I miss you too

How do you explain it to normal people when a person meant the world to you but you lived an Ocean apart and you only met in real life a handful of times? I think you don’t, I don’t think you can, but I have to try.

I met Jay Zallan during my first Autodesk University in Vegas. I was a speaker, and he was… well, he was Jay. Striding across the Venetian, an ankle-length sleeveless black and white fur over flared trousers, metallic blue boots with high heels. He was carrying half a dozen beers in his hands while holding an impromptu lecture on innovation.
Like many others, I was star-struck by his unapologetic wit.
We connected at BILT Singapore, not many months later, when he gave an amazing lecture called Batshit Crazy Revit, which started as a collection of all the insane stuff people persist on doing with the software and quickly turned into an incredible dissertation on innovation, working ethics and the unsustainability of mediocrity.

T minus 15 minutes to Batshit Crazy (Revit) showtime @BILTevent Asia. Both freaking out and excited!!! See you on the other side ;)

— Jay Zallan (@JayZallan) March 30, 2017

This was a lesson I will never forget.

A few years later, I was in a very dark place, and few people knew that. He was one of them. It was my first time in his beloved Los Angeles, and he was my guide, my friend, my confidant. When I was thinking of falling through the cracks and disappear entirely, he held me and cradled me.
I will never know whether he was conscious of how much he meant to me that he was there.
And if you knew Jay, you can have a very clear picture of what we did: we fooled around like kids, and had very profound conversations, and talked philosophy about the construction industry, Lady Gaga, Angry Birds. That was Jay. A man who was able to change the temperature in the room with just a couple of words or a couple of rehearsed gestures, a man who was fully conscious of the impact we can have on others and yet I could never be sure whether he was correspondingly conscious of the impact he himself had on our industry. Of the impact he had on me.

I will forever be inspired by his persistence, by the pureness of his determination to pursue excellence, to drive forward innovation, to shake people from their prejudices and preconceptions. His very existence constantly admonished me that it’s possible to never give up, to hear the very same reactionary bullshit over and over again and still be pissed off as if it was the first time. He reminded me that life is not easy, when you’re not complacent and you’re unwilling to compromise on your beliefs, but it’s a path that’s worth pursuing, over and over again, regardless of the uncertainty, of the struggle, of the enemies you make along the way, of the pain it brings when yet another innovation project goes up in flames. And when the struggle never ends, and the world seems stuck, and nothing you do seems to matter, you can still find it in your soul to be an artist while you carry the fuck on.

So yeah, how do you explain it to normal people when a person meant the world to you but you lived an Ocean apart? I think you can’t. But when you have such a person, make sure they know. Pick up the phone and tell them. Hop on a plane, if you can, bask in the warmth of their company and make sure they know. Make sure they know how much they mean to you, even if normal people would never get it, because you might run out of chances to do it. I hope I did enough to tell Jay knew how much he meant to me.

Farewell, my friend.

You left a hole that won’t be filled.