Daniel Jeffries's Blog, page 5

Learning to Say No

So, you say you don’t have enough time to do the things that you want to do. In fact what you’ve done is filled your life with meaningless shit. I know. I’ve done it myself. A lot. The problem is most of the things you’ve taken on just aren’t that important. They rob you of vital essence and complicate your life. I know it all seems crucial. I know you don’t see a way out of yet another pointless corporate meeting to talk about what you already talked about twice. I know you think you can’t get out of spending yet another night watching TV with your spouse because you “never spend any time together,” but you’re wrong. You can and should say no. Enough. Thanks, but no thanks. It’s one thing to watch a show that enriches you, that enthralls you, that teaches you something about the nature of life. But most TV is not Game of Thrones or Breaking Bad. Most TV is fast food for your brain. It looks good ahead of time, tastes all right going down, but afterwards you feel like shit and wonder what the hell you were thinking. The key to all of this is learning to say no. And learn it fast.

There are lots of books and things out there that can help you. Mostly, they fall under the category of “assertiveness training.” You might be thinking, I don’t need any of that shit. I’m assertive. But I’m betting you’re not, at least not in all areas of your life. You’ve probably got your assertiveness dialed in with a few spots of your existence. For me, it’s business. I have no problem pushing folks when they get lazy, stupid, arrogant or just plain drop the ball repeatedly. I will get in their face and make something happen. The same is not always true in my personal relationships, though I go in streaks there. I have days when I can tell my wife fuck off, this is not happening and days I just want to be left alone and everything she says I can’t seem to do anything about. When it comes to trivial things like confronting a contractor who sucks at his job or fighting with a hotel that failed to send me an invoice, I run from it. It sounds crazy, I know. Part of it is my engineer’s mindset. I simply can’t understand how so many people can fail to get shit done so often. The next step in anything is always obvious to an engineer. It’s concrete. Do this and then do that. It’s procedural code. I can’t understand why in the world I have to call that hotel five fucking times to get my invoice. And so I do nothing or I get passive aggressive. It never works. I’m betting in your own life you’ll find something similar. My wife has no problem jumping on the phone and demanding a supervisor and complaining for an hour over a $20 injustice but when it comes to getting what she wants out of me she is passive aggressive to the max, cajoling, guilt tripping, acting sad, rather than just coming right out and saying what she wants. Lack of assertiveness manifests differently for different people. And it’s in those dead spots of weakness that you will find your missing time. It’s there that you can free up energy to do more of what you love. If you just yelled at that fucker at the hotel the first time, you would have got what you needed and not had to call two more times because you were too nice. If you told your spouse, look there is nothing on the tube, either think of something useful for us to do together or I will go off and do something more rewarding, then you wouldn’t have felt guilty and lashed out at him or her the next day over nothing. In other words, it’s your fault. Hard to hear I know, but it has to be said. Now that you know, you can do something about it.

In this modern world, we are surrounded by unimportant bullshit. People constantly think that various meetings are essential, that they need to add another evening networking event, another after school activity. They don’t. In fact, what they need is a lot less of this crap. It’s all a total and complete waste of time. You need less not more. You need quiet time. As Kahil Gibran said in the Prophet, “a seeker of silences am I, and what treasure have I found in silences that I may dispense with confidence?” Here is what I’ve found in my silences: You will not get better at juggling it all. You will just burn out, get depressed and then one day you will look back on your life and wonder what the fuck happened and why you never wrote the great American novel or took a trip to Bali. Let’s say you join a charity and help save a bunch of kids starving in the 3rd world, but at the cost of you being so exhausted that you have no energy left except to fall in front of the TV at night and then go to sleep after too much wine. I say it’s not worth it. It sounds cruel, but if you rob yourself to save others, you do nobody any good. The anger and sadness you feel because you are broken and all of your energy is sapped will come out in other ways, undoing all the wonderful karma that you dished out in that charity. You will do shitty work, yell at your wife or kids, or forget your friend’s birthday. The key is to pick a few things that really matter. One charity. One activity that energizes you. Or none at all, if none of them do. Chances are you’re not Mother Teresa and your calling is not spending your life in India saving the children. If it is, God bless you, but it’s probably not. So a better choice is to understand where you are in the chain of existence. It might just be that in this life you’re supposed to be a Buddha or Saint, but that’s unlikely. And sainthood doesn’t always require the ultimate sacrifice. It doesn’t require you going to India to save all the sick and dying. You can make a difference right here, right now, every day. Instead of passing that bum on the street, stop for a few moments and break him off a part of your sandwich or give him a few bucks. Call your grandmother who hasn’t heard from your in six months. Prune your activities, so that you have some energy left to take care of yourself. Does your kid really need yet another after school activity? If they do, can they get a freakin’ ride from somebody else?

Of course, when you try to take back your life, you will face resistance. Understand that the people around you are highly invested in their own self-importance. Telling them no forces them to reflect on that. And it hurts. They don’t want to face it. They feel that everything they’re doing is essential. Your friends and loved ones will encourage you to follow your dreams, right up until the point when you actually do it. Then they will employee all manner of sneaky and not so sneaky shit to stop you. They will guilt trip you, make completely rational arguments about why you shouldn’t go do Bali all of a sudden, deal out fear or just plain get angry and jealous. Let them. If you need to learn how to respond to that, go ahead and pick up a few books on the subject. For me, I wanted to write more, more often. I picked up the excellent Write Every Day, by Cathy Yardley. It’s short and to the point, exactly as it should be. It does not waste time with fluff . That is what I am going for in my own life. If I can see the true point of a meeting then I go right for it, with the goal of getting something done faster and closing down that meet early and giving people back some of their day. You’d be surprised by how many people appreciate this when you say something like “it sounds like we know the next steps here, let’s call this meeting and I’ll give you back a little of your time.” I also picked up the excellent book When I Say No I Feel Guilty. I read it when I was younger, but it didn’t have much meaning to me. Things change. Now, I recognize the unhelpful behaviors the book talks about and I’m working to change them.

In other words, I am taking back my life, one no at a time. You can too.

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The Pain of Art

Artists feel pain differently. We’re not like other people. Sometimes when I’m out with friends, the slightest insult might wound me deeply. Inside I know it’s ridiculous, there’s nothing wrong, but at the emotional level I’m suffering. And I can’t get over it. Of course, I hide it incredibly well. Much of life is just learning how to mask our emotions to others. I’m an adult after all and I can’t just go crazy on someone for some perceived insult that’s only in my mind but what I feel inside is a windstorm. And when it’s not raining, the pain is a like a white noise, the constant background to my life. Why this is I don’t know. I only know that emotions hit me at strange times, unexpectedly, and they come in a wave or a sudden squall. A sadness may take me, right in the middle of joke, while everyone is hoisting beers or I might feel a euphoria just when everything has gone wrong and I’m broke with few options. And as artists the best thing we can do is lean into the pain because it’s the source of everything that matters in art.

Let’s roll back for a second to when I was younger. I made a pact with myself at an early age to always see things as they really are, no matter what and that’s had a price. I don’t think the average person thinks this way. In fact, the average person takes what they feel and see as fact, even though its incredibly distorted by their own mind, a mind that filters the world into something other than what it is. That can’t see the reality beneath reality, but for artists the world comes at us raw and intense, surging with color and sound and emotion. The pain of the world is always there for me, vibrating, a constant rip-tide under my feet, the whole of the Earth’s cruelty and sadness. It’s a private pain and one I can’t usually share, certainly not in casual conversation.

Maybe you’re wondering what you can do about this if you feel it too? I can tell you that all this pain is meant to drive one thing: creativity. Pain is the birth of art and the only relief I’ve ever found is writing. I feel NOT writing as a kind of physical and spiritual pain of its own and, believe it or not, that pain is worse than what I’ve already described. When I’m not writing, life starts to fragment for me. I begin to feel listless, irritable, angry. It suddenly feels like everything is meaningless and I’m a tiny fragment in a massive, uncaring universe. Only writing relieves that pain. It’s there that I’m washed clean, there that I’m saved. Writing is my church and my first communion and my final rights. When I set out to work, I drown out all sounds. I zone in completely, using the power of sensory deprivation to shut out the universe. I use noise canceling headphones and ambient music with no words on low. It works so well that at my artist’s co-working facility the other day someone barged in and said dammit I’ve been ringing the door for ten minutes, didn’t you hear me? Nope. And when I can’t satisfy this writing craving, I feel a spiritual pain that manifests as intense sadness and a complete loss of energy and interest in everything good or bad.

I can tell you that there’s nothing else that will work, nothing else that will save you but your art. You cannot sleep it off, fuck it away, drown it with drink or drugs or rock climbing or sky diving. I’ve faced death several times in my life, usually from my own poor choices. I almost overdosed once, when I’d gone off to write, filling myself with the substances I thought I needed to make my art. I took too much and the day was burning hot. I got to my writing space and knew I was in serious trouble. I couldn’t move, much less write, my head was on fire and swimming, my heart hammering so hard it was ready to rip out of my chest. I prayed to God. I kept myself awake, spraying myself with water, drinking as much water as I could, ready to stumble out and ask someone to call 911. But I held on, meditating to slow my heart rate, forcing myself to sit up and face the swirling dizziness. I willed myself to stay alive. I wasn’t done. I had stuff to do. And what did I do when I had a little window of clarity, after an hour that felt like a day? I picked up my laptop and started writing, thinking only, if I’m going to go, I am going to go out doing what I love. A calm swept through me, an intense joy and relief and I knew if I had to die, they would find me slumped over this damn laptop doing what I was meant to do and I could accept that. I have this theory that God doesn’t kill you off if you’re doing what you’re really supposed to be doing. It’s magical thinking I know but somehow it feels true. I sometimes wonder if I’d just lain down and tried to wait it out if I’d lived? I believe the answer is no.

I used to think I was alone and crazy, that the best I could do was hide away and suffer silently but now I know that’s not true. I saw a Richard Pryor documentary the other day that showed me I wasn’t alone once more. The man was hilarious but he was also a terrible drug addict prone to bouts of intense abuse. I’m not nearly the genius he is, but I believe I recognized that same pain reflected in his life. Many artists become addicts because they feel this brutal storm of emotion that drowns out everything else. Sometimes the only thing to do is kill it with drugs and alcohol. And sometimes we manage to dull our pain with our work but not always. There are always those dangerous hours after work or dealing with the real world, family, friends, our day job, things that eat into us, make us want to numb out because it comes on so strong and raw. All that makes artists erratic, unpredictable, but that inner current of sadness also fuels our creativity and our passion. It’s what makes us filled with vibrancy and strong will.

I don’t think this profile fits every artist ever but I know I’m in good company. Marilyn Monroe committed suicide with sleeping pills. Hemingway, Virgina Wolfe, suicides. That list is endless. O Henry, Tennessee Williams, Raymond Chandler, Stephen King, Jack Kerouac, James Joyce, alcoholics and addicts, every one. Take a look at the death of major stars like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin and Jim Morison and Heath Ledger or rather take a look at the contents of their stomachs and you’ll find pain killers, alcohol, weed, some prescriptions drugs, some coke and you’ll wonder how they survived taking that much for years, much less a single day. People don’t just do these things. Something was hurting them. Badly.

If this all sounds a bit like depression to you, well you’re probably right. Depression and art are seemingly interwoven and inextricable but that’s not the whole story. The suffering artist doesn’t always manifest in the same ways. It may not be financial. It can be emotional and spiritual as well, even when everything else in the artist’s life seems wonderful to outside eyes. There were recently a bunch of articles on how men suffer depression as much as women but the signs manifest differently, as rage, irritation, substance abuse and risk taking. But it’s more than that, it’s a ethereal pain that drives artists, an inexhaustible hurt that’s woven into every cell in our bodies. By being more tuned in we experience the joy and the pain of life fully. We don’t feel happy, we feel euphoria. We don’t feel down, we feel depressed. In order to really write about the stuff that compels people, we have to let the whole world in and the whole world is suffused with an unbearable sadness that never dies.

I am in a hotel this week finishing this article. I opened the drawer in the hotel room and next to the usual Bible I was excited to find the teachings of Buddha. Studying Buddha can be a challenge because he has no definitive text like the Bible for Christians. What we do have are highly styled stories that the Buddha probably told, collected in a lot of different texts. So I started reading and one particular passage stood out to me:

“People in this world are prone to be selfish and unsympathetic; they do not know how to love and respect each other; they argue and quarrel over trifling affairs only to their own harm and suffering, and life becomes but a deary round of unhappiness.”

I can tell you that as a writer, I feel that pain the Buddha speaks of all the time, at best like an undercurrent in the back of my life and at worst as a vicious and violent storm. I feel the insanity of humans, the weight of history, the sadness of our stupidity. I feel it all the time. It’s not a chemical reaction or a twisted wire in my brain, it’s because as artists we look too deep and what we see is terrifying.

You know what though, it’s all right.

The best cure for depression is self-awareness. Understand when it’s coming in and choose to transcend it. We can fight every day. We can get up every time we fall. And we can do the thing we were meant to do, whether that is write or paint or play Xylophone. That is the best cure. Be an artist. Be the other part of the pain and embrace it. Art is the other side of the artist’s angst. Don’t run from it, run right into it and you’ll find it transmutes into something different, something wonderful.

If you’re an artist you can do something with this inner turmoil, you can pick up a guitar or draw a sketch. It’s only when you’re not doing those things that you’re in trouble, so find a way to do what you love more often, before it’s too late. And don’t be afraid to reach out for a little help when you lose your way now and again. Nobody gets it right all the time. We break down. We fail, abuse ourselves and others. It’s how we get up that matters though. Start over. Start again. Every day is a new day and what you did yesterday is gone, good or bad. Today is the day to eat your pain and love it. Gorge on the whole dinosaur, tear into it and roar out into the rains and when the storm passes find yourself transformed and free. And for God’s sakes, make something. Don’t let it be for nothing. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

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Friday Meme

My lady took this picture of one of our cats.  I know Reddit Gold when I see it.

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How the NSA Just Killed The Public Cloud and Proprietary Software while Fragmenting the Internet

The unintentional consequences of the NSA’s spying revelations are something much bigger than most people have realized yet. The fact is, you can no longer trust the cloud or proprietary software for anything that matters. You will probably never be able to trust important data to an external provider ever again, no matter what their marketing literature tells you. They can easily insert hooks that allow that data to be snooped before it gets encrypted or after.

Let me ask you this: Now that you know that Microsoft gleefully inserted flaws into and/or bypassed their own encryption schemes, can you ever really trust code that you can’t inspect again? Proprietary software is now heading for its grave. It’s official. Can you ever trust a cloud company, now that you know Microsoft subverted their own encryption to feed the government information? The flaws in Microsoft’s encryption means that financial transactions, privileged discussions with lawyers, private competitive discussions and anything else that you hoped would be secured were not and never were. Skype was never encrypted. Real encryption does not have backdoors. If you trust anything these companies every tell you again, then you’re a fucking fool. The cascading effective of this mistrust is huge. If Microsoft can subvert their own encryption, can they spy on companies they might want to buy or destroy in the market? If one of those company’s employees just happened to use SkyDrive with some passwords and some internal memos, they could get to it. Of course, I am just speculating. Did they do this? No idea. But that possibility is there now. And that possibility creates doubt in consumers’ minds. What’s to stop any company from looking at anything? HINT: Nothing.

So here is my sense of it: Public cloud? Dead. Nobody ever trusted the public cloud anyway. Proprietary software encryption? Dead. Closed source software? Dead. If you can’t look at the code anymore and vet that it does not intentionally introduced backdoors than you can’t trust that code, period. If you do, then you’re an idiot. There is just no way around it.

Unfortunately, this also means that they are going to kill The Internet as we know it today. Other countries will not sit by and allow us to just grab all of their communications, whether friend or foe. The Internet will start to fragment into smaller fiefdoms. It’s already happening. The Chinese basically have their own Internet. Putin used the Snowden leaks to again push for UN control of the Internet. Other dictatorships will accelerate this process now, because they can’t afford to trust American companies to not include backdoors. Ironically, this means that they will continue to build home grown tech that we don’t have access to, which makes it harder to spy on our enemies.

Open Source will even be affected by this. The Chinese have already forked their own Linux and now Android. They will just take the Open Source code that they know they can trust and build forked untrustworthy versions to spy on their own citizens. They’ve already done it and I expect this trend to accelerate too.

Nobody every really trusted the public cloud anyway. The NSA just put the nail in its coffin. There’s a lot of marketing hype about cloud. Many companies are legitimately excited about it, but the dirty little secret in the industry is that nobody trusts the public version. Sure sometimes the average person trusts it to store his music or sync his bookmarks. Big companies have never trusted the public cloud for anything that actually matters. Financial data doesn’t live there. Credit cards don’t live there. There are exceptions I’m sure, many of them, but most companies are building private clouds. They may use the public cloud to waste the cloud provider’s commodity CPU and memory, but the crown jewels usually won’t live there. Now anyone who has even an ounce of security knowledge would never advise his company to put anything that matters there. Microsoft is already a company openly hated by most admins. How can you trust anything but Open Source software to run your business on? If you can’t look at the code, you can’t trust that built in encryption scheme.

Look, I don’t think it’s any surprise that governments are spying on everyone. Our government isn’t the only one. No way. I think everyone was surprised by the scope. They shouldn’t have been because we knew they were trying to do this in 2002, when Darpa put out a call to build the tech that went into PRISM called Total Information Awareness. The site went up fast, looking for companies to submit bids and after it went viral, they pulled it down quickly, but not before people made offline copies of the site. It’s not hidden. It’s hidden in plain site. It’s on Wikipedia for God’s sake. They told us they were going to build it. As Ray Ozzie, former head of Microsoft software said, we got what we asked for when we hastily passed the Patriot Act in 2001. When people reacted poorly, what did they do? They built it anyway. Duh, of course they did. Oh sure, a few senators managed to de-fund it, but work just continued under different project names. Does anyone doubt it got built? Of course not. And people stopped asking questions and forgot about it. You don’t need any special clearance to read Wikipedia, you just have to think for five seconds and put the pieces together. The World Wide Web and the global communications systems are just too tempting a target for any people in power. It’s like a drug to them. They want more and more. The only solution is for people to use more open systems, systems that are harder to corrupt, open source systems where everyone can look at the code, be they the government, the financial community or the average citizen.

The problem with programs that collect data on anything is that they can be turned against anyone for any reason. Then it becomes easy to find something on just about everyone who disagrees with you and take them out. In China, if they find a lawyer who is winning too many cases against them, they just round him up and arrest him. A more advanced and insidious control mechanism wouldn’t even require that kind of outright attack. How hard would it be for the information they gathered to be used against a protestor? Maybe they find out someone downloaded a song illegally or a movie and arrest him for that? They don’t even have to go that far. They can leave the courts out of it. When you look closely at someone’s life, almost anyone can be made to look bad. Again, you don’t even need to use the courts. You just leak a story about someone and back it up with emails from the person and that is that. Reputation destroyed. Credibility lost. Threat contained.

So what of the man who brought this debate to the forefront, Ed Snowden? This is a 29-year-old kid who gave up his freedom and choice so you could know a little bit more about what people do in our name. Because remember, at least in theory, America is still a “government for the people, by the people.” We may decide it’s too much or we may decide it’s worth the risk, but it’s still our debate to have. No matter what happens to Snowden, he gave us something to talk about. I feel bad for the kid. He tried to do the right thing. Maybe his methodology was flawed, maybe not. We love to paint these things as black and white, but it’s all so very, very grey. I don’t think he had a very good plan after the release. Unfortunately, he’ll end up in a place granting him asylum that has even worse violations of people’s freedoms, like Russia where protesting is virtually illegal and where they round up protestors, accuse them of “mass riots” and “assaulting an officer” in Communist style show trials. Seriously. Pussy Riot anyone? In other words, the kid will end up spending the rest of his life in a country where people can’t even speak their mind publicly. How long will he be able to hold his tongue in a place like that?

In the long term, we will evolve solutions to our own problems. We don’t need big untrustworthy companies to run our cloud for us. We can run it ourselves. And people will come up with new ideas, ideas that empower people, rather than leach power away from them. It will probably look something like Plug, a Kickstarter project that unites all of your storage to all of your devices in your house, hosted by you. Oh and it’s the size of a pack of chewing gum. So keep your public cloud for garbage work, like compiling software and powering websites with a million disposable Apache servers. We’ll make our own cloud. It will be the people’s cloud.

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The Absolute Best Site on the Web for Writers

TV Tropes is hands down the absolute best site for writers on the web. It’s so popular that it even has a page mocking it/venerating it on cracked.com. Not only will you learn an amazing amount about your craft, you’ll learn something about yourself too. It’s also a good place to contribute in a very open source kind of way. I’m just starting on that adventure myself, as I’ve started to notice a number of tropes I don’t see covered already, despite the site covering thousands and thousands of major and minor topics. In fact, I’m so enamored with this site that I’ve actually used a website copier to grab the entire thing in case they just disappear one day. To say that’s a rare thing for me, would be an understatement. I’ve mirrored maybe a few sites in my life, like Wikipedia (please don’t use a website copier there, as they offer the database for free). I only do it when it is an absolutely essential site that I just refuse to lose, in case they drop off the planet one day.

Let me start you out with a few warnings. Getting into TV Tropes can be a bit of a rat hole, to say the least. You start opening dozens and dozens of tabs. You click on every fascinating term and never manage to get through whole articles, because you are twenty clicks deep into an obscure topic like Red Oni, Blue Oni, but it’s so fascinating that you can’t stop, even as you’re wondering “how the fuck did I get here, wasn’t I reading about anti-heroes a few hours back?” You can easily spend HOURS on the site, trying to find new stuff. For me that’s all exacerbated by the fact that I’m in “study mode” right now. That’s where I try to learn as much about my craft as possible, while working on a new novel. This is the best time to study, because you can try out lots of new ideas and techniques to see how they affect your work. That said, I think I can help you get the best out of the site faster, by pointing out some essential resources and some resources worth skipping.

Once you start using the site, you may wonder if it will destroy your creativity? My friend and I, fellow author Graeme Ing, had this very debate over email and IM when I first told him about it. Quite frankly, I think the discussion is moot. I believe in using every single tool available to me, to make me better as a writer. I am not afraid of knowledge. Graeme said the writers of the past didn’t use anything like this. I agree, because they didn’t have anything like this! Not even 10 years ago was anything like this available! We are the first writers, ever to have a knowledge base like this available to us and as I see it, it opens up all kinds of new possibilities. Graeme falls into a different camp. He feels that knowing too much of this stuff can affect your creativity. He believes in an organic process and I see things more as a series of underlying mechanisms, though I also see the big picture. That said, I love to learn all these mechanics and then when I actually write, I get into a very trance like state, with absolute quiet and noise canceling headphones playing white noise. In other words, I am not using the site to pick and choose a bunch of tropes and just string them all together. You shouldn’t either or your story will be shit. Clearly, we are not the only writers to have this debate, because there are two wonderful and brilliant articles that cover both sides of the argument. The first is called TV Tropes will Ruin Your Life and the other is called TV Tropes will Enhance Your Life. It just goes to show there is nothing new under the sun. I’ll tell you that both of these articles are correct. At first the site may start to make you a bit of a cynic. You’ll look at a story and see trope after trope after trope, especially bad stories. It can make bad stories unbearable. But it won’t last. If you’re a good writer, a dedicated writer, it will only make you better at what you do. You will begin to find new ways to enjoy books and films. I guess I fall firmly on the side of “enhance you life.” And remember, there will always be the story that sweeps you away, where you forget everything you know while you stare at it mesmerized. These are the stories we all live for and want to create ourselves. HINT: Those are the best stories to go back and study later.

Once you’ve read enough, you may spot something that isn’t up there, despite there being upwards of 60,000 articles on the site. Contributing is a great way to exercise the writing bug. You can get started by clicking the “Getting Known” menu on this page. Sometimes I just need to take a break from work/life and crank out a few words. I don’t always have all the time I want to do that. That’s just life. I know I won’t be able to work on anything serious, like a novel, because that requires becoming totally focused and having many hours of free time to do it, as John Cleese so perfectly explains in this fantastic video called “how to be creative.” By working a little on an article here or there, it keeps me sharp. If you want to be an author, you have to write all the time, period. This is essential. With contributing to TV Tropes you can help other people too so that’s a double win.

I believe the key to really understanding this resource is to concentrate on the major tropes and avoid some of the minor ones. It also helps to have a project, so you can narrow your research. You won’t be able to read the whole site. Don’t try. Oh you’ll try anyway, but stop after a bit. There is a point of diminishing returns. Many of the minor tropes such as this one that discusses the use of “Ahem” in dialogue are of little value unless you are really struggling with a moment of dialogue. If you like writing anti-heroes, then spend a little time learning about what goes into that, rather than reading about every variation on the hero.

Still here? Ok, it’s easy to get lost clicking links here, I know. If you’re still with me, or you’re back after two hours of opening tabs, here are some of the most useful entries I’ve found, that relate to the big picture of stories.

To start, you can look up your favorite books and shows by name and see all the tropes associated with them. This is a fantastic way to get started because you are working with a story you know and love. I looked up the Godfather and Song of Ice and Fire, plus Fight Club and a bunch of others. But before you go TOO deep into that, it helps to know how to separate the wheat from the chaff. Movies or books will have LOTs of tropes. Many of them will be tiny ones, as we talked about earlier, so what does a major trope look like? It’s one that deals with the keys aspects of story, character, plot, theme, dialogue and symbolism. Let me point out a few essential articles that you should get to know and get to know well.

A simple trope that’s incredibly effective is “Chekhov’s Gun.” Ever had someone tell you never put something into the story that you don’t plan to use later? That’s this trope. Something seemingly unimportant is introduced early. It’s an ordinary object and barely anyone pays any attention to it, but it turns out to be a crucial weapon in the war against evil.

Let’s look at Morality, with a capital M. I believe most stories come down to how a character’s morality will be portrayed. It may sound simple, but it’s incredibly complex, from stories that have very black and white morality, to stories where everyone is morally ambiguous, to black and grey morality (my personal favorite), where the good guys are bad, but not nearly as bad as the bad guys. A good article on the site will be comprehensive. It will point to all the variations on that idea or theme. In those variations, if you look at the examples, you will find many of your favorite stories clustered under one type or the other. For me it was “grey on black morality.” It’s safe to say that 70% of my top 100 falls under that trope. That’s useful to know because it helps me understand the types of characters that I enjoy reading about and writing about. I just don’t believe that most people are black or white. As George R.R. Martin said in an interview, “it’s said that Hitler loved dogs.” Hitler also didn’t drink and was a vegetarian. Churchill drank a quart of brandy every morning, smoked and ate a ton of red meat. The world is not a black and white place. Yet, there is room for those type of stories and they are very popular. Find your own path. Find what you like and write that.

Now that you know morality, it really helps to understand how characters change. When they change, they change their morality and how they do that is called either the Face Heal Turn or the Heal Face Turn depending on whether they are good or evil.

Another key article is “Tropes of Legend.” These are the tropes that will be found in every story. Usually not all of them will be in one story, but probably a good number of them. They are the basic building blocks of story reality.

You also can’t go wrong with Hero and Anti-Hero. The “Five Man Band” talks about pairing various heroes together. If you want to pair up some villains, check out it’s inverse the “Five Bad Band.” Speaking of villains, we can’t leave them out, especially the “Big Bad.” Now all you have to do is make the “Big Bad” “Kick the Dog” and people will cheer his death. Don’t believe this stuff works? When someone caught LA cops shooting a man’s dog on camera the other day, people went ballistic, calling for the officer’s head. Trust me, this stuff works. Remember “Rape is a Special Kind of Evil.” Once they do that, it’s almost impossible to redeem that character in the audience’s mind because they’ve crossed the “Moral Event Horizon.”

Maybe you read Game of Thrones and thought damn I could write a big ass series like that? Perhaps you dream of creating your own doorstopper fantasy novel and having your name in lights? An epic burns inside you! The people will love you. Well, if you want to write a really big book, check out the various strategies for handling that on the “Loads and Loads of Characters” page. It doesn’t mean you will be able to pull it off, but you’ll at least be wearing the right shoes for the race. Of course, if you really want to write a story that captivates audiences, check out the “Magnificent Bastard.” This topic is so big that there are articles on “how to write your own Magnificent Bastard.”

Now that you’ve got the major tropes under your hat, it’s time to dig into some equally useful ones that are a bit harder to find. Maybe you’re not sure who’s going to die on a show or in your great American novel? Then check out the “Sorting Algorithm of Mortality,” which offers a grid of characters that are definitely going to get it and ones that usually won’t. You can easily play with this audience expectation to create all kinds of emotions. Maybe you want to really tug at audience heart-strings and make them cry? Check out “Kill the Cutie” for an easy and powerful way to achieve that.

Maybe you want to write a female hero and you want her to be a post-feminist badass, a spunky action girl, but you still want her to appear feminine and not just act like a dude with tits? Then you need “Acceptable Feminine Goals and Characteristics,” to help round our your character. Just remember, “All Women Love Shoes.”

Made it this far? If you got through this whole article and didn’t get stuck in the TV Tropes event horizon, then congrats. Or maybe you just managed to make it back here after getting caught in the infinite click-a-thon that is TV Tropes? No matter. This is a page you can keep coming back to. I will continue to expand it as I find new and essential engines of creation. Feel free to point out crucial tropes you find in the comments section.

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Subverting Expectations and Other Tricks I Learned from Games of Thrones

“Who kills Prince Humperdinck? At the end, somebody’s got to do it! Is it Inigo? Who?”

“Nobody. Nobody kills him. He lives.”

“You mean he wins? Jesus, grand-pa, what did you read me this thing for?”

- The Princess Bride

One thing Game of Thrones (GoT) does better than any other story today is subvert your expectations. This is the secret sauce that keeps people coming back week after week. So, let’s take a closer look at why this matters so much.

You can learn almost everything you need to learn about storytelling by watching and reading Game of Thrones. You’re lucky if most stories teach you one or two things about masterful storytelling. Most stories have one plot. A great story has multiple plots. True epics, like Game of Thrones, contain every single plot we have ever come up with, whether you think that there are only 7 basic plots, 20 master plots, or some other number. It does all that while including almost every major personality on the planet, from psychopath to noble hero and everything in between, enough to cover the entire range of personality disorders in the massive professional psychologists’ manual the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV). More than that, it does all in a rated R format, with a layered and nuanced view of reality. The fact is, most R Rated type stories have a more limited reach. The other great fantasy epics of our time, Star Wars and Harry Potter, are both very much PG stories, with more childlike morality. Christ, GoT’s even delivers dialogue that’s movie quality. I can tell you that most dialogue that works on the page doesn’t translate well to the screen and gets re-written by screenwriters. 85% of what you see on the show is lifted straight from the books verbatim. That’s incredible.

So what is subverting expectations and why is it essential? It’s the key to “adding the twist” that all the writing books tell you about but never explain. What does “add a twist” really mean anyway? How would you recognize it? How do you deploy it in your own fiction? How do you write something, “fresh?” All the books tell you to write something fresh, but again, what the hell does that really mean? I never really found an answer that satisfied me so I figured it out myself. There comes a time when writers have to put down writing books and study stories with their own eyes. I’ve come to believe that “fresh” writing comes from subverting expectations. An audience believes something will happen, like the good guy will dangle by his fingers from a rooftop, all while fending off kicks from the bad guy, but still finding a way to pull himself up. But, what if the good guy falls instead? Now perhaps we have a crippled detective. That’s a new one right there. Well, it was when “Read Window” was made. That’s the surprise the audience craves. That’s a new take on the old story patterns that we love to hear over and over, as long as they have that twist.

This concept is a part of all aspects of story telling, from plot, to character development to basic story telling devices. Let’s take a look at some examples so you understand what I’m talking about here.

We’ll start with some story devices or tropes. One of the most amazing sites for studying stories is tvtropes.org. What are tropes? These are techniques that writers use to make stories go. The devices might make you feel a certain way, or quickly convey something essential about someone’s personality. One warning, learning about tropes is a little like learning how a magician does his tricks. Most people don’t want to see what goes on behind the curtain. Sometimes seeing these tricks can really ruin a story for readers but if you’re a writer, learning about tropes is addicting. These are the mechanics of story telling. They are the engines that make stories run. Game of Thrones is such a massive story that it has several hundred tropes threaded through it, when most great stories might have ten. You actually have to click “expand all folders” to see them all. So let’s take one trope that this story plays with extremely well “beauty equals goodness.”

SPOILERS ahead.

“Beauty equals goodness” is one of the oldest story mechanics in history. It’s safe to say that most of the heroes you’ve ever loved have been pretty damn good looking. They probably met a girl who is stunning as well, who is their love interest, or vice versa if the hero is female. Often times they battle someone ugly, aka the antagonist. Turn on WB for five minutes and pick any show. You’ll find all the people on it are attractive. Some movies take this idea to absurdity, like the film Braveheart. For me, this film has not aged well. It’s hard to believe it won Best Picture. Then again, I remember first seeing it and being totally pumped up emotionally. In Braveheart we have a good-looking hero, who meets a fantastically beautiful French queen, who battle ugly British lords and a conniving man whose face is literally decaying. Or think of any James Bond flick, even the good ones like the wonderful Skyfall. Bond is daring, handsome, always gets the girl and he fights a man whose face is literally deformed, so much so that his teeth have rotted and he can take them out. In other words, stories use the very convenient psychological effect of physical beauty to make you feel good about one character and recoil at another.

Game of Thrones subverts this trope to great effect. There are obvious examples, like the Imp, a character who is a dwarf, yet he is also probably the most intelligent and crafty character in the universe. The books go further than the series, making him deformed. The townspeople in King’s Landing think the Imp is responsible for various atrocities because of how he looks, while giving the good looking King Joffery a pass. Speaking of Joffery, Sansa is prone to seeing the world with the filter of “beauty equals good.” In the early days, she refuses to believe that Joffery can’t possibly be the bastard he is because he is attractive. When the mad boy king cuts off her father’s head, she is disabused of this childish notion. Other characters that are good looking like the boy king, Rob Stark, and his father get killed. Yet we find characters, like the Hound, who is physically deformed, his face burnt badly by his brother, but who also have heroic traits like a protectiveness of certain people close to them. At the same time, Thrones uses this same trope in its traditional manner. For instance, Daenerys, the “Mother of Dragons” and the story’s most essential hero is incredibly beautiful, to the point that many of her enemies are disarmed by it and come to her side. For instance, Ser Jorah was sent to kill her, as were the marauders at the gate of the second slave city she raids. One of the leaders is so taken by her beauty that he kills the two other leaders and presents their heads to her, rather than assassinate her. This shows that it is not necessary or even desirable to subvert expectations across the board. Many less complicated stories than Game of Thrones only need to subvert a few expectations to be a hit with audiences and make them feel like they’re seeing something they’ve never seen before.

Other great films and stories play with “beauty equals goodness” brilliantly. Shrek made a franchise out of subverting this one trope. It’s the single most important twist in the story, which just goes to show you that subverting one major expectation can go a long way to making something “fresh” and exciting for viewers.

So how do you know when and when not to subvert something in a story? I can tell you that many amateur and novice writers pick the wrong story elements. They think they’re adding a twist, when they’re just breaking their story. Certain story elements are so essential that they just can’t be changed. For example, stories at their most basic level have to have conflict. The hero and protagonist have to battle it out in the end, whether that is physically, like in an action movie, or mentally, like in a court- room drama. Having someone else defeat that bad guy is not a twist, it’s just bad writing. I’m looking at you “The Fan“, to this day DeNiro’s worst flick. In it, the hero is fighting the bad guy and some random cop comes out of the crowd and kills the bad guy. Horrible. In other words, don’t try to change the crucial storytelling bits unless you’re an absolute master and you happen to recognize an essential truth about life that everyone else missed. (HINT: Not likely)

Let’s take a look at a trope that you probably don’t want to break, unless you’re telling a comedic story, “underestimating badassery” or as I like to call it “you picked the wrong guy to fuck with.” You know this one well. The hero is a badass motherfucker but maybe he doesn’t look it, so some other tuff guys come up to him and get in his face. Uh oh, you think, these punks are gonna fucking get it. And they do. Awesome. So why isn’t this one a good idea to screw with? It’s because this delivers such an audience satisfying punch that it’s not worth it, unless you’re trying to make people laugh. What’s the opposite of this? The hero isn’t a badass and he gets a beat down from the bullies? This won’t make your story fresh it will just make audiences hate you. I bet you can think of a hundred examples of this story device. Think of every kung-fu movie you’ve ever seen where the humble monk is just walking along, minding his own business and some thugs threaten him. They get their fucking ass kicked. We love for the bully to get their ass kicked, because we all remember getting our own asses kicked at least once as a kid. Just admit it. It happened, whether it was mental or physical. Somewhere, someone made fun of you and everyone laughed, no matter where you were on the popularity chain. Nobody wants to relive that. Here’s the plot of every kung-fu movie ever made: the hero gets their ass kicked early in the movie. They go off and study kung-fu, perhaps a secret version or style. They come back and they are still underestimated but beat the bad guy with their newfound skills. In other words, don’t fuck with this one if you want people to actually like your story.

One example of a story that almost changes one of those crucial aspects of storytelling is “The Princess Bride”. The movie is self-reverential, in that a grandpa is telling the movie’s main story to his grandson. This is called a framing narrative. That allows writers to comment openly on the story and pull some other neat tricks. The bad guy does not die in this story. Look at how the kid in the framing narrative reacts to that? That’s an audience and their expectations just smashed on the rocks. It makes people want to come back. The kid relents shortly after the grandpa threatens to wrap up the story early and head home. The movie cleverly does what we are all trying to do when we play with expectations: tell a truth about life. By leaving the character alive in a plausible way, while the hero still manages to rescue the princess, he leaves the baddie with his consciousness and the point that sometimes living with yourself is worse than death.

Voice over is another great opportunity for subverting expectations. There are certain expectations an audience has about the voiceover, such as the narrator is reliable, or that they’re alive. Several famous serial killer stories, such as American Psycho, start off in the head of someone seemingly normal, only to begin to show they’re anything but. The movie Sunset Boulevard has a dead narrator. Right away you want to know what happened to him. That’s exciting.

Speaking of framing narratives, take the Usual Suspects. This movie subverts the expectation that the people in the framing narrative are reliable. We expect them to be telling the truth, even if they’re criminals. It’s like when Batman breaks the bad guy and the baddie spills his whole tale. We expect the truth. But Kevin Spacey’s character makes up the whole story from story prompts he sees in the cop’s office. None of it is true, or all of it is true. We’ll never know.

So those are just a few examples of how great stories subvert expectations. Now go out and watch for how other great storytellers pull this fantastic trick. Just start with the stories that you like and take a closer look at them. What did they do differently that you might not have understood before now?

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Following Your Bliss: Interview with Nadia Aly

Sometimes you don’t have to look far for inspiration.  A year ago I started to see something different on my Facebook feed.  Most of the stuff on there is pretty typical, my friends posting jokes, family posting pictures of their kids or what they had for dinner last night.  Then there were Nadia Aly’s posts.  Here were glimpses of far-off lands, most of which I hadn’t even heard of, much less seen.  Instead of e-cards with some trite one-liner or yet another cell phone camera self-shot, she was posting pictures of achingly beautiful beaches, their pristine golden sands shimmering in the sun.  I kept scanning her photos and seeing islands surrounded by sweeping coral reefs or  psychedelic sea creatures suffused with color clinging to underwater rocks.  In other words, here was someone doing something different and I wanted to know more.

A few years ago, Nadia was following a standard life-script.  She worked for a series of household name tech companies, like Google and Microsoft.  She made a comfortable living.  Then suddenly, she quit and started Scuba Diver Life.  For the last year, she’s traveled the world like Anthony Bourdain, diving some of the most exotic places this Earth has to offer.  I sat down to talk to Nadia the other day.  She’s currently in Pulau, so we chatty via Skype on a somewhat spotty Internet connection.  You’ve probably never heard of Pulau.  I hadn’t.  Apparently it’s near Guam.  You can check out some pictures of it here.  I’ll warn you right now though, it might just make you a little less satisfied with your day job, when you realize you’re sitting at a desk and someone else is out there diving Pulau’s lush green and blue waters for a living.

I’ve kept the Skype like format, right down to the timestamps, with only minor edits, as it better captures the back and forth of this amazing interview.  You’ll find her fantastic photos threaded throughout the article.  You can see more of her photos on her site and her Scuba Diver Life FB page, which has a mere 666k likes in one year!

[5:48:39 PM] Dan Jeffries: Jeff Hammerbacher of Facebook said “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.”  In other words, instead of finding great breakthroughs in the arts and sciences or pursuing their dream, kids today are just wasting their talents.  Do you think that’s the true?  If so, did it factor into your decision to start Scuba Diver Life and do you think it has any implications for society in the long run?
[5:52:11 PM] Nadia: I think it’s not just kids that are wasting their talents, but many adults are as well. People get stuck in the labeling of “the perfect life” and the process that surrounds it. You go to school, go to University, get a graduate degree, get a job, get married, have kids and that’s what your life is supposed to be. I strongly, strongly do not agree with this label of how life should be, and it feels like a lot of people follow this process for their life. They end up in jobs they hate, dreading each day of their lives, or maybe having ups and downs. When I was working in the corporate world my life was eat, work, and sleep – with very little time for my passions and myself.

This is why I went full time with Scuba Diver Life.  I started it while I was working at Microsoft. I then worked at Google and Padi, but there was a huge empty void that was not being filled for me. The sense of adventure, travel and diving was missing and I was getting frustrated. I was frustrated as to why I didn’t like the corporate world, the world that everyone was so proud for me to be in. It took that GIANT step for me to quit my last job and take on Scuba Diver Life full time. The reward was in the risk, survival of the fittest, out there on my own, having to make it work.

[5:55:05 PM] Dan Jeffries: That dovetails nicely with my next question, which is about making changes in your life.  I’m always interested in the psychology of change.  In literature and film we only care about characters that transform their life and for good reason.  You were following a fairly standard career tract, working at big tech firms, and then suddenly you were traveling to all kinds of exotic locales and diving in some of the most picturesque spots on Earth.  What led you to make that kind of change?  Did you just wake up one day and say I’ve had enough or was it a gradual thing or a combination of both?

[5:59:42 PM] Nadia: I didn’t just wake up one day.  I knew the whole entire time that this is what I had to do to make Scuba Diver Life work. I needed to be out there meeting divers, telling stories, making content and investing my time into my company. Making professional content is what I knew I had to do. I often whispered to myself when I was in the corporate world.  I would passionately explain to my friends my thinking.  When I finally left the corporate world, I headed off to Indonesia for 30 days to dive and discover more about what I wanted to do. After that things just kept happening and I was traveling more and more, making more and more content. Here I am almost a year from that date (August 2012), and I’ve been all over the world.
[6:03:02 PM] Dan Jeffries: You mentioned that it was a BIG step to leave the corporate life, when you decided to let go and just make it happen.  What did you have to give up?  Was there anything you cared about that you had to let go of?
[6:04:47 PM] Nadia: Well I was nervous, really nervous. Health care was the first thing of course I worried about, but in CA I would be covered for three years I later found out. The other thing that worried me was I had a year lease. I hated the area where I lived.  Money of course came to mind.  I had always made a very comfortable living.

It was a really large learning lesson to let go of needing to make money. I talked with one of my life coaches Catherina who is a free soul. We ended up going to Burning Man.  Soon after I quit.  [Burning Man] was a really great experience, especially doing it with her and her family.

It took almost 6 months for me to let go of the concept of money. “The Universe is my bank and I have endless funds” was my new motto. Nothing could stop me. I was motivated, passionate and knew EXACTLY what I needed to do.

[6:07:37 PM] Dan Jeffries: Money comes to mind for a lot of folks, so let’s talk about that.  Letting go of it is hard.  I’ve often described my path to becoming an author as “leaving behind a lucrative job as an engineer so I can make less money as an artist.”  That seems to resonate with a lot of folks.  In America that’s one of the hardest things to let go of.  When you say your concept of money changed, did you just decide to live with less and get what you needed when you needed it?  Did you have enough capital saved up to quit or did you finally just come to a single moment and say, I’ve had enough, I’m doing something else now and I will figure it out as I go?
[6:10:14 PM] Nadia: What happened was after two weeks of sitting around on the couch, feeling lost, I pulled myself together and went into entrepreneurship mode again. I had a very large Facebook Page for Scuba Diver Life and a very active website. Since I was working all the time, I didn’t give SDL the full time attention it needed. So within weeks I was making money for SDL and supporting my travel and need for adventure.  I still am figuring it out as I go. I am making more than I was six months ago, and have plans to grow SDL even more.

[6:16:45 PM] Dan Jeffries: So I admit that I’m a little jealous sometimes when I see some of the places you’ve been in the last year and I imagine I’m not the only one.  Hell, I don’t know where half of them are, without Googling!  What’s the most incredible place you’ve been so far and why?

[6:18:37 PM] Nadia: Well hands down that’s going to be Indonesia. It’s my favorite place so far.  The diving there is beyond amazing and it’s very cheap to do things.  My top places in Indonesia have been Komodo & Raja Ampat.  The people are also amazing and very happy.
[6:21:03 PM] Dan Jeffries: I’m sure it’s not all fun and games when you’re lugging a ton of gear around and bouncing between some off the grid type of places.  Have you had any close calls out there or any scary moments?  Do you ever get tired of the travel?  Do you have to follow any security and or emergency procedures in places when you far from home?
[6:24:27 PM] Nadia: Well, yes it’s a bummer having to carry 130 lbs with you all over the world. Especially when you’re a 5ft, 110 lb girl. I had one incident where I was home sick and not very happy.  That had to do with the environment and people I was around. I was quick to realize the situation and changed my environment. I always make friends where I go so that makes me feel more secure as well on a psychological level. As for security procedures I don’t really have any, I know that I can just go home at any time. It’s just as easy as booking a flight. I do have triple travel insurance, so if anything goes wrong I have many companies that will take care of me.
[6:26:13 PM] Dan Jeffries: Good to know the very corporations you left behind will be taking care of you, should something bad happen
[6:26:31 PM] Nadia: LOL.  Yup, especially as a diver! You need to have diver’s insurance!
[6:26:54 PM] Dan Jeffries: All right so let’s get to it.  Why scuba diving?  How did you discover it and what about it really pulled you in?  Clearly lots of people share the passion.  I had no idea that people could or did do it for a living until I started seeing your FB posts!

[6:29:42 PM] Nadia: Well I dived when I was younger on vacation in Jamaica. In my early teens, what happened was I won a contest in 2010 to  go to Fiji. I started searching for resources about Fiji and the diving there (the trip I won was a diving trip). I was not happy with what I was seeing online. I soon discovered how backwards the industry is, and that it’s pretty much run by a much older generation that has no understanding of digital media. When I came back from the trip to Fiji, I started Scuba Diver Life. I had many times started websites and over time this one would become one I committed to full time. I knew to use Facebook as my means of growing a community and started growing the Facebook Page right away. Hopefully by the end of this year I will have over a million fans.

[6:31:45 PM] Dan Jeffries: So let’s talk marketing here then, because that’s interesting to me as well, how someone really cuts through the noise and gets noticed.  You seem to be a social media ninja.  Are there are any tricks that you can share with folks trying to get their name out there, or is it really just a case of having a good product and people will come?  What’s the single most important thing someone can do to get noticed in a world filled with noise?

In essence, every artist must be a self-promoter these days.  There used to be AR guys who would find the next band.  Now there are just a few of those people and they look for people who have already self-published an album, have big Twitter and Facebook followers and do shows.

[6:35:27 PM] Nadia: Yes, indeed.
[6:36:24 PM] Dan Jeffries: The same has happened in the lit world now as well.  If you said that someone should self publish even three years ago, it would be career suicide.  Now many folks go right to the people and the agents just browse the Amazon best seller lists and sign known prospects, rather than gamble.  So maybe talk a bit about how you used FB to get out there and get 666k likes.

[6:49:23 PM] Nadia: Yeah so I started concentrating on valuable content and growing the Facebook page.  The ad platform on Facebook is really great at targeting niche fans.  It’s so much more valuable then spending money on Google.  On Google search you have this one instance of search and you pay for that one click and may have a returning visitor. On Facebook you can target that user based on interest, grab their like and continuously market to them. So instead of paying maybe $1 for one instance of search you pay way less than $1 to continuously market to you niche targeted user.  Seems much more valuable to me.

[6:52:46 PM] Dan Jeffries: So is it really just FB ads for the site that are drawing people in?
[6:53:29 PM] Nadia: Well I have loads of content now so people come through search as well, G+ , Twitter all sort of places but FB is the top on the list in terms of referrals.
[6:53:59 PM] Dan Jeffries: Right and I imagine that folks just share your pictures over time and it has a snowball effect?
[6:55:00 PM] Nadia: Yes, a snowball effect for sure.
[6:54:53 PM] Dan Jeffries: Excellent.  So, what would you say to someone out there who is looking to change their life and do something completely different?
[6:56:12 PM] Nadia: Just do it. A big part of why I was pushed was because a friend had passed away hours before his 28th birthday. It was my first experience with knowing someone close that had died. This really woke me up. “Wow we really die! I will never see David again… Ever!” I thought about that  ALL THE TIME.

Life is short, you can go at any moment and what will your life have been like?

Is it worth it to hustle your life away for a nice car and a nice house? Or do you want more experiences like travel, giving, volunteering and helping the world improve?

I like what Richard Branson says, something along the lines of “follow your passion and the money will follow.’  There is no need to waste away your life in a cubicle writing code or marketing products that hurt our environment or people. Your life has more purpose than that.  You just need to explore what that is.  That’s how you find your passion.

[7:00:18 PM] Dan Jeffries: We’re really talking about enlightenment here, whether it’s full blown sitting-under-the-Bodhi-tree type or a moment where you decide to do something that comes from inside, as opposed to something that was put on your by society/upbringing

[7:00:44 PM] Nadia: Yes, exactly.
[7:01:59 PM | Dan Jeffries: Was this a complete internal shift, discovered through self awareness and self examination, or were there other folks that inspired or encouraged you?
[7:02:53 PM] Nadia: Yeah, Catherina and Gerry from ThinkLove.com and Sheleana and Caleb from YoungandRaw.com.  They were very much inspirational in helping me move forward into doing my own thing.

Catherina and Gerry developed wrist bands for their company called Think Love. The bracelets vibrate 5 times a day and can be synced with other bands. You never know when they vibrate the only thing you know is that when yours vibrates whomever you are synced to is vibrating as well. Triggering you to Think Love towards your synced companion.  Catherina and Gerry had given up everything to follow their dream of educating the world about Thinking Loving towards self and others. This was a huge inspiration to me and they were always around me when I was going through major shifts in my life. Almost as if the universe had placed them there to be there for me.

Sheleana and Caleb were living with me in Mountain View and again in Aliso Viejo. Sheleana had been sick and gained some weight in the past few years. Discovering Raw Veganism and how to live a healthy life. They both worked night and day on YoungandRaw.com and it was soon starting to provide for them.

They were living with me when I quit Padi and the first person I called was Sheleana. She was so supportive and was almost slapping me in the face, like “what took you so long?”

[7:08:13 PM] Dan Jeffries: Each in there own time.  Time doesn’t really exist anyway, so who cares how long it takes
[7:08:43 PM] Nadia: Exactly. You know the 7up story?
[7:09:00 PM] Dan Jeffries: No, tell me.

[7:09:47 PM] Nadia: There was this guy and he had this passion for soda. So he started a company, he called it 3up. The company didn’t do to well so he restarted with a new company, 4up, he kept trying and trying and gave up after 6up had failed. A few years later, 7up came out…Something like that.  The point of the story is don’t give up… maybe it’s not time yet.

[7:12:07 PM] Dan Jeffries: That reminds me of a story I heard, there was a powerful business man who meets a poor fisherman, the fisherman seems happy enough but the biz man tells him, look you have to think about the future, you should save a lot of money and work hard so you can do what you really want to do in life and so the fisherman asks him, what do you want to do? And the biz man says, I am going to retire and fish all day.
[7:12:45 PM] Nadia: LOL.
[7:14:37 PM] Dan Jeffries: Do you think all people have this drive to do something different or do you think it’s a particular type of personality?  I know friends of mine who are perfectly happy where they are and couldn’t dream of doing something different.  Then again, I always think of the line, most men leads lives of quiet desperation.  Certainly the spiritual masters would say we are all one and therefore all of us have the Buddha nature or whatever you want to call it, but sometimes I look around and think, am I the only crazy one because I want to do something different and to actually start putting a plan in place to actualize it?
[7:17:36 PM] Nadia: I think people get comfortable. That’s what happens. I have friends who are happy in their jobs as well. It becomes all they know. If you took them on a journey around the world for a year, would they still feel the same way? Would they still be happy going to their desk job?

Of course personality plays a role in it. Many people come to me and say that I am lucky to have found my passion. They don’t know what theirs is or they feel they don’t have a skill set. I don’t know what it’s like to be in that position.  If I were though I would probably do a whole bunch of different things until I found something that I really liked that fulfilled me.

[7:19:24 PM] Dan Jeffries: I hear that type of thing all the time as well, so it really resonates.  I meet a lot of artists, who are still finding their passion and they want to know how to get to it.  Sometimes they say they found it but they are just not doing the work to do anything with it.

So let’s switch tracks just a little.  It seems like you have strong conservationist streak, like many folks who spend their time outside.  Have you personally seen evidence of damage we less-than-thoughtful apes have done to the planet?  Do you think there is any real chance that we turn this thing around or does the Earth just kill us off one day and start over with a new dominant species?  Are we just too fucking stupid to take care of the everything around us?  Will we ever get right?

[7:48:53 PM] Nadia: OMG.  Yes humans are destroying the planet.  The ocean is dying. We kill over 100,000,000 Sharks every year! EVERY YEAR! Can you believe that!  Out of sigh out of mind.

Did you know that about 80% of our oxygen comes from plankton?  If we kill all the sharks there will be more and more plankton eating species on our planet.  We don’t know how that will affect us long term.  Also I think about this quite a lot: Packaging, in essence, is really new to society. The grocery store came out in the late 50′s along with TV dinners and all that jazz. Slowly we grew and grew and packaging was everywhere.  The oceans are full of plastic and packaging, and the material is very new to society, around 60 years. What does that mean for our future?

If you go diving in some parts of Indonesia, you are diving with trash. Lot’s of it. You bankroll into a garbage dump.

The people in Indonesia used to eat organic foods, bananas, mangoes and just toss the remains.  This has carried on to the younger generations and they just toss plastic and garbage around, even into the ocean. I mean dumpsters… into the ocean!

Some scientist say that 25% of earth’s species will be extinct in the next 100 years.

[7:53:57 PM] Dan Jeffries: I think the short answer is we have no fucking idea what will happen, that stats all point to the fact that we are killing off all kinds of things at an insane and accelerating rate.  You’ve got to read A Short History of Nearly Everything, it is all about how we learned what we know and how we learned it, and it is alternately mesmerizing/uplifting/mesmerizing and maddening.

When you realize that we’ve had a few total annihilation of the planet.  4 of them that we know about, that wiped out all life on the planet for eons.  We’re just not that important and the Earth will reset us in the blink of an eye and not care in the least.

[7:54:34 PM] Nadia: This is a book?
[7:54:36 PM] Dan Jeffries: Yeah.  It’s hands down the best non-fiction book I have ever read.  It covers the duality of man like you would never believe.  Every other page will just make you stop and say, no way!  Take Conservationists from the last century.  They single-handedly killed off numerous nearly extinct species.  Conservationists!  They sent there people around the world to collect specimen and if they found a bird that was the of its kind, they’d shoot it anyway, so they could mount it in their collection.  They just had no idea.  It’s unreal.

The dodo bird is the best example in history of the duality of man.  We literally killed it for no reason other than it was stupid and trusting and it was fun.  They lived in isolation for millions of years, with no predators.  Then they came into contact with us and they were gone in a blink.  All because they would come right up to people, with no fear and if you grabbed them and shook them, they would call all their friends to come see what was happening and get killed too.  I won’t spoil any more.  Just get it!  That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

[7:58:31 PM] Nadia: Yeah, don’t!  Getting it now.  LOL.
[8:05:43 PM] Dan Jeffries: Well, I got one more question here.
[8:05:52 PM] Nadia: OK, shoot.
[8:06:02 PM] Dan Jeffries: If you ruled the world, what would be the one thing you would change?
[8:07:02 PM] Nadia: I would change the oceans, have them protected and cleaned up. Did you know that at the CURRENT rate of fishing there would be no fish left by 2040, is what many scientist predict, again that’s at our current rate.

The ocean is a food source for millions world wide.  We are not being intelligent about how it’s sources are controlled.  We need to implement sustainable fishing world wide.  Shark finning is not necessary for survival, things like that.

[8:08:40 PM] Dan Jeffries: This was a lot of fun.  Thanks for doing it.
[8:08:48 PM] Nadia: Yes it was.  No worries! Anytime!

Lastly, here’s a little video with some fantastic underwater imagery for you to enjoy. Oh and it’s also got the last Komodo Dragons in the world:

The post Following Your Bliss: Interview with Nadia Aly appeared first on Me Uploads.