Sean Bonner's Blog, page 13

The Thrill Of The Hunt

I gave a new Ignite talk the other day at an icebreaker opening to a several day conference. The organizers asked for talks about the most exciting thing people had learned this year. Since I’ve been getting into vinyl jazz records recently I wrote back and asked if that might be a worthwhile talk – turned out it was and so I got to work. In thinking about these records and what drew me to them I started seeing a pattern emerge and I’m once again forced to admit that I’m a collector. I collect stuff. But this is conflicting because as the same time I really hate stuff. It piles up around and makes me feel cluttered and I want to just get rid of it all and then I do and everything is clean and nice and then I think “oh, it might be nice to put something in that space” and then it all starts all over again. But why?

It’s the thrill of the hunt. I’m not excited primarily about the stuff, I’m exciting about learning about it and tracking it down. Once it’s tracked down the thrill is gone and my attention finds itself pointing in other directions. So what is the special sauce that – for me at least – makes something thrilling and sucks me into collecting it? Once I identify a “thing” there are 4 qualities that make it irresistible.

1. LEARNABLE – The info about the thing has to be finite. That is, it can’t be continually expanding which usually means the thing has to be old and out of production. I need to be able to wrap my head around what the thing is, when it was made, for how long, what were the variations and issues involved with it’s production, how to know the early or rare stuff, etc. There has to be a complete cannon of information that I can digest. If it’s something too vast – like wine or something – then I’m instantly turned off because I know I can’t ever hope to know it all.

2. ATTAINABLE – Is it actually feasible that I could attain this thing that I’m considering collecting? This is mostly financial. I’m not going to collect Ferraris, I’m not going to collect Patek Philippe. I’m never going to even own one of those things so there’s no risk of collecting it, and thus no chance of getting infatuated with it. If the top tier collectable of this thing is in the lower 4 digits that seems much more likely to spark my interest, though upper 2 digits/lower 3 digits is much more comfortable.

3. COMPLETABLE – This is more about the thing, did they make enough of them that I can actually hope to find them? If something was produced in such limited numbers that there’s slim chance of me finding one, not to mention a bunch of them, then no chance I’ll fall into collecting it. More likely if they turn up on ebay from time to time, so not thinking about the money part, it has to actually be possible for me to find this thing. If it is, and it’s a bit of a challenge, that’s thrilling.

4. NICHE AS FUCK – This sounds hipster, like I’m saying it’s not cool if anyone else likes it, but that’s not the case. It’s more that if something is common enough that I see it when I go to everyone’s house, or if it’s produced in a “collectors edition” specifically aimed at collectors, then it’s just not exciting. If I’m really honest with myself, the fewer people who know about it the better, it’s possible to become a recognized authority on something that very few people know anything about. And before you know it, that’s infatuation.

Before I realized it the talk wasn’t so much about Jazz records as it was self psychoanalysis, but I ran with it anyway and of course I didn’t skip the jazz stuff, but out of 20 slides 13 of them were about what’s going on inside my head. After the talk lots of people came up to me saying I perfectly identified the crazy in their head too and they appreciated how much they could relate. Which was nice to hear, and so I thought I’d post those points online as well for others to find and mull over too.

Attention Stats and Questions

Followers is a term I’ve never been too comfortable with. It implies acceptance of leadership when in fact it’s more like just half assed interestingness. Am I a follower of someone I “follow” on twitter or am I just curios what they might be thinking about. That’s a pretty big difference. And worse is when followers are called “fans” – just because I “follow” someone doesn’t mean I like them, or am their fan, again I might just be curious about their thought process. I don’t have a better term, but this one is no good either. Anyway, this is all something I think about when people talk about influence and attention online. How much influence does having some number of people’s attention translate to? It’s very hard to say.

For example:

I have 38,781 followers on Google+

I have 11,442 followers on Twitter

I have 2,237 followers on Tumblr

I have 510 subscribers to my mailing list

I have 112 subscribers to my podcast

I have other profiles online but you get the point I’m making I hope.

WTF does that mean? Certainly you can’t add those together as inevitably there is some overlap, and while there are certainly some people following on Google+ who aren’t subscribed to my podcast, it’s probably less likely that many of the podcast subscribers aren’t also following on twitter. Is the difference in numbers due to platform adoption or personal messaging? How many people are actually paying attention to any given thing I post? Accepted wisdom is that all those things should reference each other so people can easily find one or the other, but does that build in some redundancy?

I don’t have answers here, just something I was thinking about and wondering what others thoughts are.

Signals and Signposts

My friend Warren occasionally makes informative posts that are actually super helpful for reference, so I thought I’d follow his lead.

Effectively the only place I hang out online these days is Twitter. I also maintain a Google+ page though I’m constantly forgetting to use it. I also have a tumblr but it’s rarely anything originally, primarily a collection of interesting links I’ve found and reblogs of other people’s posts. I do not use Facebook (or Instagram since it’s owned by Facebook). I’m “seanbonnersnap” on Snapchat.

Speaking of links, I have a mailing list called Just Another Crowd which is almost entirely links to other things peppered with some commentary here and there and every once and a while a much larger rant. I send these out a few times a week on no set schedule. I’m also producing a regular podcast called Viva Riot with my friend Jessica Gao. We typically talk about a few of the links I might have sent out, as well as other interesting news and pop culture topics. We’re aiming to do this weekly but if you expect semi weekly you’ll be less disappointed. We try to keep in under an hour.

I curate a box of stuff for Quarterly and for $100 they will send you a box of stuff I’ve picked out 4 times a year. I work really hard to pick excellent, reliable and long lasting stuff for this. On a more regular basis I send a bag of coffee out monthly to anyone subscribed to my Coffee Posse which costs more than if you went to your local coffee shop and just bought a bag of beans, but I try to pick out different things each month and write a little bit about each one so hopefully that effort justifies the added cost. I mail these out by hand.

My music/art collective, Cross My Heart Hope To Die, has announced our first gallery exhibition which will open in Los Angeles at the end of July. If you want an invite, make sure you are on our mailing list. We have a new EP coming out around the same time as well, the last one is still available everywhere.

I spend the vast majority of my time running Safecast which keeps me bouncing between Tokyo and Cambridge, my home base is in Los Angeles.

 

 

Habit Metrics

I was sitting in the audience at TechCrunch50 in 2008 when FitBit was announced and ordered one immediately. If I had money to invest in things I would have been banging on their door – I got the concept right away and knew it would change everything. I’ve had every single model they’ve released and swear by it – just knowing how active (or not) you are, give you context that might otherwise be lost. And I saw that, one days when I’d start feeling sluggish and worn out I noticed I wasn’t moving around much. If I felt awesome and ready to take on the world, surprise surprise – I’d been moving around a lot. After doing this for a little while I could tell if I walked a certain amount each day my overall attitude and general feeling was way better. I wasn’t using it for fitness as many people do (quite successfully) but just as an extra data point of something that I knew improved things for me. My only complaint with FitBit is their charger dongles which I always lose or forget when traveling which wrecks my stats anytime it happens – otherwise I love it.

And of course, other companies and other devices followed tracking all kinds of different things to give people that kind of feedback. Above X you feel good, below X you feel bad – so here’s an easy way to know where you are so you can step things up if you need to. Hell, we even have one for our dog to know if we’ve walked her enough.

Recently, spawned by a conversation on my mailing list, several people told me they track other things in their lives as well. Not just the  physical stuff, but mental and emotional too. How much time each day or week were they spending with their family, were they spending alone, were they reading, having sex, meditating, traveling, etc.. whatever was important to them, and keeping track of it. To great success I might add. This seemed incredibly obvious to me and I didn’t know why I didn’t consider it earlier. If I know I feel better if I walk 10,000 steps in a day, and I have a device/system to remind me to do that, why couldn’t I think of other things that make me feel better and use a system to remind me of those? I’m not talking about “remember to floss!” kind of things -because while those are great for you (and me) they don’t really impact day to day mental well being.

Which is kind of the thing here – I do better stuff when I’m happier. I’m more fun to be around when I’m not depressed. I get things done, things that I’m proud of, when I’m in a posi state of mind. So if I know that I need X, Y and Z to keep me posi, I shouldn’t hesitate to track those things to make sure I’m where I want to be – or at least to help me understand why I’m not where I want to be today.

I didn’t want to make a todo list, because I didn’t even really know what I wanted to track. But I had to start somewhere so came up with a random list of things questions for myself and answered them. In an ideal world how much “alone, just me” time would I have each day? In a less than ideal world, what’s the minimum I can get by with. How many day trips with my family do I want to take each month? And so on. I sent the list to Tara too, and we compared notes. Seemed like a good place to start.

But how to track this? I knew if it was too difficult I wouldn’t do it so it needed to be effortless – as much as possible at least. I thought an iPhone app was likely the way to go, but which one? I asked on line and a few people told me about one called Reporter. Other people suggested Lift. I searched on the iOS app store people seem to like TraxItAll, Habit List and Way of Life. At the last second I added Full to that list as well and after 2 weeks of trying to use all of them, Full has definitely become my favorite. I thought I’d include some of the how and why here in case anyone else wants to try this on their own as well.

Each of these apps is different and depending on your specific needs you might like a different one than me, or something might suit you better, but this is what I found.

I found Reporter to be annoying, always interrupting me and asking me stuff I didn’t care about and no easy way to log what I did care about. This was probably the odd man out in the whole list too, it’s really not designed for this kind of thing and I feel bad complaining that it’s not good at it. It’s like biting into an apple and then throwing it away saying it’s the worst hamburger you’ve ever tasted. It’s probably awesome at doing what it was designed to do, which isn’t tracking your own set of habits.

Judging from the recommendations Lift is by far the most popular among my circle of friends, however that circle of friends also includes several investors and advisors to the Lift team so that could be a little bit of bias showing through here. I’d tried Lift out when it first came out and couldn’t get into the habit of it, also the aspect of goals being public weirded me out. I know that there’s huge value in encouragement from your peers and there’s also a way to make goals private but at the end of the day there were just too many steps and it wasn’t geared towards what I wanted. Even though many of the items I wanted to track already existed in their database which means other people are using it for that, it just didn’t work for me. Lift seems ideal for someone who wants to remember to floss every day, or to study a new language and benefits from encouragement from the community.

TraxItAll is the most full featured app on this list by a long shot, with all kinds of charts and data and different ways to look at that data. I was really excited about the charts showing you longer term trends. Their site is full of tutorial videos highlighting all that can be done with it, which is great, but is also part of the problem. It’s just too much. Every step has 5 different options and different choices and classifications and reminders and it’s not intuitive at all. It’s probably great for some people and some things, but not for me.

I really liked Habit List and had I not found Full this would have likely been my choice, though WayOfLife also worked quite well. These two are fairly similar but Habit List is much cleaner and that simple design goes a long way. WayOfLife felt super dated, though the week or month view of what you’ve done or not done is very nice to quickly get an idea where you stand, which Habit List lacked only showing you where you stand today on your monthly goals so you know if you need to pick up the pace on something or if you’ve been really good about something else and have extra in the bank. HabitList scored a little higher than WayOfLife because of ability to say “I want to do something 10 times a month” and then track what you’ve done, 3 times last week, 4 this week – I’m ahead of the game! And HabitList does that math for you, knowing when to remind you to do something based on what you’ve done, and when not to. So it’s not a hard and fast “Do X every day” or “every other day” or whatever, which is really nice if you are tracking things with flexible timing, like if I want to go the park with my son twice a month, I don’t really care which days that happens on, so long as it happens. WayOfLife didn’t do that, and didn’t have those goals, just either yes or no (or skip) and then a big view so you can see how often (or not) you’ve done something – but you have to do the legwork to see if that’s on track with your goal.

Full turned out to be a happy medium of several of these things and just enough of what I needed. Super clean and simple gesture based interface, swipe one way to say you’ve done something, swipe the other way if you accidentally said you did when you didn’t. Running tally of how many times you’ve done that thing next to how many times you said you wanted to, and color coding to know if you are on track, ahead of the game or need to catch up. As well as a chart view of everything at once to see where you stand. Really simple and lovely. This is what I settled on and what I plan to use for the coming weeks and months, in hopes that I can get the same kind of idea about the rest of my life that I got about my activities thanks to FitBit.

[I also posted this on Medium]

locations and updates

Just a quite update to note that I’ve been writing more in my email newsletter than on this blog recently, and enjoying it quite  bit even though it’s gotten me in some trouble from time to time. If you want to get those emails you can sign up here. It’s rarely daily, but often 2 or 3 times a week.

Also, speaking of me sending things to you, if you want to sign up to get physical things mailed your person that I’ve picked out, you can subscribe to my coffee posse or my quarterly box.

I’m juggling my time between Los Angeles, Tokyo, Cambridge and Paris this year. Perhaps we’ll cross paths.

My art collective, Cross My Heart Hope To Die, has announced our first gallery exhibition which will open at the end of July.

I’ve been attending Bujinkan training like crazy and loving it.

I’m very interested in writing a comic book (or several), and taking some steps in that direction. Looking for artists to collaborate with.

My toe is still broken.

They still haven’t found that plane.

Today, it is not raining.

 

Status 40

I was sitting on the grey metal flat files in the back room of my art gallery talking to my friend Wil, my feet half slipping off the drawer handles. He’d just gotten printed copies of his book Dancing Barefoot  -I’d helped him with a little bit of the layout and so he’d swung by to give me a copy. It looked great. I held a copy in my hands and smiled. I remembered a year or so earlier a conversation we’d had where he said more than anything he wanted to be a writer, that he was going to be a writer. And now here we were, with an actually real book that he’d written in our hands. It was pretty awesome.

Wil was telling me about an idea he was working on for his next book, what would become Just a Geek though I don’t remember if it had a name at that point, but the way he described the collection of stories reminded me of an idea I’d been chewing on for a while. See, I’d also fancied myself a writer. I’d been writing zines and columns in magazines and things like that for years, so even though I’d never written a real book I felt like I knew what I was doing to some extent. At that time I was approaching my 30th birthday, and my idea tied into that a bit. Growing up, I never thought I’d see 30 years old. Hell, I never thought I’d see 25. I wasn’t very optimistic about my future as a kid. But here I was at the end of my 20′s and looking back on what, at that point, had been a pretty interesting ride so far. And when looking at it, I thought I could identify a handful of moments where something happened – something that in a flash could have gone any number of ways – and because they went the direction they did my entire life was impacted. And if in that one quick moment things had gone a different way, everything in my life could have played out differently. I thought, if I could write about 5 of those stories and put them together info a collection, it might make an interesting book. I wanted to call it “Status: 30″

I told Wil about this idea and he said he liked it and I should do it. Why not right? What did I have to lose?

I felt pretty good about that, I respected Wil and was pretty sure if it was a crap idea he would have been honest about it and told me, and so I decided to do it. I made some rough outlines and told myself when inspiration hits I’ll plow through this and write it all in one sitting. I was pretty sure that would happen relatively soon, I mean it was a good idea and all. Definitely would be done before my 30th birthday a year later.

I turned 39 a few days ago, and recalled that conversation and realized it happened 10 years ago. And I never wrote that book. I never wrote those stories. I’m not even sure I remember which stories they were anymore, or what the thread was that I’d worked out that tied them all together. I think one of them was about a time I was in a car accident. Maybe another was about a falling out I’d had with a business partner in college. It doesn’t matter, the point is I never did it.

And I have no reason for that, other than that I just didn’t do it. Inspiration never hit. Not for that anyway. I’ve of course written other things since then, and just shy of that 10 year mark I published my first real book last year – assuming you don’t count the collections of blogposts that I’d batched and published in a single volume many years previously. I don’t anyway. But that’s beside the point, the point is – if I’d done it, it would have been done. But I didn’t, so it wasn’t.

Like anyone else I can come up with a million excuses not to do things, but I think as I’m about to cross that line into 40 I want to finish more things. I want to ship shit. Honestly, I have no reason not to.

Uphill and overwhelmed

There was a day about a week ago that seriously kicked my ass. I made a todo list in the morning and it was epic. So much, I didn’t even know where to begin. And on top of that every item on it was epic and required something like 20 other steps to even attempt to think about crossing it off. I stared at this list. I thought about it. I paced around the house. I went back to bed and hid under the covers. Hours later I emerged and went a looked at the list again. It was scarier than it had been before, and now I had less time to do all these things. So I made the responsible decision and walked out of the house, down the street, around the corner and kept walking until I got to the coffee shop. I sat there and drank coffee. Thinking about the list. Thinking about how I didn’t know how to do anything on it. Thinking that if I could just check off one thing that would be progress and then I’d be in motion and could keep going but nothing on the list was easy or small or accomplishable. I ate junk food. I made irresponsible and ill advised purchases. These things, the tried and true self medication of overwhelming and crushing defeat did nothing to help me. I didn’t feel better. I felt just as depressed but now with a dash of guilt on top.

I wondered how I ever got in this situation. Which choices had I made in my life that instead of having a normal job with a boss that would just tell me what to do and then I could do it I was here, lost and frustrated. Instead of working on something that was annoyingly below my skill level, but easy and mindless, I was facing all of these things that were obviously way above my ability. Far beyond what I could actually pull off – that I’d somehow fooled everyone into thinking I was much more capable than I actually am. That any moment everyone would realize what a fraud I was.

I went back home, back to bed and climbed back under the covers. The world was too scary to face.

I didn’t finish shit that day. Hell, I didn’t even start anything. Then the family came home – I think they noticed something was off but I didn’t talk about it. I was too busy feeling sorry for myself, and I wasn’t even doing a good job at that, because my “you suck” voice kept getting interrupted by my “fuck that ‘you suck’ voice” voice, which usually would be reassuring, but in that case was just confusing. I couldn’t even successfully beat myself up.

I gave up and went to bed early. The next day I woke up and remembered something that had happened, or actually not happened many ears ago. And something not happening might be cause for more grey clouds, this was actually a little bit of a kick in the butt, the kick I needed. I got up and did one thing. And it felt good. I don’t know if I did anything else that day, but I did finish something and that’s what I needed to remind myself that I could finish stuff. It felt good, and that list didn’t seem so scary anymore. There was a time when that entire cycle would have taken me months to get through and sitting here a week later realizing how quickly that whole process happened and resolved itself is in itself helpful. I have a LOT on my plate for the next few months, things I’m exciting about but also nervous about, things I want to do right, but things more importantly I want to do. And even if they are all happening at once and it feels like too much, I feel like I can pull it off. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt that way.

I can’t wait to see what happens.

Ripley for Ripley

Last month I saw some of Adam Lister‘s work on Tumblr and immediately showed it to Tara. We’ve been buying artwork for our son Ripley for a while and had talked about getting him somethings personal/significant each year for his birthday so that later on in life he’ll have this collection of pieces that we got for him. We had the idea of commissioning Adam to do a scene from Alien’s of Ripley (the character) in the power loader, We named Ripley (our son) after Ripley (the Alien killing character) and thought this would be fantastic. I contacted Adam and he was psyched to do it, and the result is everything we hoped it would be. Rips turns 4 next month, no one spoil this surprise gift for him, OK?!

Coffee Posse Is Go!

 

For the last year I’ve been curating a box with Quarterly - which, as the name suggests, sends subscribers a box of things I’ve picked out four times a year. In the second box I put together I included a bag of coffee that I was really enjoying and received some excellent feedback from people, including a handful of them lamenting that I wasn’t able to hand pick their coffee all the time. Of course, this got me to thinking. There are a number of wonderful options if you want to have coffee shipped to you, Tonx and Intelligentsia immediately come to mind – both of which I recommend all the time. So it’s not an issue of people not being able to get coffee, rather it seemed like people were interested in me actually picking different things to send them each month. Different roasters, different farms. It was kind of a crazy idea honestly. Would it actually be possible for me to send some people coffee on a regular basis? Is this something people would actually pay for rather than just going and buying coffee on their own? Was this just an excuse for me to try lots of coffee all the time? Maybe so.

End of last year I said fuck it, and launched the coffee posse. Keeping it limited and small at first to see if it works, and not make it too hard for myself right away. This week I’m shipping out the first boxes of coffee. I’m writing a bit more about why I picked this specific coffee, but that’s just going to the people who will be getting these delivered to them. I’m excited to see this idea become reality, and think it’ll be a pretty fun project to mess around with for the next few months at the very least. If you are a member of the posse, expect something on your doorstep soon. If you aren’t and want to be, there are a very few spots left.

What’s In My Bag (travel edition)

After my talk at Mailchimp the other day, Jason Travis approached me and asked if I’d be willing to be a part of his ongoing series of portraits and “what’s in your bag” photos he’s been doing. I thought it sounded like fun and, since I wasn’t expecting to do it, I didn’t overthink what I should have in my bag at that point. It was literally what I had with me for that trip, just off the plane, giving a talk, heading back the next day. I really like it, and it’s funny how years of style, color, theme choices all work together.

OK, so what is all this stuff??

(I’m including links of where to buy when possible to avoid a slew of “where do I get…?” – If there’s no link I forgot or can’t find it online anymore)

iPad Mini Retina
Blue Lounge Lighting to USB key
MicroSD/SD reader to USB
Keychain with copper hook from Japan, Atwood tool &  brass whistle, Martac copper AAA light
ZOOM h4n
Safecast bGeigie Nano
Leica Monochrom w/ 50mm Summicron & Lance Strap w/ Titanium clips
Stainless Embassy Pen
Kindle Paperwhite
Maxpedtion pocket organizer w/ Stanley pen screwdriver, Copper Pen, Griffin short USB to mini/micro, Streamlight pro, Altoids tin with vitamins, Stainless Sharpie, Silver Sharpie w/ black gaffers tape
iWerkz folding bluetooth keyboard
Velodyne earbuds
Porter business card holder w/cards
Werewolf cards
Extra USB batter pack for iPhone/iPad
slim wallet w/ 2 credit cards, ID and insurance card
Maratac Copper CR123 torch
iPhone 5s w/grove skateboard deck case
Defakto one hand automatic watch w/ Maratac stiched PVC band

Friends will note that the glaring omission is any kind of knife, and I’ll point out again I’d just gotten off a plane. Also, my laptop was hooked up to a projector and I’d forgotten to grab it for this.