Let Go and Haul: how is January nearly over / making the world go forward
Week 3, 2018 – Brooklyn
Journey: where we're at
First of all, how the heck is it already Jan 20? I’ve been in a non-stop getting it done work mode since returning from the holidays and they feel like they were just yesterday. Yet here we are on the eve of the super wolf blood moon eclipse or whatever it’s called which means January is gonna be over soon aieeee!
What’s going on? More of the same. We’re all working hard on product and the two events we have coming up. In fact, I’ve been feeling so stretched recently I’ve made a couple of oh-geez-that’s-unlike-me mistakes. When that kind of thing happens I’m like wait a minute, that’s a compass pointing to something. (At first I blamed it on my Apple watch being out of commission since I left the charger in Pearson airport on Jan 2 nooooo and not having had time to replace it until today) but it's definitely more than just missing my wrist prison to keep me on track.
“Stop, breathe, and think” as our mentor Craig Kornblau tells me. “It helps!” It really does.
This email is a really helpful tool to stop breathe and think. A moment of reflection I force myself to do every week and hold myself accountable for it by making it public.
Journal: what I learned
As is with every winter in NYC I relearn how much I struggle with these dark winter months, so I have to work extra hard to stay positive and confident. This mostly involves doing yoga in front of the happy light (shouts to KT for that home purchase) and dreaming about summer.
It is good for getting lot of work done though :) This is p much what I look like 99% of the time (when I’m not at the studio “office” of course). Kitchen table, sweatshirt, hair tied up, laptop. There’s no glamour to being a founder. This is the reality right here:
This morning, in this exact position, I was reading the Brainpickings Sunday longread, and I thought I’d share this part, because it reminded me of the many times I’ve had with industry skeptics and investors (that did not invest in us) who are like “hmm, that sounds hard you know. That’s like a *new* thing you’re building, new behavior, new media. It’s hard to be successful…”
To which I’m like, uh yeah, that’s what being creative is? Making new things?
If I wanted to make things that existed, there’s plenty of businesses to be built that way that are far less stressful and also far less interesting and fulfilling. And I think that’s what’s at the heart of this journey – a commitment to creativity, to trying to make the world go forward.
Mary Oliver says on the experience of boarding an airplane as she talks about creative work –
You want this flight to be ordinary, not extraordinary. So, too, with the surgeon, and the ambulance driver, and the captain of the ship. Let all of them work, as ordinarily they do, in confident familiarity with whatever the work requires, and no more. Their ordinariness is the surety of the world. Their ordinariness makes the world go round.
In creative work — creative work of all kinds — those who are the world’s working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward. Which is something altogether different from the ordinary. Such work does not refute the ordinary. It is, simply, something else. Its labor requires a different outlook — a different set of priorities.
Anyway, maybe next time I get a question about doing something hard, I’ll be like yeah we’re trying to move the the world forward, we have a different set of priorities yo and see what happens haha.
Jams: what I’m into
I recently watched The American Meme on our investor Alexia’s recommendation and wow. Yeah. Definite must watch. It’s a deep journey into the lives of creators and celebrities on the internet. There’s an extra sad moment where Paris Hilton talks about the sex tape scandal and how it affected her life, and a mesmerizing one where Brittany Furlan talks about how with Vine, she didn’t have to audition, she didn’t have to be accepted into something to succeed, she could just act and people could watch.
Technologists talk a big game about the “democratization of tools” and I certainly subscribe to this (I mean, I’ve dedicated my entire career to tools for self expression), but hearing Furlan talk about it in such an unfiltered way in that documentary hit me harder and in a new way I didn’t expect. Anyway, just watch it :)
Shout out to my sister Soph for the re-up on the Netflix login 😅
Oh, if you haven’t heard it yet, Lizzo’s new summery jam is is exactly what we all need mid-January. Try listening to this under your happy light for real haha.
PS. Recently I started timing myself to see how fast I could do these. If things come up during the week I jot them down in notes and then I outline it on the G Train between home and pole dance class on Saturday which is two stops (plus waiting on the platform)! On Sunday it takes about 30 mins to turn the outline into an email and then 15 mins to format it with gifs, links and proofread :) I’m pretty proud of this, it used to take me a lot longer!