What would you do if you knew you would fail?

We are reminded, ever so often: Do what you love. Find your passion. Cal Newport improves on this by instead asking "What are you willing to get good at?"

Along the same lines I like to consider, koan-like, two sides of a related question. First:

What would you do if you knew you'd be successful?

If no matter what you chose, it would become huge. Be the new biggest thing. Get written up in the NYTimes. Be so big that people you don't know would email you constantly asking when they could get more X. You, as a person would publically be forever linked with this thing.

That question helped me let go of my career as a musician (maybe just for a while, maybe forever— I certainly don't know) and go into writing apps. I love playing music, of course. And for a number of years after undergrad it was very important to me that I earn a living doing music. But in the last few years the answer to "how can I scale this" has involved doing more of the things I don't particularly love doing: playing weddings, teaching people who aren't really all that interested in learning, admin to keep new work coming in. Instead, I thought, what do I like doing that is scaleable? And of course programming is the obvious answer. Turns out I am okay at it and since lots more people need software developed than know how to do it, no one much cares what your degree is in as long as you can hack teh codez.

Even more liberating, though, is the flip side of the first question:

What would you do if you knew you were going to fail? 

That no matter what you did or how hard you worked, at the end of it you would accomplish nothing, get no recognition, make no more than a minimal amount of money and have no lasting impact? It sounds depressing, but when I imagine having that kind of foreknowledge... and then getting up off the floor and heading out into the world to do something anyway, I imagine it coming with this incredible clarity, this freedom to simply pick something good and interesting and fun, with no anxiety or pressure about it seeming "right" to other people, or it being likely to make you wealthy, or it making people think you're smart when you tell them that is "what you do". 

I also imagine that this kind of knowledge— non-hypothetical in someone like Steve Jobs' case— is what makes creative, visionary leaders able to commit themselves to a project with such single-mindedness. They have looked failure in the face and said... "meh".

Final quote: A friend of mine once, many years ago, when I was trying to get up the nerve to talk to a group of cute girls, said "I think most people have a lot more things they regret not doing than things they regret doing." This is, in my experience, completely true and indicative of a human tendency worth working against. 

(Oh, and for the record, I got absolutely, positively shot down by the cute girls— but its value as an anecdote for not fearing failure still keeps that decision regret-free.)

To Japan!

All shows, bikes & accommodation are booked. Food will be taken as it comes. Leaving Monday morning. Just have to pack...

The dinosaurs in Crystal Palace

photo by Diana. Thanks, Diana!

We saw the 'real' ones too*. But this is the best.

Also eating here was amazing (bad website often = good food, when the food is from far away) and talking about Benjy and Caddie and Quentin at book club deux and and and.

Now I have to run (lit'raly) to work— but at least you have that picture.

*i.e. the big can't-ride-them ones made for adults to gaze upon at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Which you'd think there would be a Sufjan song about by now. Get with it, Suf.

Productional culture

I want to say, to start, that I want this to not be a snobby thing. It is a value thing, but not a snobby thing. Anyone can take part in it. So.

This afternoon I was moving some data around, off external hard drives and onto the schmancy 2nd hard drive I put into my macbook pro where the optical drive used to be, and so I was confronted with maybe 300 GB of old song demos and recordings, which I find kind of embarrassing for the most part these days. Part of me wants to keep this stuff forever, but I have been thinking for a couple years— since moving to the UK I suppose— about how letting old things go is often necessary for growth, even when you're not always ready to actually let those things go. You know, like forest fires. Right? So part of me feels like, as long as that's sitting around on a drive somewhere, I'm going to keep writing things like that, which I'm not happy with.

So I deleted the folder.

Don't worry, I still have some record of my past. But this giant folder of "ideas" that I was theoretically to bring out and dust off and sculpt into something good... gone. Gone! It felt liberating. If I'm going to write more music, it's going to be drawing on everything I've learned since then and who I am now, not finding some idea from years ago that was somehow "right" and working it into a polished gem. (I have done the other thing in the past, usually when I needed something for a play on short notice, but that was mostly taking finished work that had never seen the light of day and putting a final mix on it, not taking these little isolated verses / choruses / bare chord progressions / piano licks and sculpting something from them.

And then, feeling liberated, I spent some time trying to be Owen Pallett, basically, but on the piano. And, you know, me, instead of actually Owen.

And the whole time, Downstairs Neighbor was playing the TV at maximum volume. Not to drown me out— or at least, she was doing it before I started playing, so it wasn't to drown me out at the beginning at least. Just because that is what she does.

Emma and I are always making and doing. Our friends are (generally speaking) always making and doing. But lots of people I only kinda-sorta know, they don't make. They observe. They watch. They consume.

And while observing and watching and consuming— being passive, "just relaxing"— is good sometimes, it's a mode of being that wasn't available to us until fairly recently. Our squirrelly mammal brains are used to being entertained by making and doing, and I'd go so far as to say that's when we feel most satisfied, most engaged, and happiest: when we're making something.

The something doesn't even have to be good. Professionalism, in fact, takes as it gives. It's great to have geniuses (like the aforementioned Owen) who make things that blow our minds, and it's great that they can travel the world making a living showing them to us in person. But one thing that I think keeps a lot of people from doing and making is the fear that it won't be good enough to show other people, that it won't be fit for public consumption. And, very often, it won't be. But that's no reason to stop doing it. The curse of having access to all the media produced across the entire world is the same as its benefit: we get the best (and the trendiest, and the most shocking, but let's say that by one metric or another something that rises to global prominence has the ability to engage and entertain and is put together deftly and generally well-executed) of so many people's efforts that we don't see (unless we make a special effort) the rest of the pyramid. In 1950 you could put on a record and hear world-class music, but for the most part you went to hear musicians at your local pub (or whatever). In 1850 the same, but without the records. Because we mostly interact with professional products, many people tend to consider the making of music— and other art forms— as the domain of professionals.

Let's not do that! Let's have a productional culture, where people do and make and then use that, their hands-dirty lived knowledge of a discipline to inform what they decide to consume when consuming is what's in the cards for that day. How do we do that? Downstairs neighbor needs a hobby.

vs.

 

P.S. If you're thinking of doing and making tomorrow, and need a little push to get started— a little confidence boost— here's that great quote from Ira Glass about such things: 

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

Adventstuff II

To pee, or not to pee, that is the question:
Whether 'tis Nobler in the seat to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of bubbles,
And by the remote end them: too dry, to sip
No more; and by a sip, to say we pause
The movie, and the thousand battling orcs
The ring is heir to? 'Tis a plot construction
Devoutly to be wished. To pause, to pee,
To drip, perchance to stream; Aye, there's the tub,
For in that pause for breath, what scenes may come,
While we have shuffled off to liquid toil—
We must press pause. There's the prospect
That makes Calamity of so long a film:
The unflushable Country, from whose bedpan
No TV-watcher returns...
Thus Crabbies does make Cowards of us all.

This year's advent fun: one

This year instead of one type of thing we pick and do each day to keep Emma from exploding with Christmas anticipation, we're doing a bunch of different stuff. Probably some songs, some remixes, some digital internet madness. Some literary parodies... you know. "Stuff". First is this:

To borrow and to borrow and to borrow,
Cheap in this pretty place from pay to day
To the last sale table in record time;
And all our magazines have lighted fools
The way to dusty debt.
                                     Pout, pout, chief handler!
This line’s but a gawking shadow of poor players
That strut and fret an hour up in the dressing-room
and hang stuff up no more. It is a sale
sold by an idiot, full of silk and fur yet
dignifying nothing.

Guess who this is for?

(Stay tuned for further fun.) 

Farewells IV: A farewell to self-employment, aka poverty

So the reason we moved to London is because I got a job. A, you know, 'real' job. Because we needed visas, and of course because I am, in Emma's memorable phrase, "maybe the only person to have ever turned a music degree into a technical qualification". And because it was just time. Time for a change, time to put all this exploration and self-teaching and learning and so on to some use. And time to be part of a team, to join a project that's someone else's and learn and contribute in that sort of way.

And so now I help write the iPad and iPhone app Shazam, that one that tells you what song is playing. The algorithm (published here [pdf] and explained here) is mega-cool, although we're not working on that so much these days as we are on making the app more user-friendly, more social, and, well, prettier. It seems to have a (not entirely undeserved) reputation as a brilliant idea that could use some love on the implementation front (again, not technically so much as from a user-experience perspective) and so it will be fun to make that happen over the next months.

And then! And then!

Emma (who I see has been just as bad about blogging lately as have I, for more or less precisely the same reasons) also got a job. A 'real' job. As a professor. Of pop. For... Bath Spa University.

That's right. We moved to London so that she could have a monster commute.

This is survivable because the demandingness of professorial jobs is counterbalanced by their incredible flexibility. So Emma is in Bath an average of 2.5 days a week, and works from home the rest of the time.

And once I've learned the ropes a bit more at Shazam, I will also be able to work from home a day or two a week, and we will again be able to chase the sun-squares around the living room and eat cereal and go for mid-morning runs.

So, no more of this:

But maybe some more of this:

Read into this photo whatever you will.