CEO of Coke on Which Ball is Rubber

Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling some five balls in the air. You name them – work, family, health, friends and spirit – and you’re keeping all of these in the air. You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. But the other four balls – family, health, friends and spirit – are made of glass. If you drop one of these, they will be irrevocably scuffed, marked, nicked, damaged or even shattered. They will never be the same. You must understand that and strive for balance in your life.”

Brian Dyson, CEO of Coca Cola

The Third Tier

I was in Portland, OR this weekend for XOXO Fest 2013. I stayed with Myke and Matt. I say “stayed” but the proper term is “crashed like a goddam animal.” I mostly just assumed it would be ok and showed up to snuggle between two queen size beds. They were cool. It was damp.

We had a crew there in Portland. Dan, Tom and their gorgeous wives (these guys know how to pick ’em), along with Jon and occasional dancing outbursts from my new favorite person ever Liam.

We really invested in one another. “Invested” sounds cute. It’s the kind of word that would be printed on something and then you’d click to Pinterest it. But it’s the right word. We devoted our time and effort to each other.

The word (and our efforts in that direction) means something to me because I’ve left too many social situations and conferences and such regretful, feeling like I made poor choices, like I missed the point or missed my chance or missed my wife or something.

I have a theory, a tier theory. There’s people at the top. They’re celebrities. People people know. They walk in and the room changes, everyone’s looking at them out of the corners of their eyes, some are full on staring.

These first-tier folks got there due to work they did, or jokes they made, or something like that. These are the people we look up to and admire… like, a lot.

And we all want them to like us. I, for one, have spent a lot of time and effort trying to get my fav’s like Merlin Mann to like me. I’ve wasted a lot of emotional energy, extended my resources in unnatural ways to try to stand out and be someone who’s easily cool… this never works. This leaves me feeling that “missed the point/missed the chance/miss my wife” kind of feeling.

And then I met Brad and Patrick and Matt and Maja and others who had relationships with all the 1st tier people, but seemed to always be hanging with each other. They wouldn’t line the edges of a crowd around John Gruber. They’d be standing somewhere else, with each other, making each other laugh, buying each other drinks.

Also, they were real welcoming. So light and fun and enjoyable. I felt more like myself when I was around them (as opposed to whatever else I was trying to be with 1st tier folks).

By the way, I totally think this is silly and sorta dumb; putting people into tiers and classes… but I’m going to keep going. It’ll come around. Promise.

Brad and Patrick, et. al., defined a new tier for me. I saw these lovely, kind, funny, welcoming people, I saw how wildly talented they all were, how they were doing work they were proud of, how they’ve been around for a while, long enough to know the first tier people and the fact that first tier people are just regular fucking people who now get approached more than they’d like to be…

And the thing I saw the most was how they invested in one another. They seemed to realize they really liked each other. They turned towards each other and said, “let’s start a club there.” They were for one another and acted accordingly.

Then I saw myself and these guys and gals I was getting close with. We were the 3rd tier. Unknown-ish. A little younger. Just kind of coming of age in our careers. High hopes. Sensitive to the whimsy of our 1st tier swooning. We have heroes. We’re idealistic. We’re adorable and hopeful and earnest and would really like Merlin Mann to listen to our podcasts… like, so much.

And the danger is we could miss out on all the goodness in one another — the birth of each others’ first born kids, the big project launches, the arduous bug fixing nights, the giggles at breakfast as we recited lines from the previous night’s events, the awkward bathroom bonding moments, snuggles — we could miss out on all this due to spending too mcuh emotional energy trying to get Marco Arment to like us… by investing too much in the idea of someone liking us just cuz they’re important. We’d miss out on real love and relationships with one another because we were trying to be somebody to someone who was something.

Now, here’s the thing about the tiers: there are no fucking tiers. The reason why those second tier folks looked so awesome to me is not due to their proximity to the 1st tiers. It might be a by product of that. They spent enough time with the Merlins and Grubers to realize there are no fucking tiers. Just people and desire. Some people a lot of people desire. Some people not many people desire. It’s just people and desire. “So,” they said to themselves, “fuck desire. Let’s find the people we enjoy.”

They didn’t care about the tiers. But saying to myself, “don’t care about the tiers” doesn’t help me very well. It always creeps in.

So what I say instead is, “go all in on the 3rd tier.” Find the people you enjoy. Invest in them. Plan every dinner, lunch, walk, conference, breakfast and hotel choice you can with them.

And welcome others. Delight in the stories of fabulous nerds and hackers and help everyone you rub up against realize we’re all in this together, we’re all lonely humans, we all want to be seen and to be told we don’t look that fat with our shirt off and that the thing we’re making is OK or “pretty cool” and we all want to have someone to go to lunch with and to try a new beer with and to show our super embarrassing sword tattoo to and to sit next to and to wave at us and point to a saved seat when we walk in late. We all want the same shit: we just want to feel comfortable in our own skin.

This is the good stuff. We all have stinky bits, we all need undies, we’re all uncomfortable and worried, so lets make a club there.

The Reeves Tier Theory™ reminds me to dig in, think more human and ask if anyone needs another drink before I go get mine.

Dan Harmon on Being a Douchebag

I want you to respect yourself and I want your respect. I create what I create in hopes of touching you. File that where you want. Act like you’re important to me. You are.”

Dan Harmon (in a deleted post)

Someone called Dan Harmon a douchebag. He responded. The above is a bit from it (he deleted the post, claiming it was confusing). But I thought this bit was fantastic.

We’re all such big internet people with our blog posts and our email subscriptions and our “product” and our “stuff” we “make.”

We’re also lonely, like the rest of humanity, longing to connect. I want your respect. You’re important to me.

Sculpting/Collaging vs. The Blank Page

Just listened to this great interview with a comics guy. I don’t know this guy or the comics thing, but I loved the way he talked about creativity.

He makes this comic. It’s basically a collage of victorian clipart. He manipulates them, puts them together, zooms in, zooms out, and mashes a story over it like so much mod podge.

He talks about how this kind of creativity is much more inspiring to him than a blank page. Well, yea, no shit.

He also talks of his career as a movie trailer editor. Again, taking this thing, collecting some scraps and bits and rearranging them.

He also talks about how he sometimes just starts with the pictures, puts them together and then gets inspired by something this bear could be saying to this guy.

Rearranging existing things to find some connection that wasn’t there before. Manipulating some existing thing into alternate shapes.

I love this as a model for creativity… or a mode. I love his perspective about this. I also love his easy way of saying, “yes, this is what I do.”

Re-jiggering how I think about what I do more towards this “collaging” or “sculpting” mode takes some of the pressure off.

When I brainstorm a bunch of stuff, put each idea on the whiteboard or notebook or on its own sticky note, and then rearrange them…

When I draw a bunch of boxes in photoshop in different colors and then rearrange them…

When I clip bits of websites I love and rearrange them on the canvas…

Because, let’s be honest, blank pages fk’n suck.

Pic above from this comic

On Asking for Advice & The Rub

I just received a long note from an earnest fizzler trying to make their thing and getting really down about the results. I wrote her this response:

Wow, thanks for sharing so candidly.

I don’t have specific, mind blowing advice for you, not only because I don’t have experience in the your specific industry, but also because it sounds like you’re getting to a REALLY great point.

What you’re experiencing is what I call THE RUB. It’s when the pain of the thing, the compromises, heaviness, resultlessness and harshness of the current situation are such that we either double down to make the thing succeed or quit.

THIS is where you’ll find what you’re made of and what really matters to you about this project (and others).

And for that reason I recommend you stop looking for advice. You DO need a little encouragement: you’re not far off now. You’re on the right track. This rub is what it’s like to be an entrepreneur and an artist. It’s what makes the best in you come out. If everything went well all the time we’d still be making the mediocre stuff we started with.

Might feel like I’m sluffing you off here. I’m not. The rules are all changing. The advice someone gives you will be based on stuff that happened in the past. You’ll come up with better, more honest, more YOU, more NOW methods and directions than anyone else will give you.

As long as you’re taking the basics in Fizzle (choosing topic, defining audience, differentiation, productivity, intro to traffic) and understanding the seeds of this stuff, you’ve got the tools you need.

If there’s a specific question you run into, shoot me an email. I’ll probably try to get you to go with your gut, fail fast+loud and learn. But I also know there are particular bits of unknowledge or misunderstanding we all get sold at one time or another.

Also, remember: no one’s guaranteed anything in this. Our chances are bad on our first venture/idea, but they get better with each venture. Take that on the chin, gird your loins, see this thing happening over the next 4-5 years NOT the next 4-5 months. The work you’re doing, setting your own deadlines, building your own thing, is the hardest core bootcamp available to you.

I gotta run. Hope this feels empowering (and not deflating). Break a leg!

Dave Eggers (& Me) on Selling Out

What matters is that you do good work. What matters is that you produce things that are true and will stand. What matters is that the Flaming Lips’s new album is ravishing and I’ve listened to it a thousand times already, sometimes for days on end, and it enriches me and makes me want to save people. What matters is that it will stand forever, long after any narrow-hearted curmudgeons have forgotten their appearance on goddamn 90210. What matters is not the perception, nor the fashion, not who’s up and who’s down, but what someone has done and if they meant it. What matters is that you want to see and make and do, on as grand a scale as you want, regardless of what the tiny voices of tiny people say. Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them. It is a fuckload of work to be open-minded and generous and understanding and forgiving and accepting, but Christ, that is what matters. What matters is saying yes.”

Dave Eggers (emphasis added)

Dave Eggers was asked about selling out. His response (reprinted here) is long and windy and ends up being deeply rewarding… like everything I’ve ever read from the guy.

I come from a culture of sell-out seekers. We longed to write off anyone that smelled like money or main stream success.

I see now 2 things:

1. I wanted what I listened to to be cool because of what it said about me. It had little to do with the insights or spirit or heroics of the artists I was championing… it had a lot to do with my identity issues.

2. I said money and success but what I meant was greed. This is something Dan Harmon helped me understand in his (absolutely fucking stellar) XOXO talk. Success (financial or artistic or main stream) is not greed. Greed is something real and dangerous and terrible, but don’t make the mistake of equating it with success.

Dan Harmon on Heroes

Whereas the health of an individual depends on the ego’s regular descent and return to and from the unconscious, a society’s longevity depends on actual people journeying into the unknown and returning with ideas.

In their most dramatic, revolutionary form, these people are called heroes, but every day, society is replenished by millions of people diving into darkness and emerging with something new (or forgotten): scientists, painters, teachers, dancers, actors, priests, athletes, architects and most importantly, me, Dan Harmon.”

Dan Harmon

This was one of the best short article excursions on story theory I’ve read.

I think I love this story stuff (find more here) so much because it’s like learning about myself, our humanity, what we’re really like.

That, and it helps me become a better marketer and thing maker.

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