in the entire country, and sometimes they would sell out. It was meant for children, and the cover had a cute, colorful drawing of happy zoo animals, so it was more suitable for a kid to carry to kindergarten than for a teenager to be seen drawing it out of his bag in public.
But I absolutely loved it.
It was the texture of the paper, which was recycled. It had a rough, unfinished quality, and I loved the way it felt on my pencil. Every other type of drawing paper felt too smooth to draw on, but this paper was entirely inviting. I remember spending the entire month of one of my school holidays at the library, just sketching my way through a book.
I turned 30 last Thursday. Looking back on my 20s, I’d be lying if I said there were things I didn’t wish I’d done differently, but mostly, I’m happy and grateful for the experiences I’ve had. If I had a chance to go back in time and share with my 20-year old self the lessons I’ve learned in these last 10 years, this is probably what I’d say.
1. Play, Experiment, Learn
I know you want a lot of answers. The thing is, impatient as you are, some answers won’t come immediately. They can’t. They can only be bought with experience and time.
Right now, be okay with not knowing. Play. Experiment. Learn. Use your 20s to discover who you are, what you love and what you want to contribute to this world.
HOWTO: 149 Surprising Ways to Turbocharge Your Blog with Credibility! a SxSW ‘09 panel by Merlin Mann and John Gruber, has been on my repeat play-list for the past few weeks.
Merlin Mann and John Gruber are wildly successful web authors. They are both amongst my favorite writers; this is their first recorded panel together and it is insanely funny. Despite the tongue-in-cheek title, not only is it full of great advice about how to blog well, but when you replace the word ‘blog’ with any creative endeavor – like ‘photography’ or ‘3D animation’ – the advice translates across disciplines and gives insight about creativity, ownership and how to make something you can be proud of.
The first time I listened to the end of this one-hour recording, I forwarded it to my creative friends, because I knew they would get so much from it. But I was afraid they wouldn’t get the many (hilarious) Web 2.0 in-jokes and be turned off by the heavy blogging overtones.
Warning: The post below assumes you want to get better at blogging. If you’re blogging just for fun (hell, I am), this rant is not for you. It also contains snarky arrogance, so don’t read it if you’re not prepared to admit how wrong you are and how right I am about everything. Namaste.
Forget about sure-fire tips to wild blogging success, there are really only two secrets to be a successful blogger and I’ve found them:
1. Write well.
2. Or be a cute and nubile girl who blogs lots of photos of herself.
To everyone else who says you don’t need to write well to be a good blogger: that’s bloody stupid (cute and nubile girl photo-bloggers excluded). Blogging is a written medium and it is read. To say you don’t need to write well to create good reading is like saying you don’t have to cook well to make a good meal. To be good at your art invariably demands that you be good at your craft.
Neil Strauss has been preparing himself for emergencies for the last three years, but not for ordinary emergencies like blackouts or losing a job. It’s The End of the World As We Know It stuff that Strauss is concerned about – known by the acronym TEOTWAWKI in the book – the collapse of the system and civilization as we know it.
If you find his name familiar, here’s why: Neil Strauss is the author of the best-selling book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. In The Game, he reveals how he turned from a lonely and clueless music critic into one of the most famous pick-up artists in the world.
In Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life, Strauss writes about how he slowly loses his faith in the system, and determines to learn how to survive outside of it. He transforms from an everyday city-boy into a wilderness survivor who shoots, tracks, hunts, lives in the wild with nothing but a knife and the clothes on his back, picks locks, hot-wires cars, evades bounty hunters and escapes across the border.
My friend Lester pressed the DVD into my hand, and told me I had to watch this science-fiction series that was making raves in the US. I took one look at the cover, and thought it looked like a corny, cheap re-make of a corny, cheap oldie.
I told him I’d catch it when I got home. Then I stuffed it into a drawer when I got home and forgot all about it.
Lester wouldn’t give up though. He kept hounding me to see it, so one day I succumbed and popped Battlestar Galactica into my DVD player. Today, I take back everything bad I ever thought about that cover. I’d even buy Lester breakfast, lunch and dinner for introducing me to the greatest TV series I’ve watched in my entire life.
