— James Altucher, Choose Yourself
Thursday, April 30, 2015
Get over it, for your own good
"I hate the phrase 'Life is too short.' Sometimes it feels very long to me. But it's certainly too short to spend any time on hard feelings."
Monday, April 27, 2015
W.B.'s Book Report (in progress): Choose Yourself
Kindle tells me I am 70 percent of my way through James Altucher's fine manifesto Choose Yourself, which has much to say about the way things are in this day and age and about how best to live during this new era. As Altucher guides me along, I find myself in greater admiration of Paul Phillips, the central figure in my Myke Phoenix universe.
When first we met Paul in the early 1990s (or 2008 when the stories first saw light of day), he was an everyday radio news reporter for WACR, a news-talk station in Astor City, a city that sort of reminds me of Green Bay, in whose orbit I have spent the last 30 years. But local radio news has faded toward obscurity, and Paul found himself in need of a new day job.
He latched onto the Astor City Times-Gazette as a newspaper reporter. You may have heard about the newspaper industry. Yep, Paul was laid off again.
What happened next brings us to Altucher's point, which you can sample in this YouTube video from a TEDx talk a few months ago. Paul Phillips chose himself.
His traditional jobs telling the story of Astor City dried up and went away. But Paul still believed that the people of Astor City wanted and needed to hear their story.
So, using the tools of modern technology, he made his own platform to tell that story: The Astor City Beacon, a local news website that does the things that WACR and the Times-Gazette used to do – that is to say, it tells Astor City's stories as seen and reported by Paul Phillips.
Altucher's thesis is that day jobs are swiftly becoming a thing of the past and that's OK because happiness is found not when someone else chooses you, but when you choose yourself. And he goes about telling how he did that and making suggestions about how you can do something similar.
I still have 30 percent of the book to become disillusioned, but through this point I've found quite a lot of valuable insight about how to navigate this brave new world. And for that I heartily recommend the book.
Oh, and I wouldn't object if you explore Paul Phillips' world while you're at it, either the original Paul or the more recent Paul.
When first we met Paul in the early 1990s (or 2008 when the stories first saw light of day), he was an everyday radio news reporter for WACR, a news-talk station in Astor City, a city that sort of reminds me of Green Bay, in whose orbit I have spent the last 30 years. But local radio news has faded toward obscurity, and Paul found himself in need of a new day job.
He latched onto the Astor City Times-Gazette as a newspaper reporter. You may have heard about the newspaper industry. Yep, Paul was laid off again.
What happened next brings us to Altucher's point, which you can sample in this YouTube video from a TEDx talk a few months ago. Paul Phillips chose himself.
His traditional jobs telling the story of Astor City dried up and went away. But Paul still believed that the people of Astor City wanted and needed to hear their story.
So, using the tools of modern technology, he made his own platform to tell that story: The Astor City Beacon, a local news website that does the things that WACR and the Times-Gazette used to do – that is to say, it tells Astor City's stories as seen and reported by Paul Phillips.
Altucher's thesis is that day jobs are swiftly becoming a thing of the past and that's OK because happiness is found not when someone else chooses you, but when you choose yourself. And he goes about telling how he did that and making suggestions about how you can do something similar.
I still have 30 percent of the book to become disillusioned, but through this point I've found quite a lot of valuable insight about how to navigate this brave new world. And for that I heartily recommend the book.
Oh, and I wouldn't object if you explore Paul Phillips' world while you're at it, either the original Paul or the more recent Paul.
Wednesday, April 22, 2015
A little writing about writing and art
Ray Bradbury is among the greatest writers of the 20th century, and on a more personal note he is my favorite writer most days. Bradbury (1920-2012) wrote an essay called “Zen in the Art of Writing” in which he boiled the craft of writing down to four words: “Work. Relaxation. Don’t think.”
Specifically he said that while you write, don’t think about the possibility of making money with your words – even if you’re a full-time writer whose livelihood depends on it – and don’t think about the process of writing. Just let the words flow.
It’s a tricky balancing act, but every writer at least occasionally enters a “zone” where good stuff just flows from your fingers. Time enough to edit later. For the moments of creation, it’s enough to get the thoughts out and worry later about whether the words are in the proper order.
Bradbury broke into the business of writing by making a commitment to write at least one short story every week. He didn’t worry about whether they were any good or “saleable,” he just wanted to establish a habit. At the end of the first year, he had 52 short stories. Almost none of them sold, but some of them did, and his career was underway.
Writer and filmmaker Joss Whedon is doing interviews this month in advance of his next blockbuster (”Marvel’s Avengers: Age of Ultron”), and one statement jumped off the page at me: “I have a contract with my audience – that I will do better, that I will give them a reason to come in again that is more than the reason we gave them last time.”
What a powerful motivation for an artist! Whedon is the creator of several popular, well-known works from TV series to movies and even comic books, and his audience is passionate about him because they sense that commitment – that he considers his contract with them more important than any financial contract. Bradbury would likely say Whedon “gets it” – care first about the writing, and the rest will take care of itself.
There’s a brilliant little movie that Preston Sturges made in 1941, “Sullivan’s Travels,” about a filmmaker of popular comedies who decides he’d rather try to do something “important.” Instead of another silly feature, he aims to adapt a pretentious literary work called “O Brother Where Are Thou” (and yes, that’s where the 2000 film got its name).
He embarks on an undercover journey to feel what the characters in the novel experienced. Long story short, in the end he finds himself in an audience of prisoners watching a Disney Pluto cartoon.
He laughs at the antics on the screen, then looks around and sees the roomful of inmates also laughing – released from their miserable circumstances for a few minutes of something resembling joy – and he realizes that his silly comedies also meet a basic human need and he has already done something “important” with his genius for entertaining people.
We live for the act of creation – and each of us creates something in everything we do every day. There is an art to driving a busload of kids to school, there is an art to serving a great cup of coffee, there is an art to collecting garbage.
In our art we make the world a better place for others, whether we serve an audience of one or a million, whether we write a poem for our sweetheart or a blockbuster summer movie for mass consumption.
Think about your “audience” – the people you serve – and make a contract to do your best and make today’s best even better than yesterday, and you’ll achieve that better world.
Specifically he said that while you write, don’t think about the possibility of making money with your words – even if you’re a full-time writer whose livelihood depends on it – and don’t think about the process of writing. Just let the words flow.
It’s a tricky balancing act, but every writer at least occasionally enters a “zone” where good stuff just flows from your fingers. Time enough to edit later. For the moments of creation, it’s enough to get the thoughts out and worry later about whether the words are in the proper order.
Bradbury broke into the business of writing by making a commitment to write at least one short story every week. He didn’t worry about whether they were any good or “saleable,” he just wanted to establish a habit. At the end of the first year, he had 52 short stories. Almost none of them sold, but some of them did, and his career was underway.
Writer and filmmaker Joss Whedon is doing interviews this month in advance of his next blockbuster (”Marvel’s Avengers: Age of Ultron”), and one statement jumped off the page at me: “I have a contract with my audience – that I will do better, that I will give them a reason to come in again that is more than the reason we gave them last time.”
What a powerful motivation for an artist! Whedon is the creator of several popular, well-known works from TV series to movies and even comic books, and his audience is passionate about him because they sense that commitment – that he considers his contract with them more important than any financial contract. Bradbury would likely say Whedon “gets it” – care first about the writing, and the rest will take care of itself.
There’s a brilliant little movie that Preston Sturges made in 1941, “Sullivan’s Travels,” about a filmmaker of popular comedies who decides he’d rather try to do something “important.” Instead of another silly feature, he aims to adapt a pretentious literary work called “O Brother Where Are Thou” (and yes, that’s where the 2000 film got its name).
He embarks on an undercover journey to feel what the characters in the novel experienced. Long story short, in the end he finds himself in an audience of prisoners watching a Disney Pluto cartoon.
He laughs at the antics on the screen, then looks around and sees the roomful of inmates also laughing – released from their miserable circumstances for a few minutes of something resembling joy – and he realizes that his silly comedies also meet a basic human need and he has already done something “important” with his genius for entertaining people.
We live for the act of creation – and each of us creates something in everything we do every day. There is an art to driving a busload of kids to school, there is an art to serving a great cup of coffee, there is an art to collecting garbage.
In our art we make the world a better place for others, whether we serve an audience of one or a million, whether we write a poem for our sweetheart or a blockbuster summer movie for mass consumption.
Think about your “audience” – the people you serve – and make a contract to do your best and make today’s best even better than yesterday, and you’ll achieve that better world.
Friday, April 10, 2015
What's with all the anger? revisited
I can't say this any better than I did three and a half years ago, so here goes.
Monday, April 6, 2015
Just get started
Knowing what to do and doing it: The first is easy. Everyone knows what to do.
Doing it? It must be hard. It must be difficult. Because so few do what needs to be done.
Lose weight/lay off the sugar? You know it’s good for you. Exercise? Meet deadline? Discipline your life? You know what to do. Just do it. Just get started.
What’s keeping you? Just you: Overcome inertia. Overcome inertia and live. Live before you have no life left to live. Never say die until you’re dead.
Not hard. Not hard. Why act as if it’s impossible?
Tuesday, March 31, 2015
W.B. Origins: The Great Comic Book Heroes
It is a first edition of The Great Comic Book Heroes, a wonderful collection “compiled, introduced and annotated” by Jules Feiffer, and inscribed, “To Warren — the comic book fiend of 1965, From Dad and Mother, December 25, 1965.”
For the previous year and a half, ever since I found that copy of Amazing Spider-Man #4, I had been feverishly following the adventures of the Marvel Comics universe of characters, and anyone familiar with that universe knows I’d stumbled upon it at just the right time, as the characters found themselves and began to fly.
Feiffer’s book celebrated the heroes of the 1940s, when he was a teenager himself. He turned my age at an even more magical time (at least for the comics), when costumed superheroes were all being introduced for the very first time, and he actually worked as an apprentice for the legendary Will Eisner starting in 1945 at the age of 16.
He writes about each of the heroes in turn, but then the real magic appears: Here are the actual reprinted stories of Superman, Captain Marvel, Batman, the original Human Torch (my first encounter), the Flash, the Green Lantern, the Spectre, Hawkman, Wonder Woman, Sub-Mariner, Captain America, Plastic Man, and the Spirit.
It was a wonderful peek at the Golden Age of Comics, and although I had a problem with some of Feiffer’s conclusions (”Comic books, first of all, are junk. There are a few exceptions, but nonjunk comic books don’t as a rule, last very long.” OK, maybe in 1945 …) I loved Feiffer’s descriptions and histories, and I especially loved the reprints.
Each character was given a full story to give the flavor of his/her adventures, except there was a single page from Captain Marvel’s origin tale. “More can not be printed without unsettling the settlement between Clark Kent and Billy Batson,” a footnote explains. That enticement led to a curiosity that was not really settled until DC Comics started publishing Shazam! a few years later.
It is not reading and rereading those ancient stories that beat up this first edition, however. The oversized book was slightly bigger than 8.5 by 11 inches, which made it perfect for use as a workbench.
I would sit on my bed with a piece of paper pressed against the inside front cover, and I’d write and draw the adventures of Greatman and Brink The Atomic Man and the Fabulous Five and Captain Zap. I wrote hundreds of songs and poems. It was the beginning of a passion that led, in my later years, to Myke Phoenix and The Imaginary Bomb, and who knows what to come.
Sometimes I look at a memento from the far distant past like this and think, “Wow, that was almost 50 years ago now, it doesn’t seem that long.” Oh, but yes it does. The thousands of days that were lived in the meantime transformed that kid into this guy typing on a computer, and we are two remarkably different creatures who happen to share the same frame.
I continue to metamorphize into something new as time goes on. What an incredible life this is.
Monday, March 16, 2015
W.B.'s Book Report: The Martian
And it doesn’t cover Weir’s unique voice, the humor, and the care taken to walk that thin line between realism and the absurd. For all of the headaches and dangers that Weir sends the way of his astronaut stranded on Mars, I never once said “Oh, come on, now you’ve jumped the shark,” or “Oh, please, that solution was way too convenient.”
This is a great novel that takes readers to the real Mars — as real a Mars as contemporary science can speculate — and never lets up until the story reaches its powerful conclusion.
Friday, March 6, 2015
Wednesday, February 11, 2015
The day the devices stayed off
Greetings from Analog Saturday. This post began its life as scratchings in a notebook, pen on paper.
After a week in which probably 80 percent of my waking hours were spent staring at computer screens of varying sizes, as I turned off my home computer Friday night I had a sudden “I’m not going to do this anymore” impulse and declared a screen-free Saturday.
One thing I did Saturday morning was nothing. For a few minutes I just sat in the easy chair and looked around the living room and out the window. I could feel tension melt out of my shoulders and hands. I heartily endorse occasionally doing nothing.
Another thing I did was pick up a book. Now, I’ve migrated a lot of my reading to my Kindle, but that marvelous device has the same flaw as a computer or tablet or smartphone — too many conflicting choices. There’s only one book in a print book, nothing to divert your attention.
(Sidebar: Can you guess my book by its first sentence? I wouldn’t have been able: “In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the Army.”)
I think our screen-based work and play devices tend to infect us with a bit of attention deficit disorder. The fact that we can do so many things with them is both a blessing and a curse. It’s hard to concentrate on one thing when something else is just a click away.
You’re reading a book and an email chimes in. You’re replying to the email and that reminds you of something you wanted to look up on the web. You’re trying to research that and someone texts you. You’re replying to the text and someone calls.
It’s not a smartphone. It’s a collection of infinite rabbit holes.
It was not easy leaving the devices off all day. In fact, I had to cheat once, to make sure I had enough money in the checking account to take Red on a date Saturday night. (“The Imitation Game,” two thumbs up.) So it was a 99.5 percent computer-free Saturday.
Being disconnected from the world felt a little weird. But by the end of the day, I felt more connected with myself than I had for a while. And at the end of the day, that sense of self is probably the most important connection of them all.
(Oh, and the book was “A Study in Scarlet” by Arthur Conan Doyle, the story that introduced Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Sorry to keep you waiting. Or did you take a moment and Google it?)
After a week in which probably 80 percent of my waking hours were spent staring at computer screens of varying sizes, as I turned off my home computer Friday night I had a sudden “I’m not going to do this anymore” impulse and declared a screen-free Saturday.
One thing I did Saturday morning was nothing. For a few minutes I just sat in the easy chair and looked around the living room and out the window. I could feel tension melt out of my shoulders and hands. I heartily endorse occasionally doing nothing.
Another thing I did was pick up a book. Now, I’ve migrated a lot of my reading to my Kindle, but that marvelous device has the same flaw as a computer or tablet or smartphone — too many conflicting choices. There’s only one book in a print book, nothing to divert your attention.
(Sidebar: Can you guess my book by its first sentence? I wouldn’t have been able: “In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the Army.”)
I think our screen-based work and play devices tend to infect us with a bit of attention deficit disorder. The fact that we can do so many things with them is both a blessing and a curse. It’s hard to concentrate on one thing when something else is just a click away.
You’re reading a book and an email chimes in. You’re replying to the email and that reminds you of something you wanted to look up on the web. You’re trying to research that and someone texts you. You’re replying to the text and someone calls.
It’s not a smartphone. It’s a collection of infinite rabbit holes.
It was not easy leaving the devices off all day. In fact, I had to cheat once, to make sure I had enough money in the checking account to take Red on a date Saturday night. (“The Imitation Game,” two thumbs up.) So it was a 99.5 percent computer-free Saturday.
Being disconnected from the world felt a little weird. But by the end of the day, I felt more connected with myself than I had for a while. And at the end of the day, that sense of self is probably the most important connection of them all.
(Oh, and the book was “A Study in Scarlet” by Arthur Conan Doyle, the story that introduced Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Sorry to keep you waiting. Or did you take a moment and Google it?)
Tuesday, February 3, 2015
The most effective Super Bowl commercials
Because I need a life, I wrote down all of the ads that ran during Sunday's Super Bowl game and took notes on my instant reaction. I came to an interesting conclusion about which ones were the most effective.
Briefly, here are my favorite ads – not necessarily the most effective.
1. The lost puppy rescued from the wild by his Budweiser Clydesdale friend.
2. Bryan Cranston as Breaking Bad's Walter White in a pharmacy for esurance.
3. Pete Rose "in the hall" of his own home for Skechers.
4. A public service announcement about what it means to do things "Like a Girl."
5. Centenarians speak words of wisdom for Dodge, founded in 1914. "You learn a lot in 100 years."
But the most effective? Jeff Bridges sitting in a chair, running his finger around the edge of an earthen mug, and chanting like a Gregorian monk, with the subtitle "www.DreamingWithJeff.com."
Why is this the most effective, at least for me? Because later that night I went to DreamingWithJeff.com to find out what the heck that commercial was about. I learned about Squarespace and will consider using the product when I get around to redesigning my websites.
And that's the point of spending millions on a single television ad, right? To recoup your investment by making sales. To motivate the viewer to act.
Honorable mention: The trailers for Tomorrowland, an interesting-looking movie I was only dimly aware of, and for Terminator: Genisys, which I wasn't inclined to go watch but now might.
Cross-posted to Uncle Warren's Attic
Briefly, here are my favorite ads – not necessarily the most effective.
1. The lost puppy rescued from the wild by his Budweiser Clydesdale friend.
2. Bryan Cranston as Breaking Bad's Walter White in a pharmacy for esurance.
3. Pete Rose "in the hall" of his own home for Skechers.
4. A public service announcement about what it means to do things "Like a Girl."
5. Centenarians speak words of wisdom for Dodge, founded in 1914. "You learn a lot in 100 years."
But the most effective? Jeff Bridges sitting in a chair, running his finger around the edge of an earthen mug, and chanting like a Gregorian monk, with the subtitle "www.DreamingWithJeff.com."
Why is this the most effective, at least for me? Because later that night I went to DreamingWithJeff.com to find out what the heck that commercial was about. I learned about Squarespace and will consider using the product when I get around to redesigning my websites.
And that's the point of spending millions on a single television ad, right? To recoup your investment by making sales. To motivate the viewer to act.
Honorable mention: The trailers for Tomorrowland, an interesting-looking movie I was only dimly aware of, and for Terminator: Genisys, which I wasn't inclined to go watch but now might.
Cross-posted to Uncle Warren's Attic
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