How To Go Viral & Put Wings On Ideas

Read Free For 30 Days

How To Put Wings On Ideas: A Book For Content C ontent Creators By Austin Kaiser

 DISCOVER NEW BOOKS

1

 READ EVERYWHERE

 BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS


You want to make a living creating content but you do not have enough fans. So you go viral. To go viral you need to create a piece of content full of emotion. Then find an influencer to aim their spotlight at the content. That's the whole process. The tricky part is making an emotional, viral-worthy piece of content. That's why we will learn about supply and demand, cost and benefit, Andy Warhol, The Beatles, and Mona Lisa.  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS

We'll answer the following questions:

 READ EVERYWHERE

Why do so many trends come from the youth? Why are memes everywhere? Why do movie studios release so many sequels? Why is Einstein famous? Why is God famous? How do you look for a vacuum, for white space? How do you create content in a saturated market? How do you invent demand out of thin air? Altogether this book is a guide to making art and making a living making art.

2


Chapter 1 - An artist’s job is to create moments, page 4

Read Free For 30 Days Chapter 2 - Empathizing with the audience, page 7

Chapter 3 - Supply and demand, page 12

Chapter 4 - Cost and benefit, page 22

Chapter 5 - Reaching people, page 34  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS

 READ EVERYWHERE

Chapter 6 - Developing the imagination, page 44

Chapter 7 - Staying productive, page 53

Chapter 8 - Being yourself, page 63

3


Chapter 1 An artist’s job is to create moments A moment goes like this: the listener presses play. They hear your song. While they hear the song, miniature hands reach through the headphones and into their brain. The brain extends its own miniature hands which reach and clasp the song’s hands. The two become one. Whatever the song does, the listener feels. If the song gets high, the listener gets high. If the song moves, the listener gets moved. After the instrumental plays out and the song ends, the listener turns to FreeBob For 30 Daysused when their friend, hands over the headphones, and says in the same Read tone that Dylan passing Paul McCartney McCartney his first first adult cigarette, cigarette, “Listen “Listen to this.” You are probably familiar with these types of vivid moments. They are everyday experiences for people who listen to good music. Or watch good movies. Martin Scorsese carried me through a moment. I was watching Good Fellas when Joe Pesci asked, “Funny how?” Immediately the room got tense. I felt like fishing lines had tied me to my chair. Joe asked again, “Funny how? How am I funny? Am I funny like a clown? Do I amuse you?” The fishing lines got tighter. Finally Ray Liotta wises up and realizes that Joe is joking in his signature psychotic way. Ray says, “Get the fuck outta here.” Everyone laughs and the fishing lines disappear. The  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS tension evaporated as quickly as it materialized. If you had consulted a stopwatch, it would tell you that four minutes had gone by. To us it felt like one solid moment. The Beatles carried me through a moment recently too. At the end of the moment I was left with a feeling. It’s It’s true. Whether it’s the soldier running back into battle to save his friend, the family members who take 12-hour shifts to stay bedside by their sick grandmother, or the painter who who spends spends two years years on his back staring staring at the ceiling ceiling he is painting - the soldier, soldier, the family, and the painter are motivated by love. All you need is love. Joe Pesci and John Lennon were the subjects of conversation that night at dinner. My roommates sat around the living room and I played the music, played the movie. One friend says, “I never really got into the Beatles.” I say, “You’re mad.” He goes and listens to The Beatles for a week. Another friend says, “We should have a Scorsese marathon.” We have one for a week. For seven days, our house fills with the sounds of guns and guitars. Why did I tell you this story? I tell you because the story puts a magnifying magnifying glass over Step 2 of the viral process.

Step 2 is the ‘moment’ I have been talking about. To be specific, the moment is a transition. It is the transition from unemotional to emotional, from untalkative to talkative. I was hanging out, minding my business, and then, because art walked in the room, my neck got chills. I went from sleepy to jolted, from hum-drum to bang-on-the-drum.

4

That’s the transition. That transition is our goal. We want people to get an emotion out of our work and bring Read For 30 Days that emotion to a friend. If we can make a person do that, we can goFree viral. To be more scientific, the transition is what biologists call emotional arousal. It’s what happens when a person gets riled up. They get sweaty and their heart rate increases and, most importantly, they talk. They become chatterboxes. You can test this yourself by going to a basketball game or riding a rollercoaste rollercoaster. r. Your mouth mouth with open and stay open until until you calm down. Mystery solved. You cause emotional arousal. People talk about your content. You go viral. What’s missing? Step 1.  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS

 READ EVERYWHERE


Put emotion into content. That’s a fun part. Step 2 and 3 accomplish themselves when you do Step 1 really well. The easiest way to accomplish Step 1 is to take what you hate and destroy it in art. Or take what you love and give it a French kiss. If something is bothering you, stick it on canvas with TNT and blow it away. If there's something that makes you dance, put that on canvas and tango. Loves and hates are the most persistent sources of inspiration in the history of art. Imagine emotions on a scale from 1 to 10. If you can create happiness at a [6] then 100 people will will talk. If you can can make happiness at a [9] then then 1,000 will talk. talk. Each notch higher gains gains an exponential amount of conversations. The basic math is, anything under a [5] doesn’t get talked about. It stirs no response. 90% of the conversations on the internet are of the few pieces of content that take us to [9] or [10]. Content creators who want to go viral are interested in pushing to [10] at least. We aim for orgasms. We want to be as moving as full moons. For that full moon moment, our audience becomes the canvas. canvas. We We paint emotions emotions on them. Below is a list of emotions to get you started. Nostalgia: a pleasant yearning for the people, places, and life experience of the past. Nostalgic content content can bring pets, pets, musicians, musicians, and old friends back to life. life. To To make nostalgic content, get your photo album, sit next to a window, and remember. Astonishment: utter surprise and wonder. We feel astonished when an underdog wins. We expect one thing and get something else. To make astonishing content, add a twist. Catharsis: letting go of negative feeling associated with old emotions, worries, and events. Sometimes we bottle up embarrassing or traumatic feelings. Cathartic content allows us to

5

release them. them. To make cathartic content, open up to the audience. Let them see a part of you that you hide from yourself. Outrage: anger that comes from seeing or experiencing injustice. Outrage is when you scream at a bad situation. You scream in order to express your frustration and warn other people. To make someone outraged, tell them why the situation is bad and why it ought to change. Enlightenment: when curiosity is satisfied. Being in possession of impressive knowledge. Enlightenment is when you learn a lesson and feel a shock from the usefulness and Read Free For 30 Days simplicity of the lesson. To make enlightening content, come up with a great idea and share it. Empowerment: feverish optimism about one’s capacity for future achievement. Empowering content is hope in the form of art. It encourages us to shrink the difference between our current current self and ideal self, and to celebrate celebrate that journey. journey.

You can pre-decide what emotion you want to conjure. I do sometimes. But you can also be yourself, do what what you like, and see how how that goes. You can think think long and and intensely about the subtleties of emotion. Or you can let your spontaneous whim lead the way. You’ll probably end up doing both. Once you are able to take your hands off the wheel and let the information in this book  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS work in the back of your mind, making content can feel like a life goal, like a service, like a combination of game, profession, responsibility, joy, and opportunity. All things are possible through art. In conclusion. Going viral is easy. Lots of people have done it. York Facebook To practice sharpening your viral wits, go to the Humans Of New York Facebook page. Each photo is viral and taps into manys emotions. Read the comments and you’ll feel plenty. This can be your Square 1 of learning viral design. You can come here for infinite inspiration.

6

Chapter 2 Empathizing with the audience Trust yourself. Trusting yourself will lead to good work. Trust of self allows a person to take risk confidently and risk leads to art. That fact is half of everything. When you trust yourself, you can feel good vibes throughout the creative process, know that the good vibes mean the work is good, and move on feeling satisfied. When the work satisfies you, it is a success. You lived the dream. For 30 Days The other half of everything happens when the finished Read workFree is unveiled. In that moment, you become secondary. The audience and their interpretation becomes what matters because their conversations decide if the content moves or not. For that reason, trust of self is the second best quality an an artist can can have. Empathy Empathy is the first. Empathy is someone else’s feelinge happening inside you. Their tears make you cry. Their laugh makes you laugh. You are connected to the same jokes, the same attitudes. You feel what offends them and what they are sensitive too. You feel what they enjoy and what they hope for. You two become independent together.


 READ EVERYWHERE


In this book, empathy is something that, even when we are not talking about it, we are talking about it. Every page, in one way or another, is about understanding people. If you care about what people go through during their day, you can make things go viral. Personally, I did not use empathy until I was 22. Before that, I never thought about what life was like for other people. I went through life doing things I wanted to, playing games, and enjoying myself. I looked at teachers as people who gave homework, not people with feelings. The clerk at the store dispensed candy and that was the extent of his existence. I did not think much of countries I had never been to, people in other professions, or anyone. I do not think I introspected until I was 23 so I hardly thought of myself either. One day my sister was leaving the house and said, “I’m going to the corner store. Do you want anything?” I told her, “Almond Joy.” When she left, it dawned on me that she had done something nice. She was going to the store and checked to see if I needed something. For the hundreds of trips I took to the corner store, whether to the one in my hometown of South Amboy, or when I lived at Rutgers in New Brunswick, or when I lived in Jersey City, I never asked if anyone else wanted anything. Asking was simple. It made perfect sense to do. But I had never done it. After that clue I began looking up to my little sister more. I paid attention to her niceness. A lot of her niceness came from thinking about other people. What an amazing idea. Who knew that empathy and thinking of others was how people could be nice? I thought niceness was a gene or something that I got a small dose of at birth and would have to make due with. 7

As I began a writing career at the same time, empathy became the most important insight I could bring to a piece of writing. The first viral article I wrote was headlined, 10 Reasons Why Hip-Hop Makes You You A Better Person. I wrote this during a time where hip-hop was being accused of miseducating the youth. I wanted to write something for people who loved the genre and were tired of defending it. They wanted to talk about how much they enjoyed it and the lessons it taught them. This article received over 8 million views. The next article was headlined, 7 Female Singers You’ve Heard But Don’t Know The Name Of . This was written out of my love for female vocalists, specifically the women who sang on hip-hop song choruses uncredited. This also went viral. It got over 2 million views. These musicians rarely received press so their fans were eager to share the article. The third article was 7 Hip-Hop Songs That Remind Me Of My ‘90s Childhood. I wanted Read Free For 30 Days to show love to the cartoons of my youth and bring people on a nostalgia trip. The three articles were autobiographical. I spoke about what I knew. At the same time, I thought about what people wanted to hear and what they found interesting. I bet that there would be other people people who who felt the same way way as me, me, and I was right. There There were people who who loved hiphop, its singers, and their childhood.

■

Listed below are five ways  of DISCOVER empathizing. They may sound absurd here and there, and NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS you would be right to say so. In the coming paragraphs I will request that you act like another person, the the same way an actor actor would would on stage. stage. I request that that you design design vacations vacations for people people you have never met. I request you watch documentary films and read autobiographical books with the same speed that you chew food. I request that you speak the unspeakable. Ridiculous? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely. 1. To be discussed later. later. 2. To be discussed later. later. 3. To be discussed later. later. 4. Explore the unvoiced parts of the viewer. Some people keep uneasy thoughts under their tongue: unpopular opinions, unconfessed pleasures, and frowned frowned upon aspirations. aspirations. You You should free these bubbling exclamati exclamations. ons. Create content that a person can stand by as their truth and say, This is me. This is what I think. When you deal with a problem in your art, people discover a way to deal with the problem in their life. By bringing something out into the open, you give people permission to discuss it. The art nudges people and says, “Pssst. Other people feel just like you do. You may be crazy but you aren’t alone.” On the other hand, you could do the opposite. Celebrate something that is uncelebrated. Sing of something unsung. Praise that which receives too little. By expressing love, you give people the vocabulary to to speak their their own unarticulated unarticulated love. People love talking about the things they love. If they aren’t talking about their loves, then they’re waiting for a moment to bring up their loves. Create this moment for them. Build a piece of content that reminds a person how to express their love. By uncovering a love, community is born. Everyone who shares the content becomes a neighbor by virtue of having a similarly-shaped heart. See? Content gives emotions an identity. It reminds us we are neighbors. Voicing the unvoiced is about saying what is on your neighbor’s mind but for some reason

8

isn’t coming out of their mouth yet. By getting them to speak up, you have successfully found a viral opportunity and expressed yourself and done a social good deed all in one motion. What artists have done this already? Whom can we look to for an example to follow? Andy Warhol for one. He’s the first artist to paint paintings of Elvis. Before Andy, if you wanted a painting of Marilyn Monroe or Elizabeth Taylor, good luck. You’d only find photographs. photographs. If you loved their movies movies then you better enjoy enjoy replaying them because because there there is nothing extra, nothing to hang on your wall and gaze at. Then came Andy. He painted the celebrities on eight feet by eight feet canvases in bright reds, greens, blues, and yellows. The faces of movie stars and famous entertainers became rainbows. Read Free For 30 Days The truth he voiced was: movie stars are beautiful to look at and seeing them multicolored is also beautiful. Photographs and realistic paintings are wonderful. Fantastical exaggerations and colorful interpretations are wonderful too. For people who loved pop culture and wanted more ways to have fun with it, Andy was your man. There is our first example. Who else? How about a genre instead of a person? How about rap music? Rap music came from people in Brooklyn, New York who heard the radio and couldn’t relate to the music it offered. They decided to write their own songs. Rappers wrote about their neighborhood and childhood and  how they survived them. They explained that growing up DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS without money affects your personality. They said, If you want to stay optimistic and creative in a pessimistic and dangerous place, you have have to arm yourself with with art. That’s That’s how you self-educate. self-educate. Art Art can get you up to speed on the difficulty of living in a poor neighborhood, and give you the confidence needed to escape. No one born poor wants to stay poor. That’s rap’s truth. Rap is about upward mobility. Eventually seven continents choired up, went to the club, celebrated, and said, “I agree.” Rap proved that poor neighborhoods are rich in prolific autobiographical art. Can you see the similarity between rap and Andy Warhol? There is a pattern. Both of their art is helping people express themselves. See for yourself.

Next to Andy and rap rap is Woody Woody Allen. Woody Woody was was a stand-up stand-up comic comic from the 1960s. 1960s. Woody invented comedy for introverts. He made jokes about fears, death, and loneliness. He spoke about his shortcomings with women and intimacy. Before Woody, making fun of your shortcomings was not a common aspect of comedy. After Woody, it was cool to poke fun at your own low self-esteem. It was 9

endearing to be nervous and introspective. Lots of people appreciated this honesty. They liked Woody’s style of intellectual selfdepreciation. Introverts finally had a good reason to come outside. They packed stand-up comedy clubs and met one another. Like rap, this is an example of an audience who had no content suddenly having a cannon of content firing at them. Reality and truth in the form of anecdotes and punchlines came and knocked everyone over. Ten years before Woody was Jack Kerouac, a novel writer from the 1950s. Jack also threw back at the public their their own feelings. feelings. He wrote On The Road which is a novel that became the instruction booklet for the 1950s Beat Generation and paved the way for the 1960s Flower Children. Read Free For 30 Days is about a guy who doesn’t want to work in an office, and he doesn’t want to On The Road is pay off a mortgage. mortgage. He doesn’t doesn’t know know what what he wants wants from life but he he knows knows that he doesn’t doesn’t want what mainstream society is offering. Therefore he takes to the road. He travels from New Jersey to the West Coast. He hitchhikes, stays with friends, learns about camping, eastern religions, and other lifestyles. He learns that there are other people who are also questioning society. For historical context, in the 1950s a lot of cultural ideas we consider backwards were still going strong. If you earned a scholarship for graduate school and then got married, the scholarship could be taken away. If you got pregnant you could lose your job. Both situations were justified by the university and corporation with the following logic, “You are not committed. If you were, you would not have married or become pregnant. You cannot handle the full responsibility anymore. Therefore, goodbye privileges. You should not have followed your  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS heart.” Those times were full of emotional repression. Marrying for love was a revolutionary way of looking at marriage. Imagine that. Thanks to Jack and other artists, society moved in a healthier direction. Young people learned how to improve the social values taught to them, rather than accept and repeat them. Our last example moves us backwards a few centuries to 0AD. Here is Jesus, another classic viral content creator. Jesus preached love and kindness. He said, Love everyone, including your enemies and the people who hate you. You should even love people who are sick. Even people who don’t have money should be loved. At this time in Rome, showing love to sick and poor people was not a popular thing to do. Kindness was not a well-developed topic. The values that built society were bravery, strength, composure, law and order. ‘Turning the other cheek’ was profound. It spread quickly. Especially to the Jewish people who were not having a good time under Roman law. They saw the teachings of Jesus as making a lot of sense. Eventually the Roman Emperor Constantine decriminalized Christianity and converted to it himself. His influence helped Christianity become the world’s most popular religion. Andy, Woody, Jack, Jesus, and Brooklyn were debuting feelings. This is how trends and eras start. The generation is inspired by the content and echoes it in their own lifestyles. The content feeds the audience, and the audience grows. Those with an interest have an entrance. Want to find white space for yourself? It’s easy. 1) List all mediums of art. Here is a short version: painting, writing, singing, dancing, acting, computer programming, video game designing, sculpting, public speaking, architecture, and academia. 2) List all areas of human endeavor: medicine, science, war, relationships, sex, animals, nature, mathematics, health and fitness, geography, society, economics, religion, celebrities, mass media, technology, psychology, and history. Ask yourself, what aspect of human endeavor has not yet been covered by a particular medium? For Andy, the answer was celebrities and painting. Rap covered socioeconomics through music. Woody covered introverts through comedy. 10

Jack covered individualism through literature. Jesus covered kindness through public speaking. Of course you have to get more specific than this. My book is media theory/internet studies/marketing/art through how-to literature. The Simpsons was sarcasm/irreverence/social commentary/comedy through prime-time cartoons. Jackass was pranks/stunts/daredevilism through home movies. Pokemon Blue was collectathoning through handheld gaming. These artists went where there was demand and no supply. They found an audience waiting and ready for the signal to gather and link arms. Once the music spoke through the radio and the preaching ran through the streets and the Gameboys linked at the lunch tables, a generation rallied. 5. To be discussed later later..


6. To be discussed later later.. In conclusion. To be concluded later.


11

 READ EVERYWHERE


Chapter 3 Demand Demand is what people are in the mood for. By understanding what the audience is in the mood for, you can know what lightning bolts and hearts to put into your content.

Read Free For 30will Days Not only that, that, but while while you stuff stuff the bolts and hearts into content, you you feel feel confident. confident. Sometimes creating content takes weeks. During those weeks you don’t want to feel like, “Do people actually want an Almond Joy? Is this the right flavor? Is coconut and chocolate truly as tasty as I think it is?” You want to feel like, “The world is waiting for my Almond Joy. Après nous, le déluge. After me, the flood. Once people taste coconut and chocolate there will be a renaissance.” Ideally you’d know beforehand that your Almond Joy is viral-destined. Unfortunately we can’t know. The best we can do is be confident by estimating demand. If you think a girl likes you, then you are confident when you ask her on a date. If you have no idea what the girl is feeling, you might be less confident. You can ask her friends if she likes you.  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS “Asking her friends” is “estimating demand.” You are trying to predict if your attempt is going to pay off. This is what an entrepreneur does before they go into business. An entrepreneur says to themselves, “I want to open a lemonade stand. Will it be successful? Should I go through the effort of squeezing the lemons?” The entrepreneur thinks, “It’s winter. It’s 20 degrees outside. Most people want lemonade to cool off with. Demand is low. But in the summer, when it’s 90 degrees out, people will feel hot. Demand will be high. Therefore, I’ll open the stand in the summer and close in the winter.” Ta-da. The entrepreneur made a smart decision because he estimated demand. In this example, demand shifted based on the time of the year. 1. Time shifts demand.

This graph shows the demand for the September 7th weather forecast. The demand rises each day leading up to the 7th. As the date approaches, the weather becomes more relevant and more people search for the information. They want to know, “Will I need an umbrella? Can I wear a t-shirt?” On the 7th, demand peaks. This is when the most people are looking for the forecast. On the 8th, demand crashes. Each day forever after, the demand for September 7th’s weather forecast will remain near-zero. It will have a small spike again next year on September 7th if some people, like farmers, want to know the weather’s history. 12


This graph shows the demand for Christmas music. Demand grows in November, spikes in the week of Christmas, and crashes shortly after. If you have a piece of content tied to a cultural event, you want to estimate when a spike will happen. In these examples, estimating the spike is easy. The pattern repeats. Christmas is always December 25th. The forecast is always demanded the day of the forecast. That is not true for all demand shifts. Some are on their own schedule.  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS

 READ EVERYWHERE


2. Technology shifts demand. In 1927 The Jazz Singer was was released. This was the first full-length film to have sound. It changed the world and marked the end of the silent film era. In the silent era, actors communicated entirely with their bodies. They flailed their arms and grimaced their face. An actor portraying a sleepy character might yawn big, lean forward, and as his forehead touches the ground, jerk back and look around as if to say, “Where am I? What happened?” The acting technique was all exaggerated body language. Film with sound, known then as Talkies, had the advantage of using voices to tell stories. “Sam slept over last night so I didn’t get any sleep.” That’s how you portray a tired character with dialog. This changed the way actors acted. Actors began acting more natural. They came closer to real life. This is to say, the movies and the expectations of the audience went through stylistic shifts. The September 7th weather report was no longer needed. September 8th was the new permanent permanent demand. demand. Silence was was no longer longer needed. needed. Sound, dialog, dialog, and music - those were were the new loves. Movies were connecting with the heart in our ears. This led to more tickets sold, more profits, more filmmakers hired, and more genres. We got gangster films like The Public Enemy (1931) and Scarface (1932), western films like Billy The Kid (1930) and The Texas Ranger (1931). Talkies started a 30-year-long golden era of musicals like Moulin Rogue (1934) and 42nd Street (1933). If you were a young film talent, you were being called. Especially if you were a Broadway performers and knew how to carry a story with dialog. Film needs you. The industry was pounding its fists on the table saying, “More actors. We need more scripts, more directors, and more ideas.” That’s an artist’s dream: to feel called, to feel demand pulling. What happened with Talkies has happened many times in other ways. When portable fisheye lens cameras became popular in the early 2010s there was a rush to strap one to every animal possible, every high-floating or deep-diving object like anchors, hot air balloons, and bald eagles. eagles. The same same demand demand spike happened in the late 2010s when when small, small, civilian-grade civilian-grade drones came out. Filmmakers rushed to capture glaciers and deserts and jungle’s from the bald eagle’s perspective. Once audiences saw these videos, they said, “More, please.” Content creators heard the request and gave more.

13

3. Events shift demand. In 1939 World War 2 began and created demand for scientific discoveries. We were at war and needed new ways to win. The government put government put money up for scientist to work on the Manhattan Project, the codename given to the development of the nuclear bomb. Some scientists were professors and their content was lectures. That content was put on hold. The secrets of the atom were in higher demand. End of story. The lesson is that scientific breakthroughs are content too. Governments are audiences too. A demand spike is anytime an audience wants a lot of new ideas. The government wanted Reads Free Forweather 30 Days reports. breakthroughs breakthroughs on the the atom. Moviegoers Moviegoers wanted musicals. musicals. Farmers Farmer wanted Have you ever heard the phrase, “Finding a niche”? Someone who has found a niche is someone who found an audience and a demand spike. A content creator found a specific group with a specific need. The actors who were ready to embrace sound were in demand. Scientists who were ready to embrace the atom were in demand. An artist whose talents overlap with the audience and the direction of the next demand shift is an artist positioned for virality.

■ DISCOVER  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL After the scientists inventedthe bomb,NEW the BOOKS government dropped it on Japan. Another shift READING LISTS in content occurred. This time it was not with the scientists and governments only. It was with everyone. A common emotion entered everyone’s heart. The emotion was worry. People were nervous that a nuclear war would happen. For the first time in history it was possible for for the world world to end. end. There was was enough firepower firepower for the major major nations nations to kill one one another. This possibility became a global piece of conversation. That’s what the Cold War was. The Cold War was America and Russia threatening one another with nuclear war. No one pushed the button but everyone on earth was scared. No one knew how many more bombs would be produced or how many other countries would build them. The bombs seemed se emed to guarantee guarant ee World War War 3. This fear and uncertainty led to content. Books were written judging the likelihood of apocalypse; journalists and newscasters explained how to protect yourself in case of a detonation. Hollywood movies were released and books were written on the theme of nuclear war. Mom and Dad would worry before bed. Kids would speculate during sleepovers. Similar demand spikes are found following the terrorist attack of September 11th. Same with the moon landing. Same with the death of Franz Ferdinand; Prince; JFK; Emmett Till; Amy Winehouse; Michael Jackson; Thich Quang Duc; David Bowie. When a global event happens, everyone thinks about it. Demand spikes for content. When: Lebron was traded; Kobe retired; Greece went bankrupt; Wilt scored 100; Elvis got drafted; the Catcher In The Rye was published. All of these events are rich arenas for the current-events-minded designer, the politically-thinking content creator, and the globallyinclined artist.

4. Youth Youth shifts shif ts demand. In 1945 World War II ended and the returning troops made babies. There were lots of babies made. made. These These babies would would grow up to become become the teenagers of the 1960s. 1960s. When When the The Beatles were sprouting and gaining momentum, so were the teenagers. In 1966 when The Beatles were living in a yellow submarine, Time Magazine was naming the teenagers “The Man Of The Year.” The teens became the most progressive generation in American history. They smoked weed, played guitar, ran away from home, and questioned everything. They brought new attitudes towards music, politics, sex, drugs, religion, science, and civil rights.

14

A short list of cultural changes in the 1960s goes as follows: British rock and roll invaded America; the birth control pill reached corner store shelves; homosexuality and femininity and nudity and long hair on men were expressed in public for the first time; LSD fell on tongues; world peace emerged as an ambition of citizens; and experimentation in cults and Eastern religions emerged. Each of these things represents a shift in demand. These shifts led to new varieties of content being content being consumed. consumed. People wanted to live in a world where all men are equal. Hence Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches rose in demand, Harper Lee wrote To Kill A Mockingbird , and JFK J FK was elected president. People wanted open-ended religions that valued self-discovery. self-discovery. Demand rose for the Hare Krishna mantra, Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, ” and cults and community Read Free For 30 Days living became popular. People wanted to talk about drugs and government. Demand for Hunter S. Thompson’s reporting rose, Tom Wolfe wrote, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” and the Free Speech Movement began. People wanted to contemplate existentialism and sexuality. Demand rose for the cartoons of Robert Crumb. Demand rose for “I Am Curious Yellow,” a highly controversial film. It was the first to have nudity. This released to million of horny teens who heard that there was a scene with - cover your ears - a girl kissing a flaccid penis. The Vietnam war made people lose trust in the US government and their image as the good guys. Before the Vietnam war, people had not realized that the government would lie to them. TV reporting, then a recentinvention, showed the previously-hidden gruesomeness of DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS war. This led people to stop believing in the idea that men should kill other men on behalf of their governments. People decided that they wanted their friends to come home. By the beginning of the 1970s, 1970s, after citizens voiced voiced their low low demand demand for war war and high high demand demand for peace, troops troops began returning. In 1962 Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring. The book is about the dangers of pesticide spraying. It brought to light propaganda the Department of Agriculture had released, encouraging pesticide use. This book began the environmentalism movement in America. This was the beginning of public rallies for the environment. People saw that certain industries were not being honest and that we, the public, must care more. David Attenborough said that, second to Darwin’s Origin of Species, Silent Spring changed changed the science world most. In 1960 the birth control pill was released. This gave women, for the first time, the ability to chose and control whether or not they got pregnant, when they got pregnant, how to plan a career, when to go to school, and how to organize their life’s calendar. It raised the idea of control in the first place. Woman of the 1950s and prior were not expected to develop ambition unless their ambition was motherhood and housekeeping. People thought pre-marital sex was immoral. The invention of the pill helped to prove that sex was all good. White people and black people used to have separate bathrooms. In the 1960s that became not acceptable. The definition of equality included segregation and then the definition was reexamined, deemed backwards, and segregation removed. Attitudes towards civil rights changed. Segregation is not equality. All men created equal included all men co-existing. Forced separation is immoral. The sermons of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X go viral. New religious religious attitude attitude emerged. emerged. People asked, asked, what what is the meaning meaning of life? With With our short short time on earth, how is it best spent? What is important for us to care about and strive towards? These questions had traditionally been answered by Christianity but those answers seemed unsatisfactory. Thus Buddhism, Hinduism, and Native American mysticism see a surge of popularity. popularity. In 1961 Russia launched the first human into space. Everyone’s curiosity launched too. For the first time, space felt like a place to go. In 1969 the Apollo 11 landed on the moon with Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins. Throughout these years, a generation of science lovers and star gazers was born. Popular culture followed: The Twilight Zone, a creepy science-fiction show aired; the Jetsons, a science-fiction cartoon was animated; Stanley Kubrick 15

directed 2001: A Space Odyssey; Frank Sinatra sang “Fly Me To The Moon,” which was played by Buzz Aldrin Aldrin and became the first piece piece of music music played on the moon. moon. Space made people people feel many emotions: hopeful and worried, powerful and helpless. It was a moment when “the more you see, the less you know” happened. Songwriting of Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, and Jim Morrison captured the new demand and celebrated alongside. The demand was rolled into music, welcoming Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company, and The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Teenagers embraced this content and demanded more. They obsessed over free thinking. They wanted to be enlightened, to develop passions, set goals, see peace on earth, find their calling in life, and find their true loves. “Changing the world” was on the teenager’s To-Do List. Read Free For 30 Days This renaissance is a case study for what happens when new kids shift demand. Whether the new kids are global or local, the same pattern happens. New kids create new demands. New demands. New demand encourages new artists to rise. New artists create new culture and give the next generation of kids something to build off of.


 READ EVERYWHERE


5. Look for vacuums. Finding a vacuum is like finding a Lazarus Pit or a PokeCenter. Or Aurora Borealis or Halley’s Comet. It’s a banker finding a bag of money. A cowboy finding a watering hole. A gold miner finding gold. This is where a dream can come true. This is the feeling Charles Darwin had when he was studying finches at the Galapagos Islands and thought to himself, “Jeezo Christ. Animals change.” Or when Nicolaus Copernicus said, “Holy hell. The earth moves.” This is a patch of dirt dirt begging for seeds; a box of money on on the sidewalk sidewalk everyone everyone is walking walking passed; passed; a house with the best Halloween candy that no one has stopped by. What is the gold? The dirt? The candy? What are my metaphors getting at? The audience, of course. These sweet, passionate people want something and no one is giving it to them. They want to cheer. They want to give their attention and be someone’s audience. But there is no content creator. A vacuum appears when people want something that isn’t yet available. In the case of the Flower Children, a vacuum appeared when the Flower Children rejected their parent’s values. Their parents had been raised during the Depression on the values of conservatism, discipline, and avoiding risk. The kids wanted more free thinking than that. The demand for free thinking created a vacuum. My advice: if you feel demand shifting, if the mood of the audience is leaning towards a new vibe, get there first.

16

I felt a vacuum when I was working at the magazine and I asked, “Has anyone answered the question, ‘How do you go viral?’” When I realized the answer was, “No.” I knew I had a vacuum. I knew that even if the demand for the answer was less than 1,000 people, I’d at least get all of their attention since no one else was supplying an answer. As it turns out the demand is more than 1,000 people. There are millions of content creators. Meaning, the demand was high and there there was a vacuum. Those are the two best things a designer can find: a high demand market that’s also a vacuum. If this is the case for you, run. That’s a viral opportunity. I left the magazine and moved out of the apartment I lived in with my best friends. This was sad but I knew (had faith) the faith) the answer to the question, “How you go viral?” was in demand. Read Free For 30 Days I knew Moby Dick was out there with his mouth open while no one was going fishing. I knew there was a pinata hanging from a tree that no one was swinging at. My parents wanted me to be sure before I left. I searched for reasons other than intuitive ones. I found two. 1) At the end of each week, every employee of the magazine would be sent a list of the articles that received the most traffic. It looked like this: We Ran The T he Numbers: It’s I t’s True. All You Need Is Love. 1,245,094 pageviews Man Says, “To Hell With Painted Lines. I Drive According To The Curvature Of The Earth.”  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS 534,984 pageviews Carrie Bradshaw Has Been Voted ‘America’s Favorite Writer’ For The Sixth Year In A Row 243,726 pageviews We Celebrate the 66th Anniversary of the Day Andy Warhol Got Gum Stuck In His Hair 93,987 pageviews

The writers would look over these emails to see who was getting traffic, which subjects were most interesting to audiences, and whether or not their latest Hail-Mary-throw-article resonated with the audience. I knew the writers would want to know how to go viral for at least bragging rights. rights. 2) If your article got traffic, the advertising department would put money behind your article. They’d spend $500 dollars and promote it on Facebook. That promotion would get you more pageviews. The more popular your article was, the more money the magazine spent, and the more popular you got. It was a snowball effect. Let me break down the system: Facebook charges you to put ads on their website. If your ad gets clicked very little, Facebook charges you more. If your ad gets clicked a lot, Facebook charges you less. This is because Facebook wants ads that people click. If your ad gets clicked, Facebook wants it there, so they charge less. If your ad doesn’t get clicked, Facebook doesn’t want it there, and they charge more. Let’s say there are 3 writers at the magazine. We each write an article. The first article gets clicked 100 times. The second 500 times. The third 1,000 times. Facebook says, “If you want to advertise that first article, we’re going to charge you 20 cents each time it’s clicked. The second article is 10 cents per click. The third is 3 cents per click. The third guy has the most attractive article so Facebook charges the least to promote it and the magazine puts the most money behind it. All of this is to say, writers wanted to know the answer to the question, “How do things go viral?” The answer would make them popular in the office and popular with the fans. This homework was my way of confirming demand. After I confirmed the demand, the intuition and heart justifications came back, I thought, “Writing this book is a good excuse to learn about art. I don’t know much about 17

art but I know it must be an awesome slice of life. This book would be an adventure to write. Plus it’s demanded by interesting people. Content creators are an audience I’d enjoy connecting with.” I knew if I could write a book that encouraged 10 artists to make art then there would be more art in the world. That was reason enough. 6. After the vacuum. I can’t tell you what happened after I finished the book or if my demand hunches were right. I’m still writing at this moment. I can tell you what happened after a vacuum appeared in the early 1990s. In 1992, ID Software, a video game company, released Wolfenstein 3D. This video game Read Free For 30 Days was the first 1st-person shooter video game. It invented the genre. The following year, ID Software released Doom. Doom cemented the genre, sold 10 million copies, and broke open the market. Following Doom came a flood of game developers trying to work their own magic in the genre. In 1994, Raven Software developed Heretic, Heretic, Rebellion Developments released Alien vs redator, and Bungie, the developer that would create Halo, released Marathon. They rushed to fill the vacuum. Doom’s influence was so strong that the term ‘first-person shooter’ didn’t catch on until the late 1990s. For years these games were called “Doom Clones.” Once you get Martin Luther King Jr., you get a thousand preachers preaching in his vein. After Pink Floyd, you get a thousand Pink Floyds, each slightly different, each exploring a side  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS of their niche. After Banksy, you get a thousand street artists using stencils. After the Angry Video Game Nerd, you get a thousand gamers making YouTube videos. After Bruce Lee, you get Bruce Lo, Bruce Lay, and Bruce Lin. After Richard Pryor, you get a thousand stand-up comedians on stage saying, “Fuck.” This is inspiration in action. Martin, Floyd, Banksy, the AVGN, Bruce, and Richard gave energy to artists. Artists bought the speeches, speeches, songs, and video games, games, brought them home, home, and and absorbed absorbed them. When the artists got tired, they put the art under their pillow and dreamt about it. They absorbed and dreamt and absorbed and dreamt and after their enthrallment had built up from the bottom of their feet to the top of their neck they spoke their own art. You can see a bamboo shoot with marks along the side. Each comes from a sword swung at a different angle. You look at the impact and see, this mark came from a sword at 34 degrees. This one is from a sword swung at 30 degrees. Here’s one from 72 degrees. And 66 degrees. And so on. Each is slightly different, some are deeper and some more shallow. The swordsmen stand around, talking about the notches. Then comes a swordsman who swings his sword at 45 degrees and cuts clear through the bamboo shoot, splitting splitting it in two. That’s what Martin did. Banksy too. Many people were preaching, many people were painting. But one person person did what what the sword sword was was trying to do all along along - perform perform a breakthrough breakthrough.. Martin explained what black people were trying to articulate all along. Banksy presented the power stencils stencils had all along. Now everyone everyone is swinging swinging at 45 45 degrees. degrees. The culture culture is elevated. elevated. Technique Technique is improved. improved. It’s easier to become better faster because there are better instructions, better role models. This is one reason why vacuums attract. Once a vacuum is discovered, the community, genre, and style begin a history history.. Young Young creators creators crowd crowd around this origin mom moment. ent. They recognize recognize the potential for further exploration. As time goes by, a breakthrough is carried out by the children of Martin and Banksy someone slices through two bamboo shoots at once. Then someone slices through a bamboo shoot thrown in the air. Then two thrown in the air. And on it goes, with new kids seeing the talents of their predecessors, and the kids discovering their generation’s own greater heights.

18

Once new creators join, the community begins its lifecycle, a progression from a vacuum to saturation.


The growth of a community of content creators can be plotted on the above spectrum. The community goes from an empty vacuum where no one is satisfying demand, to saturation where the community is so full of content creators, all seeking attention, that it becomes very hard to get a word in.  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS The rule is: when demand rises, supply rises. As more people demand content, content creators go to satisfy them. If you create for a niche that has no competition, you will enjoy the first mover advantage. The first mover advantage is the audience’s undivided attention. With little or no peers competing for the same attention, you have less pressure to produce results and more time to experiment and take risk. You can set the tone for what the content of the future might look like by inspiring your viewers, viewers, some some of whom whom will will become become content creators. creators. The disadvantage of creating content for a new audience is that the new audience might be very small. You are betting and hoping and having faith that the audience is about to boom. 7. Competition after the vacuum. As a community moves towards saturation, competition increases. As competition increases, you have to be a better artist. You have to be more original. I can’t come out and do what Banksy did. It wouldn’t stand out. The shock is gone. The first mover advantage has been taken. I have to do better. I have to learn what I can from the world, and then add myself to the world. Being a mirror isn’t enough. For example, think of a website that requires a unique username to join like HappyBagels2012 or Smelly_Candle777. The more people register names, the harder it is to find an original name. In the beginning, when few names are chosen, you can pick:

Bob Sara Arthur Once more users register names, the bar raises. Now you have to pick: pick: Bob.tunafish92 SaraBoxingChamp4eva ArthurAllDayYall 19

Each name raises the bar slightly. This ever-raising bar is called competition. The more people attempt attempt the same same goal, the more creativity creativity must must be exercised exercised to achieve achieve the goal in an original way. Competition can a healthy force. SaraBoxingChamp4Eva has a lot of personality. Being challenged to be inventive can be good. In economics, competition is credited with motivating entrepreneurs to innovate. In content creation, the effect is similar. Sega, the video game company, created Sonic The Hedgehog to compete with Nintendo’s Mario. At the time, Nintendo dominated the video game market. Sega consciously decided that they needed a character who kids could fixate on and concentrate their affection towards. Good games were not enough. They needed a lightning rod, a centerpiece mascot for people to gather around with their mouths open, wondering, “Where can I buy this? When can I play this?” Read Free For 30 Days Sonic was the perfect answer to Mario. Mario is red. Sonic is blue. Mario’s signature ability is his jump, his vertical motion. Sonic’s signature is his running speed, his horizontal motion. Mario is friendly and well-rounded. Sonic is impatient and spiky. The pattern goes: one person does something, gets attention for it, and other creators want that same attention. To get the attention, they make content that is similar enough to be similar and different enough to be different. As content creators challenge one another to do better, the audience matures alongside. Everytime the audience buys video game, their taste and preferences grow more sophisticated. With each video game, they know themselves a bit better. They know more about what they like and what they don’t. If they buy a game they don’t like, they have no problem pushing the tray away and saying, “I lost my appetite.” If they buy a game they do like, they are quick to say,  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS “Another one.” A classic story of audiences outgrowing content is about The Twilight Zone TV show. In 1959 the Twilight Zone debuted. The show was popular. People loved it. It was creepy. Aliens would impersonate humans. Daughters would age faster than their moms. It was scary. John Doe would hallucinate and forget his identity. Ugly creatures would appear at 13 o’clock. It was mind-twisting. A man explored an abandoned town for weeks until he went insane. We discover that he was part of an isolation experiment the government used to train astronauts with. In 1980 a new version was released. This show was not popular. People did not like it. It was not creepy. It was not scary or mind-twisting. Why? Because audiences had grown up. In the 20 years between, science fiction as a TV and movie genre had evolved. Ugly aliens? Hallucinations? Insanity? That was stale popcorn. Audiences of the 1980s were more prepared than those of the 1950s. It was harder to surprise them. They had seen more content, seen more plot-twists. The old story lines were no longer compelling. Within a scene or two, they’d call out the ending. “She’s a doll in a dollhouse!” dollhouse!” “The beggar is the devil!” “The dog is telepathic!” telepathic!” The more competitive your market, the more sophisticated and developed your audience is, the more original you need to be. Keep getting more specific with your creation. Think hard about the audience you want to reach. Respect their intelligence and love their loves. Conclusion. We have talked about 1) filling a vacuum and 2) competing in a saturated market. The final idea is 3) how to invent demand out of thin air. This means giving people what they don’t know they want yet. When an album is about to release, you know there is going to be a vacuum for reviews of the album. You know people are going to demand reviews and commentary immediately. Martin Luther King Jr. knew people wanted powerful sermons. Once he could write them properly and perform them well, well, he knew knew he’d have demand. demand. But that is not the case for all situations. Sometimes there is no precedent, there is no blinking neon neon sign with with an arrow arrow that reads, reads, “Can someone someone satisfy this enormous enormous demand demand

20

already?” However there might be clues. Some visionaries have their ear to the streets and hear the clues. What is my example for this? For inventing demand? Steve Jobs and the iPhone. Steve was told a phone that was all screen and no buttons made no sense. No one wants that. There is no demand. There is no use for that. People will not understand it. The phone itself was in demand. People wanted a phone that could play music. The visionary aspect that no one believed in was the lack of physical keyboard. The most successful smart phones had keyboards - Palm Pilots, Motorolas, Blackberries. Apple developed a phone that was all touch screen at the same time that internet speeds Read Free For 30 Days were improving enough for phones to download videos and use social media. The demand for mobile web was not yet developed in the minds of consumers. But with the iPhone, the demand developed overnight. In this way, Apple created the demand for the mobile web and sold the best gateway gateway to it. Watch Steve Jobs’s unveiling presentation from 2007. When he shows the audience that he can scroll with his finger, you’d think he was Ben Franklin controlling a thunderstorm with his kite. The audience gasps. The phone in their pocket turns to rust. You can hear their expectations elevate as new neural pathways develop in their head. The touch-screen-only format went on to become the dominant format for phones ever after. It is the way we use phones today. We swipe through photos. We pinch and zoom on our maps. We watch two hour moviesinDISCOVER landscape mode. NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS If you have a hunch, a vision of a future vibe, you don’t necessarily need demand. Having demand helps. It makes you feel confident. But if you have no demand, summon the confidence from your own insides, and create anyway.

21

Chapter 4 Cost Last chapter was about, “What do people want?” This chapter is about, “How bad do they want it?” We are talking about the currency that viral design deals with. Business people deal with money. They sell stuff for money and customers pay for stuff with money. Viral designers use a different currency: attention. How is attention a currency? Read Free For 30 Days In two ways: 1) Time: if I want to listen to a song, that costs me three minutes. If I only have one minute to spend, I cannot afford the song. It is too expensive. 2) Effort: if I want to enjoy the satisfaction of a crossword puzzle, I have to do the damn thing. If I don’t want to pay that attention, it’s too expensive for me. Why is cost important? Because your audience is going to be paying with this attention currency. Like any good supplier, you want to give them the most bang for their buck. You want to give them the most benefit for the least cost. cost. That means if you have a blog post that’s five paragraphs long, and you can make the same point with the same impact in three paragraphs, you better do that. If you have a comic  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS strip that’s ten panels long but you can get to your punchline in seven, do that. If you have a 20 minute video, you gotta look at each line of dialog and ask, “Is this line driving the plot forward? Is this line necessary?” This cost-minimizing way of thinking, put another way, is courtesy for the viewer. If you are courteous, you’ll make your content affordable. You respect the audience’s limited resources.

22

Let’s go over this diagram. In the bottom left corner is the most effortless, least expensive content: memes. Meme is technically not the right term. The word meme is supposed to signify any form of culture that gets shared. It comes from the word gene. A gene is genetic material passed from from person-to-pers person-to-person. on. A meme meme is cultural cultural material material passed from person-to-p person-to-person. erson. What What I’m actually talking about, and what you’re probably thinking of, are image macros. An image macro looks like this:


We all know about these. These are the internet’s drug, the most addictive, instantly BOOKS cost READ EVERYWHERE  benefit, BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS gratifying content possible. Whenit DISCOVER comes toNEW minimizing and maximizing image macros are king. In half a second you can be delivered a really specific, home-hitting joke with a picture of an extremely extremely ridiculous face, and your brain hardly had to work. It just just had to laugh. laugh. We can learn a lot about virality from memes just like we can learn a lot about survival from plants that live off of one nutrient. This plant shows us how much you can accomplish with a small amount of material. Sometimes that plant becomes the most prolific around. Image macros are the same. Since their cost is low, we can scroll through a newsfeed and consume these by the hundreds. They require almost no time or effort. Whenever we have free attention, it’s easy to spend it on memes. It’s funny that what is considered the internet’s biggest time waster, its most unsophisticated, temporary content is a shining example of cost efficiency. It’s the grand daddy of “getting to the point.” There is no preamble, no interlude, no build-up, no credits roll. Just a sucker punch. If people are giving your content feedback like, “I don’t get it.” “or “It’s not hitting.” then refer back to image macros. Kneel at the altar of simplicity. In the top right hand corner of the diagram you see “Books written by Ernest Hemingway.” And “Books written by William Faulkner.” Ernest Hemingway is a writer famous for using simple language. He wrote in short sentences and used few adjectives or adverbs. He’d write like: “I wondered if the hook was in the fish’s belly. If it was in the fish’s cheek, it could fall out. I did not want that. Swallow, fish. I thought to myself. Swallow that damn hook.” William Faulkner is the opposite. He loved long, windy sentences. According to the 1983 Guinness Book of World Records, a sentence from his book, “Absalom, Absalom!” was the longest in history. Faulkner wrote like this: “The cat gnawed on the cardboard string that lifted from the frayed rim of the cardboard box until the the string ripped ripped and flung the cat backwards backwards into the corner of the box. box. Both objects, objects, now airborne and tumbling, stopped in space several times as if to tempt my hesitant fingers, to mock my passive passive catch. I did not catch the cat. It landed on its feet like it always did and, I hoped, always would whether or not I was there to play the role of the witness who fails to catch and thus becomes the witness who receive more guilt than the accident victim receives wounds.”

23

Ernest and William were friends and competitors and both are two of the greatest writers of all time. It’s a cute moment in history where two opposite styles are so close in conversation. I include them to distinguish between easy reading and in-depth reading. Easy reading is reading you can do when you are sleepy. With in-depth reading, you have to pay attention otherwise the words will get away from you. If you are a writer, be self-aware enough to know, “Am I giving my reader a hard time?” If your intention is to do that, do that. If you want to target readers who sweat and enjoy a satisfying trudge, do so. But know you are doing it and know where you fall on this Hemingway-Faulkner spectrum. 1. The land of low cognitive cost. Read Free For 30 Days On our diagram, near memes in the bottom left corner is Keith Haring’s art. If you’ve never seen it, it looks like this:


 READ EVERYWHERE


That is not actually his art. It’s a painting one of my best friends, Martin Corso, made. Martin is a fantastic painter. He enjoys painting landscapes, nudes, and album covers. See more of his work at @magicalmrtn. Keith, if you’re reading this, reach out and give me permission to use your real art. Anyway, Keith is listed as near-zero cost because his drawings are simple. They are outlines of people doing things like playing jump rope or high-fiving. My dad calls these people “thick figures.” They’re like “stick figures” except thick. Keith’s art is universal. Any child from any country, any person of any profession or walk of life can see his work and feel something. Everyone recognizes the human shape. Everyone recognizes activities like holding hands and dancing. Keith’s friend is Jean-Michel Basquiat. Jean-Michel was also a painter. His paintings are very different but they also have low costs. His work looks like this:

24



 READ EVERYWHERE


This is another @magicalmrtn re-invention. I’d get the real thing if Jean-Michel was easier to contact, and if I wasn’t such a fan of Martin. What makes Jean-Michel’s painting low cost? It’s not because the image is simple. You could stare at this image for a long time and still not know what you’re looking at. It’s low cost because of the words. words. Imagine walking through a gallery of 30 30 paintings paintings done by 30 30 different different painters in 30 different different styles. One One of these these paintings paintings has words. words. You see, “unpaid “unpaid interest” interest” “being earnest” “wristbone.” The words make you look. Jean-Michel has performed a feat. He got you to pay attention. That puts him ahead of the other paintings. The other paintings may get looked at, they may not. He’s guaranteed a look. In a room of 30 paintings, or a newsfeed of memes, getting someone to stop and look is a feat. This is the power of being different. If you have a sheet of paper with 29 blue dots and one red dot, the red dot is going to catch attention. If there are 29 red dots and one blue dot, the blue dot would catch the attention. This is also the power of words. Words catch attention quickly which is why YouTube video thumbnails have words in them. If you google, “YouTube homepage 2009” none of the thumbnails have words. Now most do. Adding text to a thumbnail was a craze when it was discovered how many more clicks they got compared to thumbnails without them. The difference was due to cost and benefit. For the same fraction of a glance, thumbnails with words communicated more information and provoked more curiosity. Keith and Jean-Michel became the two most famous painters of the ‘80s, of the post-Andy Warhol generation. Their popularity is due to many things. They were prolific and made paintings constantly constantly.. They were were intelligent intelligent and thoughtful thoughtful and put substance substance into every every work. work. They were in the right place and time; New York City when a generation of Pop Art babies were getting together. They marketed themselves and networked. They hustled. Behind all of these reasons is their ever-present low cost art style. Their styles have features that universally attract people. 2. The land of high cognitive cost. In Chapter 3 I talked about Andy Warhol, Jesus, Woody Allen, Jack Kerouac, and Brooklyn. I said these people and places were voicing an unvoiced voice. We can look at that

25

statement another way. They were supplying an unsupplied benefit. The benefit was colorful Madonna. If you wanted that painting before Andy was around, you had to paint it yourself. That’s a lot of effort. After Andy was around, you could buy a copy. Presto! Cost is reduced. Benefit is more accessible. Let’s talk about a new example: science - chemistry, astronomy, physics, geology, biology. Mother Nature has secrets. I want to know them. Unfortunately knowing those secrets is hard work. It took thousands of scientists thousands of years to discover the information we have so far. Thankfully the information is printed in textbooks. Presto! Cost is reduced. Benefit is more accessible. I don’t need to find the fossil myself. I can buy a textbook and read about the fossil. I receive the benefit of the knowledge, the feeling Read Free For 30 Days of fascination as I turn to a new page, and the satisfaction after I read it. But the attention cost of a textbook is still high. Textbooks are some of the most time and effort intensive pieces of content we have: hundreds of page, definitions to learn, passages you have to read five times just to understand them once. Getting through a textbook sometimes feels like chipping away at a big rock, like the fossil is in the book and you have to excavate anyway. It would be nice to do less work and still receive the benefit of science. Can we lower the cost? Ah-ha! MOVIES. We can make nature movies. We can film dolphins and monkeys and volcanoes and narrate them with smooth-sounding British people. We can take the highlights of the textbook, the most fascinatingparts, and explain them in simple Hemingway-esque DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS language. Thus the book barrier is banished. We reduced the cognitive cost by switching mediums. We added benefit by providing visuals and music and a British narrator. We tipped the scale! Benefit is finally higher than cost. What happens now? A sweet, wonderful, thank-goodness, viral moment. The audience explodes. Where there was 10 people, there are 10,000. The textbook sold 5 copies. The movie sold 5,000. Can you see this?

This is art in action. Artist are taking benefit that was previously under-appreciated and finding ways for audiences to appreciate it. Appreciation is growing. People are being entertained. They are seeing penguins. They never would have seen penguins if not for our video cameras. Well done! And lucky you for having the chance to fly to Antarctica and film them. 3. High benefit vs low cost and low benefit vs high cost. Do you remember Napster? It came out in 1998. This was the first music-sharing software. Before Napster, you went to the store for music. After Napster, you went to the internet. This changed the world. But not everyone thought it would. Critics said the program cost consumers too much effort to use. They said no one would be willing to download a program, give access to their harddrive and bandwidth, and learn how to use the program. Of course people were willing and did. These critics underestimated how badly

26

people wanted wanted music. music. The benefit outweighed outweighed the cost; free free music music outweighed outweighed learning learning a new program. program. The critics also underestimated the cost of the alternatives. Driving to the store and spending money on a CD was a hassle. You had to put on clothes, drive to the store, find the product in the store, and then pay with money. money. Each of these these activities cause a certain certain amount amount of customers to dropout. In bed there is someone who would buy the music but doesn’t feel like putting on clothes. There There is another another guy with with clothes on who who doesn’t doesn’t feel like driving. There There is another guy who went to the store but the store didn’t have the CD in stock. Napster reduced reduced all of of these costs costs to zero. zero. You You could download download your music music in your birthday suit while your your car’s gas tank was was on E. Read Free For 30 Days


 READ EVERYWHERE


In Chapter 5 we expanded our definition of demand. It didn’t apply to just Almond Joys. It applied to ideas, to scientific discoveries, to religions, to civil rights. Now we are doing the same with cost. Costs are any obstacles to consumption. “Hear about Napster” is what’s called discovery cost . It’s the effort a person has to go through in order to hear about a piece of content in the first place. What has low discovery cost? Graffiti. You don’t have to look for graffiti to find it. Artists put it on subway carts. What has high discovery cost? This book. If I leave it on my harddrive and never publish then anyone looking for a “how to go viral book” is going to have a hard time finding it. Lucky for Napster, their discovery cost was near-zero because word-of-mouth was volcanic. People couldn’t shut up about Napster. Friends told friends. Everyone’s emotion was pushed to [10]. “Spend 15 minutes learning Napster” is called learning cost. It’s the effort needed to learn how to use content. Most content has no learning cost because we know how to read a book or a watch a video. Learning cost is most common for software like operating systems (Windows/Mac), music players (Tidal/Spotify), and video players (Netflix/Hulu). Napster’s learning cost was near-zero because if you knew how to use a search bar, you knew how to use Napster. Napster. “All of history’s music” is the benefit. This was the hallelujah. People typed Rolling Stones and saw ‘Sympathy For The Devil’ and ‘Wild Horses’ and unreleased stuff that superfans had never heard of. Using the search bar for the first time was like realizing you hadn’t been breathing your your whole whole life and finally taking your first breathe. breathe. All you wanted wanted to do do was inhale. inhale. It was a “I am grateful to be alive” moment. Napster is an example example of critics critics overestimating overestimating cost cost and underestim underestimating ating benefit. benefit. Let’s talk about the reverse situation - when a content creator underestimates how much their content costs and overestimate how much benefit they are delivering. I’m talking about roadside pop-up ads: billboards. Firstly I think billboards are dangerous as hell. They ask you to take your eyes off the road and fifty feet in the air and a hundred feet to the right. The only reason they exist is because the 27

government wants to make money from its audience of drivers, and advertisers have more money than they know what to do with. That’s my moral issue with billboards. My design issue is this: they are overdecorated. There are too many symbols, graphics, adjectives, and web addresses and phone numbers. This is not appropriate. At most, drivers can glance. We don’t have time to handle that volume of information. A billboard, like the sign of a panhandler, or a piece of viral content should say one direct thing only. This is why simplicity is regarded among all fields of communication as the trait nearest perfection. It is a harmony between information conveyed and information digested. The more you can say through efficient use of text and image the less work must be done by the viewer. If 100 cars pass the billboard per hour, a difficult sign may reach and be effective to 20 Read Free For 30 Days of the drivers. A billboard with a shorter and clearer message might effect 40. This improved content engagement is due to a designer being respectful of a viewer’s resources. Worse than the high cost is that billboards have low benefit. Sometimes I am hungry and I’m traveling and I see a billboard for food. That happens. That’s helpful. But 99% of billboards don’t offer me much benefit. If you know your content is asking a person to pay attention when that person is already paying attention attention to something something else (like the road), road), then you are obligated obligated to keep keep costs low. low. If you are going to interrupt people, at least be brief so people can understand what you’re trying to say. Napster was was music music for nothing. nothing. Billboards Billboards are nothing nothing for, for, if you crash, crash, everything. everything.  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS

 READ EVERYWHERE


4. The youth is rich. In the last chapter I said that young kids caused the cultural revolutions of the 1960s. How was that possible? Why were adults not the ones leading the changes? Kids were able to because they are rich. They have time and energy. Time and energy are the currencies used to create culture with. Adults who work 50 hours a week have less. They have less time to partake in culture. They have less energy to read the science textbooks and maybe not enough to watch the documentaries. This wealth inequality is why culture movements come from the youth. The youth have the resources to make them happen. If you are a kid or a teen and you go to school and you play on the internet and hang with you friends, you are rich. Grade schoolers play patty cake and tell knock knock jokes. Middle schoolers collect trading cards and ride bikes. High schoolers make up slang and buy concert tickets. These are the activities of the wealthy. Going to college, attending class, listening to lectures, writing essays, these are also activities of the wealthy. College is a place where patty caking, bikes riding, and slang inventing gets cheek-tocheek with adult ambitions. The essays and lectures make us think more about politics, religion, ustice, happiness. College students are a mixture time, energy, childishness, and ambitiousness which is why they are the ones who began the Free Speech Movement, anti-war protests, woman’s right movements, sexual assault rights and gay rights rallies. College students are the most grown up rich people. They’re the entrepreneurs of next year’s technology startups. Tomorrow’s chemists are probing petri petri dishes in sorority sorority house basements basements.. Tomorr Tomorrow’ ow’ss economists economists are staring staring at spreadsheets in dorm room lounges. We have accepted maturity and retained out energy. We’ll work midnight to midnight, run fundraisers, volunteer at hospitals, stage Guys and Dolls, and still have time for Tuesday and Thursday intramural basketball. I shouldn’t say “we” since I am not in college anymore. My diploma just came in the mail. This brings me to the concept of established viewers and unestablished viewers. I am an established viewer. I have been watching YouTube for years. I am subscribed to 30 channels which I watch regularly and have a history with. I have my likes and dislikes. I

28

have preferences. When I have three hours of attention to spend, it is more or less pre-decided what content I’ll be watching. I will be watching my favorite channels. My 10 year old cousin is an unestablished viewer. YouTube is a place for him to develop his interests. He uses the search bar and explores. I go to the channels I like, straight to the source. I do not go through a middleman search bar. bar. I don’t go go digging as much. much. My cousin does. He does does not have have favorites favorites yet. He is energetic energetic and searching. I know how finite my leisure time is. I am less interested in potentially wasting my time on a book or movie that is uninteresting or unsatisfying. I am more picky. My cousin could care less. He has no prejudices or expectations. If adults did not work for a living and could spend all day doing what they wanted, Read Free For 30 Days playing patty cake cake and making making up slang, they they would start just as as many trends trends as the the youth do. do. The division between established and unestablished viewers is generally between age but the real divide is between lifestyle. I explain this to ask you: Is your target audience rich or are they poor? Do they have their interests established established already or are they open to newness? Viewers who have time are happy to spend it on content. They are more willing to gamble attention on new sources and try things that are different. They are more willing to huddle around your campfire and light their marshmallow sticks and then run off to ignite the fireplaces of their friends and neighbors. Viewers who do not have time are more selective. They are more likely to stick to the  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS sources of content that they know. They’ll look at your campfire from afar and say, “I wonder what the kids are up to.” 5. Switching cost. Why do movie studios release so many sequels? To answer this question, we can combine our knowledge of demand with our knowledge of cost. The first reason is that a sequel has guaranteed demand. When the studio wants to film its next blockbuster, it can choose to gamble on an original idea and take Pepto Bismol for a year to cure the nervous stomach, or it can make a sequel to an old blockbuster smash and feel confident. I said, “understanding demand helps you feel confident.” This is what I was talking about. When you know your work has demand, you can make the work and know that it’ll be appreciated when it’s done. There is less risk of failure. The second reason sequels are popular is because switching cost are are high. Switching cost is the effort a person has to exert in order to change from something familiar to something new. Imagine you are looking for a movie to watch. There are two options: a sequel to a movie you’ve seen, and a new movie you’ve never heard of. You want to reduce your risk of seeing a bad movie movie and maximize maximize your chance of seeing a good one. one. You You want want to know that your $10 $10 movie ticket is going to get you alot of benefit. You saw the first movie in the series so you know the sequel is going to be somewhat good. You know the characters, the situations, and the style of drama. With the new movie, it’s a big question mark. It could be really good. Or it could be really bad. The choice choice depends depends on how how adventurous adventurous you you are. What What is your appetite for risk? It takes no effort to say, “Let’s see the sequel.” It takes initiative to say, “Let’s see the new movie.” Therefore movies make lots of sequels and people watch lots of sequels. Switching cost is the reason why its easy to order the same thing on the menu at your favorite restaurant. Switching cost is the reason people stay with streaming services they don’t totally love. Finding a new one takes effort. They would have to do research, ask their friends for advice, and eventually transfer their music collection. People stay with boyfriends and girlfriends they don’t totally love for the same reasons.

29

People get back with exes because switching costs are low. They already know the character, the situation, and the style of drama. Conclusion. I do a lot of reading in the bathtub. When I do, my cat, Chance, comes to the side. I dangle my arm over and scratch her head. After some time my arm feels numb and I pull it back in. Chance stands on her hind legs and puts her head on the rim of the tub. I scratch her more. After some time her legs get tired and she goes back down. My arm reaches over the tub and we start the routine over. I hope this cost chapter has not persuaded you to avoid challenging your viewers. I want Read Free For 30 Days you to do that. But I recommend you challenge your viewers after you you get your viewers. I assume you, like me, have zero viewers and no one has heard about your work. Since that is the case, we are trying to go viral. In order to go viral, we have to dangle our arm over the tub. We have to reach. After we've gone viral and we have an audience who is familiar with our work then it's okay to ask them to climb on their hind legs. Until then, Chance should be able to lay on the floor and you’d still get behind her ears. It’s nice of her to be there in the first place. She could have been by the back window birdwatching. birdwatch ing. The people looking at Jean-Michel’s paintings could have been at home looking at memes. Anytime someone shows you attention, see that as a victory. The world is a busy place and there is plenty to do besides checkour content. Stay humble. Continue empathizing with the DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS viewer, being courteous, and minimizing cost and maximizing benefit. For you to read this book, I am asking for several hours of your time and a good helping of your thinking power. I can’t reduce these costs to zero but I can choose to write like Hemingway instead of Faulkner. I can watch lectures of great teachers like Richard Feynman and Martin Luther King Jr., and learn how to explain things in simple terms. The better writer I am, the lower the cost of reading my work. I want to write books about other subjects. But a book about how to go viral has a better chance of going viral. So I chose to write this book instead of the others. I love this book and my heart’s in it, but if I already had ten thousands readers, I’d write about other stuff. I’m focusing where I think there is demand, where I think I can supply something low cost with high benefit, something something meaningful meaningful and true, true, something something people people haven’t haven’t seen before before and something something they’ll be happy to see finally.

30

Chapter 4 Cost (reprise) First question. Why is Einstein famous? What aspect of Einstein’s legacy helps him be a popular, easy-to-remember-and-talk-about piece of content? content? His hair, his tongue, his brain. He’s a genius. He revolutionized physics. Those are good Free Days speed of answers. Einstein realized time and space could be calculated Read relative toFor the 30 constant light. That’s a part of his fame. Especially when he was alive. But now, 70 years after his death, how does he maintain his fame? The answer is: E=mc^2. That equation is beautiful and simple-looking. There are 3 letters and 1 number. A child could remember and recognize this. Children do remember and recognize this. Whenever we need to reference someone being a smarty pants, e=mc^2 comes up. I bet that e=mc^2 has been written on, at some point, every chalkboard. This may be the most famous equation of all time. A^2+b^2=c^2 is in the running too. These are the Mona Lisa and The Starry Night of the equation world. Think about other famous physicists: Niels Bohr, Max Planck, Enrico Fermi, Michael  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS Faraday. Ever heard of these guys? Not really? These are the smartest smarty pants ever but they aren’t big parts of popular culture. They might be if their dissertations didn’t look like 45346/25252-2523522+4-2342+5-245+242-4+2-46+5252525+6-356356*6**6-36*-35*65+53-f*g*r-g/r*g+43*3/6*363+45 Second question. Why do most people believe in god and not gods? Because of cost reduction. Around Jesus’s time religious beliefs transitioned from believing in many gods gods (polytheism) (polytheism) to believing believing in one god (monotheism). (monotheism). If you want your religion to catch on to a new generation, and you expect this to happen every 20 years or so, you have to be good at explaining the religion. You need compelling parables, memorab memorable le lessons, lessons, and a smooth smooth delivery delivery.. Religions depend on going viral. viral. Every few decades they need a new group of kids to really enjoy the content. As this re-telling goes on, year after year, the religions with the best stories survive. The religions with convoluted stories flake off. You may think modern religions are convoluted but relatively speaking they are not. Learn about the religions from back in the day, when there were multiple gods and you’ll have ‘convoluted’ redefined. Imagine a different god for love, for dishonesty, for sun, for rain, for war, for crops, for birth, for death and on and on. This multiplies the storylines, feuds, parables and all the things necessary to pass on the religion. Here comes Judaism and Buddhism and Islam. They have one supreme guy, one almighty, all-knowing, always-present-and-always-has-been guy at the top. If you need to elevator pitch these religion, you can do it. This, like Sega and Nintendo and The Twilight Zone, is maturation. This is cost efficiency improving over the course of generations and competitions. It makes sense that religions went from many gods to one. That’s a more likely transition than from one god to many. The cost is too high to go in that direction. Third question. Why do you know how to read and write? Because there are 26 letters. They’re easy to learn. If you go to the origin of written language, you find Sumerians in 4,000 BC with over 1,000 characters. With that many characters, a very small amount of people have the time and 31

energy to become literate. The written language got slimmed down to a few hundred characters by the Egyptians. Egyptians passed it to more cultures. With each passing, written language became leaner. More people could could adopt it and more more professions professions could could use it for for bookkeeping bookkeeping and history-recording. history-recording. Phoenicians in the year 1,500 BC reduced cost again. They switched mediums from clay tablets that weighed 10 pounds to papyrus that weighed 10 feathers. You could carry words in your hands instead of on your shoulders. They further reduced the alphabet’s hundreds of characters to 22 characters. Why the big reduction? Before Phoenicians, written language used characters to mean objects. A tiny picture of a bird meant meant “bird.” “bird.” A picture of a leaf meant meant “leaf.” “leaf.” That’s That’s why there there were hundreds. hundreds. You You needed Read Free For 30 Days a character for every noun. Instead of having a character for every object, Phoenicians came up with a character for sounds. They chose 22 sounds, gave each sound a letter, and made every word pronounceable through a combination of those sounds. Instead of writing “rabbit” “chicken” “cow” “duck” and “horse” and needing a different character for rabbit, chicken, cow, duck, and horse, we could use characters to make sounds like “ra” “bit” and “chi” “ken.” With 22 sounds, Phoenicians could pronounce anything. Gah-et wah-t I’m s-ay-ing? In the year 800 BC, the Greeks adopted the Phoenician system. They gave it vowels and settled the number of letters, after combining some and dropping others, on 24. This was a lovely number of letters written on lovely paper. Literacy went viral.  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS Greeks took language and used the hell out of it. We were just talking about multiple gods. Greeks loved inventing gods. They were eager to label every natural phenomenon, storm, crop, and ritual with it’s own backstory and cast of characters. You get Homer writing the Odyssey and Illiad , Sophocles writing Oedipus Rex, Thucydides writing the History of the Peloponnesian Peloponnesian War War.. Plato writes The Republic and the Symposium. Aristotle tutors Alexander The Great. Euclid invents geometry. Archimedes approximates Pi and invents the word “Eureka.” Hippocrates, the father of medicine, invents the Hippocratic Oath: “I swear by Apollo the Healer, by Asclepius, by Hygieia, by Panacea, and by all the gods and goddesses, making them my witnesses, that I will carry out, according to my ability and udgment, this oath and this indenture… I will use treatment to help the sick according to my ability and judgment, but never with a view to injury and wrong-doing… Into whatsoever houses I enter, I will enter to help the sick, and I will abstain from all intentional wrong-doing and harm, especially from abusing the bodies of man or woman, bond or free… Now if I carry carry out this oath, oath, and break break it not, not, may I gain for ever reputation reputation among among all men men for my life and for my art; but if I transgress it and forswear myself, may the opposite befall me.” This discussion of written language shows every concept we’ve discussed over the last two chapters: Sumerians demanded a way to keep track of the grain they traded. A content creator invents written language. Egypt’s discovery cost of written language is low because Sumerians traded grain with Egypt and in doing so brought written language to them. Phoenicians changed mediums and reduced cost. The audience size increased from political and religious leaders leaders and war generals generals to shop shop keepers, keepers, pot makers, makers, and and sailors. Greeks just had their culture destroyed by war for the previous 300 years during the Dark Ages. They had a vacuum. Written language was a perfect tool to build back the culture with. 32

After all of this viral design, in the year 2018 we have one god, 26 letters to describe Him with, and Einstein to beautify the numbers behind the scenes. What a pleasant, cost-efficient, content-rich world.



33

 READ EVERYWHERE


Chapter 5 Reaching People Remember this?


What’s hard about that? Putting emotion into a piece of content. Okay. That takes some  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS finesse. Aside from that, what’s tricky? A tricky part is that Step 2 and 3 have to happen thousands of times. Maybe you want to go viral in your friend group. That’s ten people. Maybe you want to go viral in your schoolyard. That’s fifty people. That’s not tricky. But if you want to go viral and get 100,000 fans, making Step 2 and 3 happen over and over can be tricky. Especially since you don’t know 100,000 people. What’s the solution? Find someone who knows 100,000 people. This person is called an influencer. If you can get this influencer to share your content with their 100,000 fans/followers/friends then you will find out if your content is viral-destined. You’ll find out within a day, maybe within a few hours. Sharing happens immediately. When a viewer is in Step 2 and feeling that lightning-bolt-heart-swarm, they’ll share the work. They text the link to their friend. They turn to the friend in the room and say, “Look at this.” That will happen thousands of times an hour when the right influencer shares your work. By right influencer I mean an influencer whose audience demands your work. If you are a comedian, you want a bigger comedian to share your standup video. If you are a musician, you want a bigger musicians to share your song. If a comedian shares your song and a musician shares your standup routine, you may get shares. You may find a special group of supporters in that off-shoot audience. But I’d aim for like-minded influencers. When you do, you get a graph that looks like this:

34


Notice there there are two influencers. influencers. One has 10,000 10,000 fans fans and the other has 100,000 fans.  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS Each one causes their own spike. You need multiple influencers to help you reach the six and seven digit numbers. Once a few big ones share your work, a snowball effect begins. Other influencers discover your work and share on their own. You keep leapfrogging from audience to audience until demand is satisfied. You do not have to orchestrate every share. What you need to do is find the one or two or three influencers to start. Then set-up a beach chair and watch. When an influencer agrees to share your work, the influencer believes in you. You send them your content via email or whatever method you wrangle, and when they say, “I dig this” a halo forms over your head. You feel, “I did it. I put the work in. I stayed up late. I cared about the people I want to reach. Now the right person might share their spotlight with me and give me a chance to earn some applause.” Then someone taps you on the shoulder and asks, What are you thinking about? You say, “I’m proud of myself.” 1. Influencers and the viral moments they caused. Rebecca Black’s “Friday” went viral after Tosh.0 made a blog post about it. Flappy Bird went viral after PewDiePie made a video featuring it. Lana Del Ray went viral when The Weeknd posted post ed “Video Games” on his Tumblr. Tumblr. The routine is: you give content to an influencer. An influencer gives content everyone else. You bring the talent and originality and viral potential, and the influencer sticks you in a crowded auditorium and hands you a microphone. Eminem had Dr. Dre. Without Dr. Dre, Eminem is the world’s most talented rapper. He’s hilarious, inventive, honest, and capable of making albums and albums of music. And he’s living in Detroit with no money. With Dr. Dre, he is immediately famous. He has the ears of a 100,000 people curious curious about about his music. music. Rocky had Apollo Creed. Without Apollo Creed, Rocky is the world’s best fighter. He is passionate and determined determined and running running miles miles and miles miles and has has enough strength to drop any opponent. And he’s living in Philadelphia with no money. With Apollo Creed, he is immediately famous. He has the eyes of a 100,000 people curious about his right hook. The universe had the Big Bang. The universe was full of potential for galaxies, stars, planets, and and human human life, and none of that that would would have gotten gotten a chance chance to develop develop if an explosion explosion at Moment 0 hadn’t happened.

35

If you see something culturally big, it’s likely that a bang proceeded it. There was an initial explosion of momentum that gave the viral-worthy material a chance at realizing its potential. Investors give money to young businesses. That’s economic momentum. Business owners started the business to make money but they need money to start. You made content to become popular but but you need popularity to start. Mona Lisa is famous because of, at least, a half dozen influencers. Walter Pater, tutor to Oscar Wilde, wrote a poetic review of Mona in a London magazine, The Fortnightly Review. This was in 1893 when art criticism was a highly relevant part of society and daily conversation (in demand). Eighteen years later, Mona was stolen from the Louvre which ignited a world-wide hysteria and hunt. In 2003, Mona ended up on the cover of the 9th most printed book of all time, Read Free For 30 Days The Da Vinci Code which sold 80 million copies. Thanks to Walter Pater, the critic, Vincenzo Peruggia, the thief, and Dan Brown, the writer, Mona Lisa retains her popularity well into her sixth century. In Mona’s case you can see how audience-sharing goes both ways. The Da Vinci Code became as popular as it did because of of Mona. Mona kept becoming becoming more more popular because of of The Da Vinci Code. If you go viral, the person who helped you go viral can forever be associated with that success. A little artist gets big. A big artist gets bigger. The most famous influencer is the media. The media is a collection of critics, reporters, and publications that comment on content. In 2014 when Edward Snowden wanted to release his government secrets, he went to the British newspaper, The Guardian. In 2010 when Wikileaks wanted to release the Reykjavik 13 cable, they went to The Guardian and The New York Times.  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS In 1972 Deep Throat went to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post. Deep Throat had viral material. But he knew he couldn’t get it out himself. He went to an influencer who already had a huge audience that would demand this sort of content. The Silk Road went through a growth spurt after Gawker published the first article on it. Napster went went through through a growth growth spurt after after ZDnet blogged blogged about it. The media media rocket-boosted rocket-boosted the popularity. It made the line graph launch vertically. Even the media uses influencers. The media is able to be the biggest collective influencer by talking about, about, bringing bringing onto the show, show, writing writing covers stories about, about, and circulating circulating rumors rumors about, the most popular individual influencers - the musicians, actors and actresses, politicians, and so on. Part of this started in the 1960s at Vogue Magazine. Diana Vreeland, who was editor at the time, was the first to put celebrities on the cover - Barbara Streisand, Cher. This had not been done before. Models were used on the covers, not musicians or actors. The cover was a sacred place for the the model. model. This was was their Everest, Everest, their life-long life-long goal. goal. Magazines didn’t want to give that spot to a non-model. That changed. Diana put celebrities on covers because she loved the celebrities and knew they were worthy and wonderful in their own way. Vogue kept celebrities on covers because magazines sold better with a celebrity’s face than an anonymous model’s face. Broadway musicals have done the same thing. Before the 1980s, Broadway shows hired actors who trained to be Broadway actors. Then they started using movie stars in lead roles. The poster would would say say say,, “Starring BIG STAR YOU KNOW WHO” Whether Whether that star is more more qualified than the best Broadway actor, who knows. We do know the movie star is an audienceswollen influencer who bring popularity to the theater’s content. I tell you these things because I want you to see how simple things are. As far as I can tell, there are no secret methods of becoming popular. The most straight-forward method, the one that has worked for many people whether they did it intentionally or not, is to be as good an artist as they can be and then chirp around until an influencer shines the limelight love on them. Knowing this, you can focus your energy on those two goals. Work your ass off to make good content. Work your ass off to find one or two or three influencers who believe in your content. 36

2. Killer apps. Once you find an influencer, what do you send them? You send them the most emotional, striking, immediate content you have. Send the content that, after seeing it, makes a viewer think, “Who did this? Who made this? I want to see more.” In technology, this content is called a killer app. Killer apps are pieces of content that popularize the source of the content. content. Like a radio radio single single or a breakout breakout hit. For example, do you know what made computers popular? Answer: the word processor. Once the word processor came out and people saw that they could type, write, save, delete, drag and drop, they said, “I need one of these computers. I want to write something.” Read Free For 30 Days Before that people said, “What could I possibly need a computer for?” Businesses adopted computers for a similar reason. The computer’s killer app in that case was the spreadsheet. Businesses said, “I can order numbers around. I can put them in boxes and move the boxes around. I’m glad I got this computer.” You want to send your influencer your killer app. Send them content that makes their brain do a cartwheel. “Where did this come from? How is it possible that this exists?” In Chapter 5, I said the iPhone became really popular. Its killer app was mobile web and eventually, social media newsfeeds and mobile video. Finally there was a reason to own a phone with such a large screen. People came for the mobile web and then stayed, found the app store, the stocks, the weather, and all of the other content. Media companies become popular because of killer apps. The TV show X-Files made the  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS Fox television network popular. Buffy did the same for the WB. Handmaid Handmaid’’s Tale Tale did it for Hulu. House of Cards did it for Netflix. The Thrilla In Manila boxing match match between between Joe Frasier and Muhammad Ali did it for HBO. Sonic did it to the Sega Genesis. Halo did it to Xbox. Pornography and pirated video games did it for the early internet. Pornography was one of the first reasons for a person to say to themselves, “Okay. I’m going sit down and learn how this internet-thing works.” You need pornography. You need something that’s going to make the influencer and their 100,000 fans say, “Okay. I’m going to sit down and learn who this content creator is.” CNN, the news organization, the 24-hour juggernaut was not always a juggernaut. In 1987 CNN was young, unproven, and receiving doubt. People weren’t sure that they needed a 24hour news channel. That was until Jessica McClure, an 18-month-old baby, fell down a well in her aunt’s backyard in Midland, Texas. For 58 hours rescue workers tried to save Jessica. Video footage of the rescue became a national fascination. Across the country mothers, fathers, daughters, and sons watched their TV, bit their nails, and, when Jessica was rescued, cried tears of exhaustion and relief. Then-President Ronald Reagan said, "everybody in America became godmothers and godfathers of Jessica while this was going on." For the first time, there was demand for 24-hour news coverage. In conclusion. I’m showing you dawn. This is the moment where the orange sun brushes away the purple night. Before dawn, no one can see you. Everything is purple. After dawn, you are washed in light. You become visible. This transformation has happened to every thing you have ever heard of. If you’ve heard of it, it was at one point unheard and purple. Then it dawned. The End. You are 17,000 words into this book. You have read all of the basics. You now know how to go viral and puts wings on ideas: Empathize with who you want to reach. Find out what they demand. Think about your loves and hates and see where they overlap with the audience’s demands. Practice, practice, practice. Make content until until you have the finesse finesse to stuff stuff 10 pounds pounds of wow wow into a 5 pound bag low cost, high benefit, emotional arousal at a [10]. Find an influencer who enjoys this sort of

37

content, who has the same loves and hates as you and your target audience. Let the influencer share the work. Turn your neck 90 degrees to the sky and watch the sunrise.



38

 READ EVERYWHERE


Chapter 2 Empathizing with the audience (continued) Fred: Oh? What's empathicalism? Audrey: The most sensible approach to true understanding and peace of mind. Fred: Sounds great, but what is it? Read "empathy" Free For 30means? Days Audrey: It's based on empathy. Do you know what the word

Fred: No, I'll have to have the beginner's course on that one. (pause) Empathy. Is it something like sympathy? Audrey: Oh, it goes beyond sympathy. Sympathy is to understand what someone feels. Empathy is to project your imagination so that you actually feel what the other person is feeling. You put yourself in the other person's place. This dialog is from the movie Funny Face. Audrey Hepburn plays the main character. Audrey, as usual, is right.  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS “In this book, empathy is something that, even when we are not talking about it, we are talking about it.” Chapter 5, 6, and 7 which were about demand, cost, and influencers, were actually about empathy. Chapter 5 is about empathizing with a community. Chapter 6 is about empathizing with an individual. Chapter 7 is about empathizing with an influencer. I don’t know what it was like to be around when the nuclear bomb was dropped. I don’t know what is was like when Talkies came out or when Jean-Michel debuted. I was six when Napster was was released. released. I was -6,000 -6,000 when when the Sumerians put Sumerians put out the first alphabet. But in order to learn the lessons taught by those moments, I empathized. By imagining what it was like to be there, I was able to learn things I otherwise would not have a chance to in my lifetime. The people who were there, who wrote books, were interviewed in documentaries, and made content about their experience, gave me, a boy in the future, something to empathize with. They are my heroes and without them there would be no “how to go viral” book. On the other hand, I give myself credit. I went out of my way to learn. Those books and documentaries aren’t hanging around. I dug. I went from author to author, dud to dud to dud to goldstrike. To dud to dud to dud to goldstrike again. For every historical moment I spoke on, I had to read fifteen others. Even after fifteen duds in a row, I told myself, “There is something here. I’m picking up pieces of it every so often. If I f I pick enough, I’ll have a book.” I was right. Thankfully, I trusted myself. Thankfully, I empathized.

■

1. Design vacations. To go away. To poof. To vanish and be whisked off like a leaf, as aimless as an accident, as gracefully as a rolling marble. This feeling of whoosh is one of the top aims of the human mind, one of the sweetest sensations perceivable. Such alien abductions are commonly caused by smatterings smatterings of colors colors arranged arranged on canvas, canvas, pictures pictures shown shown one after after the other on screen, screen, groups of words spelt and placed on a page, dancers airborne with pointed toes, cartoon characters traveling across a video game landscape - caused by, in a word, art.

39

Art is the horse and we are the carriage. We hitch our selves to the painting, film, or book, and let our feet do the following, the mind the wandering, and our eyes the intaking. Where will art take us? Where will we go? These are questions of sweet anticipation and wonder. Can you relate to a child who smiles when he is told he will be taken to the video game? That is the smile of a traveler-to-be, a person receiving receiving a saddle. saddle. Their Their whoosh is impending. Now then, then, let us take assessment assessment of of a situation, situation, a situation situation that repeats repeats itself a million million times a day in a millions places. Over the course of your career, you may have to cure this situation at least a hundred dozen times. Situation is as follows: man/women sits, possibly at a bus stop, dentist waiting waiting room, room, or empty empty cafeteria. Boredom Boredom creeps, mind mind becomes becomes restless restless and eager but with nothing to eat, nothing to gaze at or ponder towards. Read Free For 30 Days Solution: art. Solution: you. Lift this person from the bus stop, the waiting room, the dull cafeteria. Get their mind away from the mundane moment and away from the daily sameness. Off! We go off. The imagination needs exercise. The imagination is long, sprawling and extends in three hundred and sixty directions. There is too much to explore on one’s own. From time to time, one needs a tour guide and you have been appointed to just such a position. Comedians are tour guides. They have come up with a million ways for us to arrive at laughter. Horror movie directors have paved a million different roads that lead to fear. As a content creator, your job is to add a destination to the map, a new route through the cornfield of good humor, high thoughts, intrigue, and disbelief. Is there a way to cross that stream of consciousness? Can we arrive at wisdom? Perhaps  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS Shakespeare can direct us, or might Francis Bacon have a dirt road or two to recommend? Where are they? Where is their head? Ask the viewer. Find out where they are and where they have been. Viewer, what are your tastes? What do you love? What do you hate? What food would you like to eat and how long should I cook it for? Do you prefer candlelight privacy or stadium seating? Blue beaches or blue glaciers? Will this be an overnight stay or an afternoon adventure? By asking, you can understand what vacations the audience wants to take, what untouched destinations have been tugging on their mind, whispering “Sneak off.” Here are my questions for you, reader: If the sun is out, do you head for the crowded boardwalk boardwalk or for the private rooftop? When When you have have only ten minutes to read before before bed, do you prefer a poem or short story? If I sing, will you sing along? Or would you prefer to listen? Here are my imagined answers: “Creative epiphanies are the destination I am pleased by most. If I can be shown a new trick, a neat perspective, or even a well-timed mirage, I am satisfied and full. Bring me to a volcano where I can ignite my ambition. Pass me near a pond where I can wet my beak and find other birds similarly chirping. Finally, bring me to joy. This location above all, I am most eager to become familiar with.” Knowing this, it becomes my mission to take you to a book where these things are selfevident and the usual topic of conversation. 2. Create for people who share your enthusiasms (and neglect critics). My views on criticism go like this: If somebody wants to go line-by-line with me and explain what they think about my writing, I'd like that. But if someone say, “It's slow.” or “It's confusing.” or “You missed a big point.” I can't listen. It's not that I think they're wrong. It’s that I don't have the time to figure out if they're wrong or right. When you go viral there are many responses. Most of the responses are vague or only a few words long. If someone says this book is slow, they may be talking about a particular passage or or chapter. chapter. But if they don't don't get specific specific then I’m stuck with with an adjective adjective and don't don't know where to put it. The mistake would be for me to think it applies to the whole book. To avoid making the mistake, I don't listen to criticism.

40

The exception is criticism from someone whose opinion I trust like family or friends or from someone who, through the sincerity of an email or message, explains that they really want to tell me something about my book. In that case I'm happy to listen. I want to hear interesting, provocative feedback. I want want to be showed a place in the book where there there is more more to say, say, where there's more gold to mine. If I miss that location, point it out. The problem with virality is the amount of voices is so large that I cannot hear every voice. I have to be okay with flaws in the book and ignored criticism because if I didn't I’d run out of time. I'd never get any work done. A natural question is, “Who is my audience? Who should I be listening to/empathizing with?” Answer: A member of your audience is anyone who is enthusiastic about same things you Read Free For 30 Days are enthusiastic about. The people who get a kick out of life for the same reasons as you are the people worth listening to. They love like you. They care about your work and reply because you have given them a gift and supplied their life with some form of happiness. Their opinions are credible and deserve consideration. You will always remember the first day you receive fan mail. I think that your work work is great. great. I check everyday everyday to see what you’ve you’ve posted. posted. Please don’t don’t stop. That makes everything worth it. You want to cry when you are confronted with someone truly loving your hard work. Forever these comments will lift your spirit. Be conscious of the voices you are letting occupy your time. There are great voices out there, ones that will nourish and motivate. It’s a high to be encouraged by people who believe in  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS you, your friends and family. You’ll stay buoyant because of them. Always save the compliments in your heart. Keep in touch with the feelings of loved ones. Borrow their care. Empathize with their enthusiasm. 3. Act, be another person. You can relive first impressions. You can see your work as if you did not create it, as if you were a viewer, a person walking in off the street. This is done by acting, by being someone else. Be a blank face and experience your content. Feel the impressive parts. Be moved when the work is powerful. Be confused when the work is unclear. Acting is about becoming receptive to the spontaneous thoughts of a viewer and the unintended aspects of your work. You know what you intend. Acting shows the inadvertent. Acting shows a portion of the countless impressions your work could give. To act, is easy. Acting is like singing. It’s easier done than said. Suppose I say, “Squeeze your vocal chords in a certain way and push air.” That description is no good. I’m better off opening my mouth and singing for you. In the same way, acting is easy to try, not so easy to understand if you only read instructions. Anyway, here are instructions.

1. Breathe 2. Allow time to elapse Ha. You know how to act. You act when you sing a song in the shower. You act when you read a fairytale to your little cousins and give voices to characters. Pretending is acting. Forget yourself: wants, needs, tastes, and distastes. Disappear yourself and reappear as someone else. Be your mailman, a goofball funny guy; be your grandma, a best friend who overpraises and understands; watch Planet Earth and act as David Attenborough, the great embodiment of curiosity and intellect and British accentness. Watch a movie and afterward, head to your desk and act as your favorite character. The amount of people you can be is really marvelous. Acting is most lively when you act as people different by age or gender or vocabulary. Act as an insider and outsider, in context and out of context. Each outlook is a lantern. 41

My favorite people to act as are Danny from Oceans 11, the Sundance Kid, David Attenborough, Spock, and Muhammad Ali. They make up a spectrum of personality: sarcasm, cleverness, irreverence, intelligence, and honesty. When diverse personalities mingle with and approach your work in unexpected ways, new aspects are revealed. Perspective is the revelation that comes from acting. Acting shows how little you know of your own art, how independent and vocal it is, how much it could mean to others. You gave it your voice, yet it has its own. You gave it your aspirations, yet it has its own. If you’ve had trouble with being defensive or taking reactions personally, acting is a good way to train out those habits. Acting loosens you up. It's takes the pressure off of being yourself. Act when you wake up, before you put yourself on. Bring your groggy self to your work and, as if the content was live dream, undergo it. Acting comes best when you are relaxed. Find Read Free For 30 Days the content and then let the content carry you away. This is a way of escaping towards revelations nonchalantly. By the time you are done acting, revelations have dawned. Acting puts the back of your brain to work. It is the automatic, impulsive honesty that acting needs. Trust the inner auto-pilot. The best reason to act is, act to see what happens. See what lands on an open mind. With some practice and a few instances of revelation, acting becomes natural. You will ump in and out of character as needed. When you need a break, pull out another face. When your work is puzzling you, give someone else a try. If your work is good and solid but you can not put a finger on what it all means, send in the light-hearted, I-always-see-the-bright-side optimist. Sawye r and, Acting is reading Tom Sawyer and, afterward, as you view your content, wondering what  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS would Tom think? Would he understand it? Would he find it funny? How would he respond? Act and find out. 5. Learn from people. What does one person experience in their lifetime? If we could add up the experiences and throw them in a bucket, what would that look like? It would include a variety of days, countries visited, foods eaten. There would be clothes worn, birthdays celebrated, pets owned. That’s one person and and 80 years is plenty. plenty. There’s There’s a lot to go through through and be enticed by and and build a life around. Compare that bucket of experience to all of the experience experienced by all of the people on Earth Earth throughout throughout all of time. This This includes includes all the lives, lives, all the things seen, seen, all the things talked about by everyone who has ever lived. If you get curious about what's inside that Earth-sized bucket, the way you access that is by being empathetic. empathetic. The moment moment you’re interested interested in not just what what you learn learn in the life life classroom but what the people in other chairs are getting out of the moment, then you have to empathize. It's through emphasizing that you get more ideas, ideas from outside of your bucket. I can only know what I see through my one set of eyes from the one position in space that I occupy. The moment I get curious about all the other people in all the other places on Earth with their diversities of language and problems and family and creative expression then I must listen. I ought to approach every situation, no matter what person is involved, with the attitude, “I have something to learn here.” Keeping this attitude for a straight week, I’m bound to have a streak of prolific learning. If you don’t have many people around you to learn from, watch documentaries. You meet people this way. way. In ninety minutes minutes you can can be brought brought into a foreign world world and empathize. empathize. Whether the subject is immigrants crossing the border, architects building houses on Cape Cod, pilots racing racing airplanes, airplanes, or preachers preachers delivering delivering sermons sermons in Time Time Square, Square, you get to know a new life. Documentaries are a wonderful way to be overwhelmed. During an interview you will see, captured on camera, a person reliving a section of their life. They’ll introspect, have a change of heart, or an epiphany. By talking to the camera they come to new conclusions.

42

This is a double miracle. One miracle is the change of heart. The other is you being able to witness the change of heart that would otherwise be private. A documentary allows you, on your own time, to hear profound conversations. In conclusion. Imagine a machine that lets a person feel what another person feels. That machine would be helpful to an artist. artist. While you, you, the reader, reader, read my book book I’d use the the machine machine to experience experience your experience. Some of my friends have read my work and they’ve given the draft back with highlighter marks on sentences they like. This is helpful. It's helpful to know when a punchline connects, or when a metaphor comes across. I love these drafts. This machine would be a thousand times more helpful than these drafts. I want to know what it felt like to be in the Read Free For 30 Days moment, reading the punchline, the metaphor. Did it dawn gradually or suddenly? Did it stand across the room with its arms wide and slowly walk to you? Or did it fall on your head like a piano? How long did the the aftershock aftershock last? Did the the feeling stay stay with you? you? The intimacy in order of magnitude goes: a conversation about my writing (nice!), a highlighted draft of the best lines (thanks for taking the time!), the feeling machine (I can see clearly now, the rain is gone, all questions are answered, my writing can become supernaturally good). I would use the machine to do research on different professions. What if a character in my story wants to be a firefighter? I know nothing about the profession. What if my character needed to be an ambulance driver? What if my character wanted to be a radio psychic and tell people about their future, the  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS soul of their pet’s ghost, and the soul mate who waits across the sea? With the machine, I’d to tell you what it was like to be a boxer, to throw a punch as quick as a eye blink. I’d tell you what to was like to paint a mural on the side of a building; to read a poem to a crowd. To plead the 5th; to defend my amendment rights; to be falsely accused and prove my innocence. To be caller number 7 on the radio; to win the lottery; to pull the parachute cord in the knick of time. To immigrate from Mexico to America; from Germany to France; from America to India; from Syria to Hungary. To go on a Roman Holiday; walk the Spanish Steps; ride a vespa. I’d know what to get my sister for Christmas; how to console my friend; how to be more patient with with the person person on the the other end end of the phone. phone. If I knew how they they felt, if I knew where they were coming from, I’d be a better person. I’d understand why my cat is staring intently into the corner of the room; I’d have more sympathy for people in trouble; more willingness to help; more humor to keep from crying. I’d have more motivation to pursue my goals; more discipline to write the goals down; more enthusiasm to celebrate the goals when accomplished. Unfortunately we don't have a machine like this. Empathy is our closest thing.

43

Chapter 6 Developing the imagination Sometimes I wonder, “What does the imagination look like?” It’s the home of all of my memories, my likes and dislikes, the foods I’ve eaten, the songs I’ve heard, and the baths I’ve taken. My imagination has stored everything. And somehow more ideas come from my imagination. Old ideas are kept and new ideas are made. If I could see this infinite place, what would it look like? Read Free For 30 Days I think I have an answer. My image of the imagination is that it’s a beach. As far as the eye can see, there is sand and ocean. Foam stretches across miles of seashore where the breeze is warm and sand smooshes under your toes. This beach is covered by thousands of sand castles. Big castles, small castles, decorative castles, beautiful castles, complicated castles. Each castle represents an idea you’ve had. Everytime you think about the idea, its sand castle gets bigger. A sand castle appeared when you saw your favorite a movie, and it got bigger everytime you saw the movie again. A sand castle appeared when you learned algebra and, if you never used algebra again,  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS probably stayed stayed that size forever. forever. Occasionally impossible things happen like a sandcastle washes on shore. A fully-built castle floats in on a wave. This is a spontaneous, intuitive idea that is handed to you when the weather is nice. Receiving a sandcastle like this is can be common. If you’re having a marathon of learning and being inspired, you can get ten sandcastles a day to wash on shore and two or three to wash up in your sleep. Sometimes we sit on the beach cross-legged, using a brush and our fingertips to build the details of an idea. Other times we are using ladders and moving earth, putting our body to the test under a hot sun and building the foundation of skyscrapers. After you have been a content creator for a year or so, you can look back at your beach and see all of the sandcastles you have put together. There are little ones that represent short and memorable things like the weekend you traveled to Sleepy Hollow, Massachusetts with your dad and visited the grave of Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Other castles are big and represent eras of artistic accomplishments. By looking at these, you can see the evolution of your style, when you went from academic to relaxed, from intentionally clever to instinctively clever, from try-hard and exhausting to natural and efficient. We all have Pyramids of Giza and Empire State Buildings of our own. These are the ideas we forged with persistence. We carried miniature versions of these ideas around for our whole life and discussed them at the dinner table, contemplated them before bed, and daydreamed about them through windows. Eventually they became monuments of our identity.

■

44

Below are ways of building castles. 1. Go slowly and be relaxed. When you are thinking, philosophizing, introspecting, and searching a shoreline for inspiration, be cool. Sometimes a castle washes on shore, you work on it, another castle washes on shore, and you realize that you have been listening to Frank Ocean’s Forrest Forrest Gump the whole time. All of that washing on shore and building and washing up again happened in less than 3 minutes and 15 seconds. This goes to show, when in a vibe, ideas come easily. Ideas come easily when you are easygoing. Read Free For 30 Days 2. Do yoga. Yoga gets you in touch with your little muscles, the ones that play a background position. Usually you don’t talk to them. When you do, they will respond with ahhhh. This is true for all people. Stretching feels good like getting your head scratched or your foot rubbed or your hand massaged. Any day of the week, any mood you're in: it feels good. Lay on the floor. You’ll feel bigger than a mattress, bigger than the room itself. As you bend to reach reach your toe, toe, you’ll feel little muscles muscles in your your ankle. Little muscles muscles in your lower lower back back come to life and so do ones on the side of your back and ones connecting your hip to your lower back and ones ones connecting connecting your big toe to the back of of your ankle. ankle. It feels good. good. Add the time element. You're doing this for ten minutes. Your mind relaxes. You are  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS focusing your attention on what’s going on inside the ankle. That place is a new place for your mind to go. The ankle is bending more. It’s becoming flexible. The lower back is bending more. You're sinking into the pose. You're finding more room inside yourself. 3. Dwell. Watching a tree branch wave in the breeze is soothing. Hearing drops of rain pitter-pat on the roof is soothing. Putting your head on your lover’s chest is soothing. What do these things have in common? Staring into a campfire is soothing. Sitting in a rocking chair is soothing. Sleeping in a car is soothing. The common element is rhythm - calm, repetitive rhythm. When one of our senses are given a rhythm, we get mellow. We get goo-goo eyes and goo-goo eyes help us daydream. These goo-goo daydreams are high quality. They go for minutes, lead themselves like a dog walking its trainer, and seem to have at their disposal our most coordinated cognitive abilities of critical thinking, metaphor invention, and memory recollection. Put another way, dwelling is fishing your mind’s sea. You are staring at the tide go in and out and then suddenly you are transported 50 yards ahead, on a boat, staring at a row of fishing rods with lines dipped. These are the open waters of imagination. Ideas float near the surface, welcoming a hand to scoop them. You find epiphanies. You find nonsense. You find ideas pooling in your palm. The lottery is fun. When dwelling, be sure to have solid time. Some ideas take a while to fish. Some do not come up until other fish are caught first. These are the compound ideas, the ones that small ideas come from. Sometimes you find an idea to the south, one to the north, one to the east, and despite their distance, they point to the same direction. By going in that direction, you find the bigger idea that these smaller ones spawned from. To do this traveling, you need solid time. If you have trouble getting a hold of solid time, if daily life has too many non-fishing obligations, be negligent. Forget to fulfill obligations so often that you are no longer asked to do them. Say, “I should go. Fish need catching. Please understand.” This feels wrong at first but it will feel right once you start catching big ones. Newton was not doing dishes when he caught the apple on his head. He was fishing.

45

4. Fixate. (Stare at what you love.) As dwelling ends, you transport back to the shoreline. A basket on your side sits full of idea-fish. You lift a fish out and it turns to sand. Every fish turns to sand and falls into its own castle. After the fish are unpacked, you get in a hammock and go to sleep. Dwelling over. Sleep until the next day. Can we improve this routine? Can we get more out of dwelling, more out of our fishing trips? I think so. We can fixate. Read Free For 30 Days How? Think about one fish and one fish only. If possible, jump into the fish and spend an afternoon in its belly. Practice on this book. See each word as if it was the only word. See each sentence as if it was the last sentence of the book. Fixation is thinking about one specific thing. Dwelling is thinking for solid time. When you practice both, you have a relaxed mind that can perform creative feats regularly and fast. The more you fixate, the easier it becomes to fall into a mellow state. Eventually you can fixate while doing the doing the dishes. You can go fishing at will. Most of the time though you’ll be fixating when looking at a painting or listening to music  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS or resting your head in your mate’s lap. Fixate on things you love. Think about your lover. Think about the music. You drift back and forth. You are thinking about the music and then you are in her lap again and then you are back with the music and then you are back in her lap again. Each time it feels like wherever you are is everything the world consists of. 5. Indulge your instincts. Put a farmer in a field and he's going to sing. Put a hiker near a campfire and he's going to tell stories. Pick any person on any continent of any age, of any wealth or circumstance and he and his neighbors will be cracking jokes, painting, gaming, gossiping, kissing, and engaging all forms of being expressive. Being expressive is a natural thing people do. Animals have lot of instincts. There are birds who know how to fly to different continents without being told, and insects that know which flower amongst hundreds they must visit. We are born knowing just about nothing other than how to suck on a nipple and express ourselves. A baby's doing two or three things at most: laughing or crying or pooping. All three are forms of expression. Expression is the closest thing we have to instinct. Expression is what’s most natural. We sing songs to remember our loved ones. We take photographs to add to our memory. We make clothing because we have pride in our appearance. We tell stories because we like to laugh. When I was eight years old I went to church often. When I was bored, I would play I Spy with myself. I would look at the center altar and the golden cross in the recessed wall, the stained glass that ran around the walls, the gold Tabernacle to the left of the altar, the stands of pink and purple purple candles, candles, the wires wires that ran ran across the ceiling for, for, I imagined, imagined, trapeze artists artists to swing on during celebrations. I stared at the details and carvings of these objects. When I was five years old my mom took me to a toy store. In the store was a toy of Nala, the female lion from The Lion King. At my local library there was toy chest with a Simba toy. It was my favorite. When I saw the Nala, I put her in my pocket with intentions to reunite the lion lovers. After we left the store, my mom saw me clutching my pocket and asked what I had. She made me return the lion and apologize to the storekeeper. When I was ten years old, we had Talent Day at school. Every fifth grader decorated a poster board board with things that that represented represented a talent of theirs. Mine Mine was drawing. drawing. I loved doodling. doodling.

46

I loved making Pokemon comic books, Where’s Waldo, and Captain Underpants remakes. The next day, parents came to look at the class’s poster boards. A father came to mine and said, “These are nice. Eventually are you going to add some shading? Some third dimension?” I was offended. These were the greatest drawings. The idea that there could be more or that you could feel anything other than awe was alarming to me. The I Spy, the matchmaking, and the doodling were instincts. I did them for fun. No one told me to do these things. I just did them for fun. Because I did them for fun, when I decided to start a career as a writer, learning how to write was easier. By indulging in creative work for no reason, I had readiness to do creative work for some reason. 6. Vibe. Read Free For 30 Days It's like my kitten does some nights: she sits in front of her cat door that leads to the basement basement where she goes poop. She sits in front front of this paper door door and presses presses her paw it as if she was pushing a doorbell. She does this for minutes, sometimes sticking her head through, looking around and then pulling back. Then she goes furiously at it, patting the door quickly like someone playing the piano. This activity never gets old for her. It's engrossing the whole time. Once I was sitting in the Museum of Modern Art across from a Monet painting. The painting was was of water water and lily lily pads and fish and it was 25ft 25ft long and and stretched stretched across the room. room. I looked at this painting for an hour. Once in a while I would remember to blink and when I did it felt like two gates were closing in front of me, or like the hatch of a submarine was sealing shut. When I opened them, waves poured at me. My museum bench was parked in the surf. I saw a blue spot and staredat DISCOVER it for 15NEW minutes. After a blink, I moved my eyes five BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS degrees to the right and saw another spot. This spot was much darker blue than the first. This shift in color amazed me. I couldn't believe so much excitement was waiting a short hop over. The first blue spot was overwhelming. Paint splatters swam in schools. They practiced swim routines. One paint drop was swimming across the blue spot, encouraging the other paint drops to organize into shapes and form a theater company. The drops coalesced, pulled in on themselves, and then spun out into a star shape. They performed a 3-act play involving a drop of painting getting getting separated separated from its father. father. During the young drop’s drop’s search, he he made friends with with other paint drops and eventually learned two lessons 1) how to be independent as well as 2) how much his father meant to him. The father and son were reunited in the third act. Realizing there was another blue spot so close to my first one, equal in its complexities and theatrics, was an astonishing fact. I took a breathe and stared at the deeper blue spot for another blink. My best friend Tom told me that when he was young, six or seven, he had a video tape. This was a tape of Rugrats, the cartoon about adventurous babies who learn how to get along in the world as infants while hilariously mispronouncing adult words like, "Tired home" instead of "retirement home." On this tape were two episodes of the show and between the shows was a commercial for Dorney Park. Dorney Park is an amusement park near our houses. It has waterslides and rollercoasters. Tom would rewind this commercial over and over. He loved watching it. It was as captivating as the cartoon. This sort of engrossment, the type experienced by my cat playing with the door, me looking at the blue spot, and Tom looking at the Dorney Park ad, is the type of engrossment I try to fall into during my daily writing. I try to experience a vibe for myself and get that vibe into my writing. If I'm writing about a movie, I watch some of the movie, pause, and let my brain write out onto the page. I am in a vibe. That same vibe, I hope I capture on the page, and when I read it back, I can be there again. Vibing is about making something that engrosses me while I do it, that I have focus on and jazz towards, and then being able to revisit that feeling when I view the work later. My three examples are of a cat, a teen in a really relaxed mood, and a child. It's for this reason that I believe doing art is easy. Feeling good about something and letting that thing take us, is letting our mind take its natural course. Our mind wants to be stimulated. It wants to enjoy itself.

47

If I ever feel like writing is hard, I take a break. I try to be loose, to be flexible enough to fall into whatever groove is present at that moment. Sometimes the groove is obvious, and I fall in, and enjoy myself. These paragraphs are examples of that. I had something to say, and I enjoyed saying it. I get a kick out of sharing stories and being nostalgic. The art I make while I'm grooving is always creative and unexpected. I stand back and think, Wow. ow. I goofed and made that? This relationship between being nonchalant and making good work is one of the things that endeared me to art. I’m not attracted to art if it means hard labor. I don't want to suffer. I want to do it for fun. 7. Become intimate. If you want to be a photographer, tape the camera to your forehead. If you want to be a Read Free For 30 Days musician, replace your Teddy Bear with your guitar. The more time you spend with the book between your nose and the paint paint brush in your paint-stained paint-stained hand, hand, the sooner sooner you create a lifelifelong bond with the craft. See that your library has a certain number of shelves and a certain number of books. As the days go by, the shelves gain more books and the books more neighbors. Each one represents a few hours of quiet time spent reading with your feet on the bed and your head in contemplation. 8. Place yourself in the background. To get to know a castle and what happens inside, become its wallpaper. Be a listener. Remove yourself from the action. Listening is a way of being involved without getting involved. To practice, sit in a train station or coffee shop and hear the volley of a conversation. Let  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS your ear be caught. If two people are arguing, avoid thinking I agree agree or I disagree. disagree. Be interested not in your own leanings but in the stances themselves and what they reveal about the speakers. During the moment, the bubble of time where art meets you, be unconcerned with analysis and logic. Ignore what may be fair or unfair, organized or backwards. During the live experience, shhhhh. Let the moment happen. Let the moment hit you on its time. You want to be so still that birds land on you, so still that statues wonder where you get your patience from. Thankfully art can do this to you. Ella Fitzgerald’s voice can turn you into a statue. This statuesqueness heightens your senses. It turns your ears into funnels. Your eyes become magnetic, magnetic, toes become become Richter Richter scales. This is artistic participation in its rawest form. This is what the artist wanted, and it is going to get you the most educational experience. After you become good at listening to art, you can use your imagination to make the art even more than it is. Next time you hear a song, listen as if you had never heard music before. Imagine the song is the first song you have ever heard. How wonderful it would be then. How much more intensely you would attend to the sound. Hear as if the singer was in front of you, live and in the room, swinging themselves and gesturing to you. Read a book as if the author was typing live. The author is sitting in front of you and the hammers are banging the words in existence. Both you and the writer are seeing them for the first time. The letters hit the page like newborns. Each one has a life of its own. 9. Read the words of men and women who think freely. Books are good ways to learn. They give you alot to think about in a short amount of time. Some books have been written by artists. Some of these are autobiographies, published diaries, and compilations of personal letters. These can connect you to the words of a free person, to a person who who lived how how they wanted wanted to. Once Once you read these, you’ll you’ll get hooked. hooked. I was reading the compiled letters of Dalton Trumbo, a screenwriter from the 1950s. He was in front of the House of Un-American Activities Committee. The committee was questioning his political beliefs. He said, more or less, “You cannot criminalize thought. I am allowed to believe what I want to believe.” Many people would plead the fifth amendment in this situation. Dalton plead the first. He plead Freedom of Speech.

48

After the trial, he explains to his friend how he felt like he was hovering above the court room, as if the events were happening to someone else. That is how he was able to keep his cool. That is inspiring. It’s hard for me to imagine myself being that mature and clear-headed but when when I read stories like this I see that that it is possible. possible. I was reading the essays of Ray Bradbury and told my Dad, “Ray talks about a cheap ceramic gorilla statue he got in the mail as a kid. He got it for sending in the wrapper of a package of macaroni. macaroni. When the gorilla arrived, it it received as as big of a reception as David did when Michaelangelo unveiled him.” I thought this was an amazing comparison. I said, “I don’t know if I’ll ever be this colorful and sophisticated.” My Dad said, “You are stupid if you think you can’t be as good as Ray Bradbury.” I was reading Martin Luther King Jr. and he said, more or less, “You cannot hate white Read Free For 30 Days people. Despite Despite experiencing experiencing violence violence from white people people you cannot cannot look at them as animals. animals. You have to love them. There is no sense in receiving freedom if you become hateful during the process.” It’s much easier to achieve great things when you see someone else doing something great first.

Here are books to get you started: DIARIES  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS Pope John XXIII Frida Kahlo (painter) Keith Haring (painter) Susan Sontag (writer, On Photography) Franz Kafka (writer, The Castle, The Trial ) Virginia Woolf (writer, A Room Of One’s Own) H.L Mencken (newspaperman) Karen Horney (psychologist) Anne Morrow Lindbergh (writer, Bring Me A Unicorn Unicorn) Sylvia Plath (writer, The Bell Jar ) George Orwell (writer, 1984) Anne Frank, (writer, Diary of Anne Frank ) Mark Twain (writer, The Adventures Of Huckleberry Fin )

 READ EVERYWHERE


PERSONAL LETTERS Leo Tolstoy (writer, War and Peace) E.B. White (writer, Charlotte’s Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little) Vladimir Nabokov (writer, Lolita) Arthur Conan Doyle (writer, Sherlock Holmes) Jane Austen (writer, Pride and Prejudice) John Steinbeck (writer, Of Mice and Men, Grapes of Wrath ). George Bernard Shaw (writer, Man and Superman) Pope John Paul I (writer) (writer) AUTOBIOGRAPHIES William Butler Yeats (poet) David Carr (newspaperman) David Attenborough (broadcaster) Malcolm X (preacher) INTERVIEW COMPILATION by Peter Bogdanovich , interviews with filmmakers Who The Devil Wrote It by by Mike Sacks, interviews with comedians Poking a Dead Dead Frog by by Studs Terkel, interviews with people at work Working by Film And Theater Theater Interviews Interviews by Studs Terkel Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artist’s Writing, Edited by Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz

49

ESSAYS A Testament Of Hope: The Writings And Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. The Pleasure Of Finding Things Out by Richard Feyman (physicist, Manhattan Project) The Theater Essays by Arthur Miller (playwright, Death of A Salesman) The Adding Machine by William S. Burroughs (writer, Naked Lunch Lunch) Staring Point by Hayao Miyazaki (director, Spirited Away) Yestermorrow by Ray Bradbury (writer, Fahrenheit Fahrenheit 451) The Boy Who Could Change The World: The Writing of Aaron Shwartz The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of Writings Ideas and Opinions by Albert Einstein. (physicist, Theory of Relativity) An Open Mind by Robert Oppenheimer (physicist, Manhattan Project) REFLECTIONS ON ART The Spooky Art by Norman Mailer. Rodin on Art and Artists (sculpture, The Thinker) On Writing by Stephen King On Writing by Ernest Hemingway On Writing by F. Scott Fitzgerald Art of Acting by Stella Adler Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud Design Is A Job by Mike Monteiro


11. Imitate. Whether you are looking at the moves of a Joffrey dancer, the lecture of a biologist, the sonnets of Emily Dickinson, or a dress designed by Valentino, you are looking at wet sand. They are available for your castles. When reading NEW BenBOOKS Franklin’s autobiography, took himDIGITAL a  DISCOVER  READ EVERYWHERE which  BUILD YOUR READING LISTS thousand-some odd hours to write, you can finish the whole thing in three hours and receive the benefits of his deep thought. Then you take take forward forward those same ideas ideas and contribute contribute your your own 1,000 hours. Whenever you feel compelled to borrow, borrow. By borrowing, you receive. You receive new ideas that bring your thinking to new beaches. Your mind is given coordinates to a place it has never been. Welcome. Explore and have a walk. If you are in love, you are in luck because you may revisit here again for as long as you live. If you discover the work of Oscar Wilde when you are twenty five years old and spend a summer reading his life’s work with his poems Grey on the nightstand, and one-liners plucked from essays and stacked on your carpet, Dorian Grey tried out on your friends during dinner table conversations, conversations, then when you are thirty five years old you may do it all again, anew, and with nostalgia, the weight of progress, and Oscar’s wit as it grew through you for the past decade. Everyone has memories of moments where they were introduced to artists and art styles. Maybe it happened when listening to their sister’s music collection, getting lost in a museum hallway, or talking to the saxophone player in the subway. Whichever way you stumble, stumble often. By vacationing through other people’s beaches, you can bring new perspective to your work and practice new relationships with it. As staring at a light bulb leaves the bulb’s impression on your vision, so too does staring at someone else’s work. The work you make in this mixed state is always be original and curious. Mel Blanc imitated Bronx and Brooklyn accents and came up with the voice of Bugs Bunny. Elvis imitated James Dean and Marlon Brando’s mannerisms and came up with his own steelyeyed, rebel expression. Keith Haring imitated Disney’s style. Martin Scorsese imitated Federico Fellini. Steve Martin, when hosting his first Academy Awards, imitated Johnny Carson’s Academy Awards hosting. Each of these greats became greats by borrowing from greats. 12. Mingle with the drunks. You have to see Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire. You have to because it will put you on your ass. It has already put millions millions of people on millions of asses. The movie movie is Streetcar is moonshine, guaranteed to purify. A Streetcar is one of the purest distillations of human feeling assembled in one movie-length shot glass; one part screenplay, one part actor, one part production, production, and many many parts honest-to-s honest-to-sky ky serendipity serendipity..

50

Listen to Martin Luther King's, 'I Have A Dream Speech.' Listen to the voice recordings of the astronauts as they stepped on the moon. Read the last page of The Great Gatsby and watch Charlie Chaplin's 'The Great Dictator' speech. Once you go, you’ll keep going. You’ll become an arrow, arrow, pursuing pursuing the potent potent moments moments in art. You’ll notice notice that these these moments moments mirror mirror the potent moments in civilization. As civilization progresses and electricity is invented and running water is routed and gold is minted, artists scribble and inhale the magic. Take your pick of any civilization-shaking idea or product: democracy, the combustion engine, the air plane, the motion picture, the bill of rights. There you will find a renaissance of artists overdosing on inspiration. The air is so thick that you can't walk around without contracting the urge to write a poem or or sing a song. song. Art becomes becomes like a cough cough that you can’t can’t hold in. The proof of this pattern pattern is recorded and dated in the Library of Congress and filed under, ‘deemed culturally, historically Read Free For 30 Days and aesthetically significant.’ See for yourself. See what everyone was talking about then. Why did the Library think such-and-such film is significant? Do you? Were you knocked on your ass? If you want to be creative, take a drink from the bar. Every taste is accounted for. The shelf is stocked with more than you can drink in ten lifetimes, and a whiff from a coaster is enough to get you dizzy. Three cheers for you, Mr. Student. Remember, no one is going to test you. There is no exam at the end of the movie. You cannot fail out of the museum. There is no such thing as drinking too slowly. I hope to see you dancing, singing, paying compliments, bantering, laughing at, crying during, being offended by, and most importantly, enjoying, enjoying, enjoying. By drinking art, you will discover a precious thing: your reaction. Your reaction, the evidence of being alive, is  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS art. A person experienced in reacting can drink a painting and immediately throw up a poem. That makes today exciting. Even a pessimist has to admit. The internet exists. Shakespeare has left all of his plays for us to read. Woody Allen has been on stage. So has Abraham Lincoln, Allen Ginsberg, Dustin Hoffman, and plenty of other bright people. The Beatles have sang. Ella Fitzgerald sang. John Coltrane played. And now their work is lying around. The work is stacked to the ceiling in $0.99 bins at used book stores and record shops. You can leaf through them whenever. With that much material to be inspired by, there is every reason to be not sober. One of my first jobs was at a magazine and it was then that I realized, now that I was sitting with writers and editors, that I ought to learn how to write and edit myself. I walked to the local book store and on a table were two books, Zen In The Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury Writing by Unpleasant Facts by George Orwell. I did not know who these drunks were but I do and Facing Unpleasant know that in high school I had been assigned to read books of theirs. I picked up both and when I went to pay, the clerk at the register said, “Good choices. You’ve got both ends of the spectrum.” I nodded and smiled but wasn’t sure what she meant. As I read the books I realized that she was referring to Ray being a happy-go-lucky guy and George being a bar fighter. At some point in reading these books the thought dawned on me, These are about something! I realized that books, and probably all other forms of art, were actually interesting. They probably had something to say, something to intoxicate me with and make me think. This was the beginning of my career career as a writer writer and ever ever since I have been tipsy. tipsy. 13. Have sex. Sex is key. Have it as much as possible, especially when you are young and first discover it. Find every occasion and every location. Each time is a new mystery solved, a new way of being alive that works works real well. well. Pay attention attention to how it feels. You’ll notice that it’s it’s the best best thing ever. Mother Nature knew what she was doing. There was one thing that was crucial for us to know. Sex is best. Mother Nature equip us to know this fact well.

51

14. Be lawless. Put rules in the trashcan. When it comes to using creativity and making contact with the special, one-of-a-kind, never-before-seen, carnival of potential which sits inside you, rules are beyond unhelpful. unhelpful. If you are are a writer, writer, have have no rules rules about adjectives. adjectives. If you are a photographer photographer,, have no rules about proportions. If you are a filmmaker, have no rules about pacing. To use rules is to build a sticky-walled box for yourself, hop in, and eat the key. You can, of course, get the key out and free yourself, but it is slow and uncomfortable and involves pushing. Guidelines are fine. Rules of thumb are okay. Best practices can be good starting points. But for muse’s sake, do not hold them too tightly, do expect them to crumble after use, and do oin us on a journey without signposts, maps, or pre-decided destinations, which is the real and true journey of an artist. Every second your body makes new cells and thus your internal makeRead Free For 30 Days up changes again. So it is with the ideas that populate your creative spirit and the people that populate the the world we live in. Change is ever-present, ever-present, innovation innovation is ceaseless, and the thing thing you make that will startle the world will be a product of your freedom, spontaneity, intuition, and unembarrassed heart. Rules do nothing for that chemistry. That chemistry is achieved through persistence, persistence, the pursuit pursuit of pleasure, pleasure, and a honesty-above-all honesty-above-all attitude. attitude. So, as best as we we can, let us us make a commitment to welcome surprises, and forever and ever, seek our own solutions. 15. Learn forever. During the first two decades of life, from babyhood to early twenties, we gulp, guzzle, swig, and sponge the sights and sounds of our world. During the third decade, ages twenty and on, we re-direct our energy. We switch from  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS consuming to producing, from eating to cooking. Less time is spent watching TV, listening to music, traveling, reading books, and learning about new ideas. More time is spent expressing ourselves, sweating it out, and going. Remember, while sweating it out and going, stay curious. Continue to be a student and a baby and a reader. reader. Studying is the the fountain of youth. If you study enough, enough, you will will eventually eventually be studied. Conclusion. After you have stuffed your head full of the art, you will discover your favorites. Favorite art has a special impact on you. This impact is so special that I say it is the best thing in life. Art is arguably the best thing in life already. Raising children is a contender. I consider parenting an an art anyway anyway.. Sex is a contender contender.. My definition definition of art includes includes sex so no contest contest either. But favorite art is indisputably indisputably the best thing in life. Enjoying your favorite things is when you remember the corny jokes that makes you laugh and the slow guitar that makes you feel happy tears. When you revisit those moments you are reminded about who you were and who you became. Life, Life, for all of of its progress, progress, is not so different. different. You are still still a sucker sucker for the same same things. things. That is a fresh revelation. I am old me and a new me. I am who I was and I am who I am. My present self is my past self plus the between time. When I was young I had figures of Pokemon. Now I have figures of Isaac Newton, Ben Bradlee, and Martin Luther King Jr. These figures are not on my shelf like the Pokemon were. They are in my heart and mind and paper. Having this roster of artists accompany me through life is as good as it gets. The more I love my favorites, the more of my life is comprised of love.

52

Chapter 7 Staying productive productive Last chapter was about developing a vivid imagination. The big lessons taught were 1) relax and 2) be open-minded. This Productivity chapter will, for different reasons, come to the same conclusions. To get to those conclusions, we start with a statement: anything you do many times, you become good at. Read Free For 30 Days We can read this statement as: Doing something many times = becoming good at it. If you lived forever, you could become a masterful painter and musician and film director and writer. Every skill is available. The question is, do you have 10,000 hours to spend painting and then another 10,000 composing and then directing and writing? Probably not. But you have enough time to do at least one or two of those things. After picking a thing to do, the next problem to solve is: what motivates us to do this activity over and over? When I wake up tomorrow, what will motivate me to sit at my desk and write? There are several answers.  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS

Motivation = ?? + ?? + ?? + ?? + ?? + ??

 READ EVERYWHERE


We’ll go through the ??’s one at a time. 1. Fun. The most common motivation is fun. You’ll use fun every day. It’s the most important short-term motivation, and it’s also the root of love, which is the most important long-term motivation. People who are very good at having fun know how to have fun with every step of the artmaking process. They have fun scribbling on a blank page, fixing up a scribbled-on page, and performing performing the final final scribble live. Most of of us have fun with with at least some of of this process. process. Some Some love the blank page but not editing. Some like editing but not the blank page. I say: 1) Do the things that are naturally fun for you. Do them often. Become really great at them. 2) Find the parts of the art-making process that you do not have a natural attraction to. Then commit yourself to digging into them and finding a place where fun exists. When I started to write, I did not have fun with grammar. But I studied clauses and semicolons. Now I can use grammar with ease. Writing feels more like flying now that I know how to use a hyphen properly. The same transformation happened when I learned public speaking. Once I could talk into a microphone, writing became a superpower. Without grammar or public speaking, I had a lid on my potential. On the other hand, I always had fun reading. That was my easy strength. I could read a book peacefully peacefully during a fire drill. I took this naturally fun activity and discovered ways to have more fun with it. My Dad and I made a routine out of driving to libraries and used book stores. We’d walk in and ask, “Any books for sale? Will you take $1 per book if I buy five books?” We We learned to haggle. Now we love making conversation conversation and meeting meeting the locals.

53

2. Desire to take chances. Okay. Motivation = fun + ?? + ?? + ?? + ?? + ?? What else? The desire to take a chance. Taking a chance is something you will be doing thousands of times. Asking your boss if she would read your rough draft, is taking a chance. Opening your word document and writing, “Hello world” is taking a chance. Every little thing you do is a chance taken. It’s fun to take chances. It’s fun to see what happens when you apply effort and intention, when you see a hazy version of what might be and then fan away the fog and reveal a spectacular sight. Read Free For 30 Days When my Dad and I look for used books, there is a lurking excitement. This excitement shows itself when we find a bookshop with a sign that says, “Everything on this shelf is $0.50” We are cheap. $0.50 is the right number. That lurking excitement is called the thrill of the hunt . Thrill of the hunt is similar to the thrill of the chance. Try to take a MAYBE and turn it into a SOMETHING . Every word I type is a chance. I don’t know the result of the word until I type it out. I don’t know how the photograph looks until I take it. Every moment in art-making is about taking a chance and discovering a result. are your After some months of art-making, you’ll know the following fact vividly: you are chose to solve, the solutions you invent, the pathways you chances. You are the problems you  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS walk down. You decide when to follow the compass or when to follow whim, or when to combine the two. One day, after finding fun in chance taking, you will find that taking chances has become automatic and smooth. Your intuition can spot the truth in a crowd. Your intuition can look at a seed and see the tree, look at a sentence and see the book it leads to. 3. Desire to flow. Now the equation is: is: Motivation = fun + desire desire to take chances + ?? + ?? + ?? + ?? What next? Flow. Flow is when you move perfectly. Flow is when the chances you took in your past and the fun you had, mix inside you and make your muscles big and brain move quickly. All of your limbs feel coordinated. Your mind feels clear. You gain an exaggerated sensitivity to the right answers. This allows you to act spontaneously, without thinking. Scientists explain flow as brain signals traveling from your eyes and ears directly to your muscles without traveling through your frontal lobe. If the information was to go through your frontal lobe, then you’d say to yourself, “Should I go left or right?” If the information skips the lobe, you say to yourself, “I’ll just pick a direction and go. Forks in the road don’t slow me down.” Flow is how artists are able to be prolific. Flow is how you can work all day long and feel refreshed afterward. To access flow, you have to be be good at making decisions. People can flow because they already talked to a thousand forks in the road and asked, Where am I coming from? Where am I headed? How can I solve you? They sat on the floor and started dwelling and fixating with their frontal lobe. After some months of traveling, forks became easy. The correct side became obvious. Flow took over. If you scanned someone’s brain while they flowed, you would see all blues and greens. They are relaxed. A runner running his fastest race is relaxed. He's He's in perfect form doing exactly

54

what his body has practiced. Same is true with a surgeon making precise, complicated decisions with efficiency and ease. The ease. The runner and the surgeon are doing something they have done thousands of times. We want this effortlessness. We want to make art like it ain’t no thang. The road to flow goes: make art, release art, learn from the impact, repeat. Create again and again and each time learn new things. Some projects begin and end in twenty four hours. You get bit by an idea bug, transfer the venom from your mad mind to the content in hurried fashion, and then collapse on your bed in a sweat of good fatigue. Other projects last months. Every week you undergo a knock to the head and shift of vision. You challenge yourself to change, to remain, to adapt, to be firm, to be emotional, to be sober, to be free-thinking yet rigorous, fantastical yet practical. You go through rainy and sunny, rainy and sunny, flood and Read Free For 30 Days drought, flood and drought. Then, when your dues are paid and you have experienced the process enough to consider yourself a resident of it like a gardener does their garden or a surfer does their wave, you reach bliss, the post-fluctuation, post-fluctuation, steady steady pleasure, also known known as grace, grace, flow, flow, oneness, oneness, connectedness, connectedness, all-encompassing mind, body, spirit, past, present, future “yes”-ness. Your fingertips are so well practiced that that they can masterpiece masterpiece without instruction. instruction. Making Making art has become become second nature. 4. Desire to achieve dreams. Our equation is getting more full. Motivation = fun + desire to take chances + desire to experience flow + ?? + ?? + ?? The newest addition is: wanting to achieve your dreams.  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS Wanting to achieve your dreams is like wanting to take a chance. They both are about trying. The difference is that taking a chance happens daily. Taking chances happens when you get out of bed and take a shower. Achieving your dreams is motivation that, instead of sitting at your fingertips at all hours, sits in your heart. It is a stronghold. The dream is especially important on days when you don’t have much fun, don’t flow, and your chances aren’t immediately fruitful. When you are exhausted and considering not making art the next day, remember the dream. The dream is a well-developed, vivid castle in your mind. Mine is this: write a book on how to go viral and, in the process, become a good writer. Get the book to people. Become a full-time author and make enough money so my mom, dad, and sister can quit their jobs or pursue whatever jobs they want. Once they are set, help my friends achieve their dreams. Once I do that, I have achieved my dreams. When I think of those things, I feel motivated to work. My dream is why I’m here, at the keyboard. I see a future that can happen and ought to happen and a way to make it so. I’m 25. I’m in the extra innings of my youth. This is the last chance for me to pull off a major art project before the real world gives me a W-2. So you see, the course of action is obvious. Work I must do. I must indulge in working and do what I imagine is possible. This is the time it happens. I happen now. There have been approximately 90 billion people before me. There will be billions after. For this sliver in time, I am here. I am awake. I have dreams supported by a mind and body that can fulfill them.

■ The next ?? is a good attitude attitude. A good attitude is several ideas put together. Good attitude = ?? + ?? + ?? + ?? + ??

55

5. Feel lucky. By looking at the past, we can see a bunch of people who were unluckier than us. If you are reading this book, you have a chance to be an artist. If you are from the past, you probably did not. I’m thinking about the people born before 1950 when a video camera could not be found in the possession of an ordinary person. I remember when I was a kid, my grandfather wheeled in a camera that weighed 70 pounds. It took 24 hours to charge and could hold 60 minutes of footage. We are lucky. This is what I preach. My grandparents were too busy immigrating to make art. My dad realized he loved reading and writing at the age of 50. He wishes he was younger. My mom works tirelessly and when I show her a new book I’m reading, her response is, “I wish Read Free For 30 Days I had the time to read this.” When I left the magazine I used to work for, every adult told me, “I’m excited for you, Austin. I’ve always wanted to write a book.” In my mind, I write on behalf of everyone everyone who who wishes wishes they could. could. The people who support me are good, kind-hearted, intelligent, creative people who, if they had the time and opportunity, would love to work on art. But because of the way life is set up, they can’t. I’m in a perfect zone: out of college, young enough to attempt a creative career, and a member of a generation of ambitious, young people. I have to try art. I didn’t align the stars. But I have to follow and see where they go. 6. Have faith. Faith is a new concept to me. I went to Catholic School for thirteen years, from  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS Kindergarden to 12th grade. Back then, my definition of faith was a word Catholics used so they could believe in God and Moses and Adam and Eve no matter what. If scientists discovered the creator is a lizard from a galaxy far away, it wouldn’t matter. If God came down and said, “No, none of the Bible is accurate. My story is completely different.” It would not matter. If a note from 2,000 years ago was found that said, “I wrote the Bible and made most of it up. Sometimes I would sneeze, my pen would strike across the page, and I didn’t even have the decency to correct that.” It would not matter. Now that that I’ve started writing writing this book, I’ve found found myself myself using faith more. more. Originally, Originally, I called it ‘trust.’ I’ve found the two words to be synonyms. I trust that my book is decent. I trust that when I publish it, whenever that is, the people who read it will consider it decent. I trust that in a year’s time, if I write everyday, I will be a better writer. That Austin, the Austin I am today plus a year of growth, growth, is able to handle more difficult difficult problems, problems, write more interesting interesting scenarios, and edit more efficiently. I trust that if I sit at the computer and write, no matter what I write, whether it is of immediate use or not, it is progress and it is worth writing. I don’t know any of this for certain but by trusting, I’m able to avoiding overthinking about these things and instead approach my art casually. Faith takes care of the future for me. It is the answer to every uncertainty. Even if I’m in a bad mood or not feeling motivated, I know that it’s helpful for me to write. I have faith that by writing, writing will work itself out. Faith has made Catholics very productive. By not having to think about whether God is real or not everytime someone comes up with a new piece of opposing evidence, they are able to move past that question and be that much more devoted to the religion. Because people have faith they can fearlessly and blinklessly study scripture, attend Mass weekly, donate money, donate food, mentor, tutor, and pray. This productivity goes beyond Church activities and into their personal lives. “Let go and let God.” “God will handle it.” “God works in mysterious ways.” “God has a plan for me.” These phrases are used by people who are handling something they cannot understand, and they are intimidated, but they are able to find peace by believing God is with them and that what will come is okay. An artist can borrow this thinking. “Art has a plan for me.” Substitute God for art, or intuition, or dumb luck. “Dumb luck has a plan for me.” “Intuition will handle it.” “Let go and let art.”

56

7. Have pride. When I was 9 years old, my teacher gave the class an assignment to write a story. I wrote about a bird and a gazelle. These two animals are misfits. The bird has fins and swims. The gazelle has wings and flies. The other gazelles and birds tease them constantly. To prove their worth, the two climb a mountain in search of a sparkle berry. At the top, they discover an evil Rock King who guards the sparkle tree. The gazelle charges the King and, using his wings to generate speed, crumbles the King. The sparkle berry falls into a river but the bird swims and plucks it. The two rejoice. Now brave heroes, heroes, they go off with with their newfound newfound confidenc confidence, e, ready to enjoy another another adventure. adventure. Why was I proud of this story? Because as I'm writing the ending, - you have to picture a Read Free For 30 Days little boy sitting at a computer, tiny hand on a mouse, tiny fingers on a keyboard - as I’m writing the final lines, I see the page jump. The word document on my computer flickers. A gray bar appears across the screen and I realize that I'm on Page 2. In the bottom corner there is a number that usually reads, '1/1.' Now it says, '2/2.' My eyes got big. I had never been on page two before. When When I printed the the story out, out, I proudly went went into my my mom's mom's drawer drawer and got her stapler. stapler. This was the first time I got to use the stapler. The next morning, as I walked up the aisle of desks towards my teacher's desk, I remember rubbing the staple with my thumb and pointer finger. Anytime I write something and I don't feel like it's such a big accomplishment, I think back to that staple. The staple reminds me that satisfaction comes from inside, from my own enthusiasm. That sort of dreamy pride is the pride I like having. having.  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS 8. Be generous. Ideas are everywhere. You will come across 10,000. When you have a good idea and you know someone else could use it, give it to them. An idea given comes back next week as a thought plus thought and now progress is yours for free. In other words, tell a friend your revelation. Your friend will have a revelation about your revelation. Now you both have two revelations for the price of one. Giving away ideas gets you in the habit of blurting, which is a good habit for any artist to have. The quicker you blurt, the richer in thought you become. Speak, speak, speak. Thoughts multiply as they are verbalized. Talk, talk, talk. Say things and attract things. Say something, hear something, say something, hear something…volley… volley…volley... 9. Let life surprise you. I am going to teach you an attitude that I learned from a scientist. The scientist is Richard Feyman and the attitude is this, “I have approximate answers and possible beliefs with different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything.” What is Richard saying? He’s saying that he believes things but doesn’t believe in anything for sure. Why is Richard saying this? Because in science, there are a lot of surprises. In science, you can consider a statement true like, Gravity makes stuff fall. To test this hypothesis, you pick up an apple and let go of it. The apple falls. The hypothesis is supported. The more apples you drop, the more confidence you have in your idea that gravity makes stuff fall. Someday you may let go of the apple and it will float away. On that day, you refer to Richard’s belief, the belief that nothing is certain, and you will have an easier time accepting the apple floating away. If you were convinced that apples fall and always would fall, you might refuse to believe the apple floated away. You might have a lot of mental difficulty coming to terms with this version of the truth.

57

Moral is: Even when you are really, really sure about something, in the back of your mind, there has to be a hint of reservation, a willingness to accept a different truth being possible. This acceptance of uncertainty and willingness to adapt to surprises is helpful in science. It helps progress move quicker. Scientists get hung up on old theories for shorter periods of time and are quicker to develop new solutions. In art, this attitude is even more necessary. Why? Because in science you may find stuff like e = mc^2 that is consistent 8 days a week. In art, nothing is that consistent. The most consistent stuff we got, the art we refer to as ‘timeless’ like Elvis or The Beatles have only been around for one or two sets of grandpas and grandkids. In the 200,000 year lifespan of human kind on earth, nothing is truly timeless. The culture from Read Free For 30 Days 100 ago years is way different from today’s culture. That said, you want to be willing to try anything. Any style that you need to learn, you can learn. The more willing you are to be surprised by results, the more quickly you’ll bounce back when results don’t go your way. I’m holding you to a high standard. Not only do I expect you to weather storms since you know there is no such thing as endless summer but, I expect you to enjoy the rain. Imagine you wake up at 4:00 AM. You went to sleep early and told your friends that you couldn’t party because you want to photograph the sunrise. There is a perfect spot on the Turnpike where you can see the sunrise over New York City. You borrow your friend’s car to drive there. When you get there, there is construction. The construction forces you to take another route and miss the shot.  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS I want you to pull over, look around, and realize there is a bird perched below the highway on a sandbar. Take that picture. The sunrise didn’t work out. Forget it. This bird is the new 4:00 AM supermodel. Christian Dior calls this the “joy of chance.” Richard Feynman calls it the “value of uncertainty.” Barney Rosset calls it, “the art of nourishing the accidental.” Edward Steichen says, “Be receptive to accidental things.” All sing the same tune. The life of a creator is a life walking a path with no footprints. We must enjoy that uncertainty.

■

Now our our equation is: Good attitude = feeling lucky + having faith + having pride + being generous + letting life surprise you Motivation = fun + desire to take chances + desire to experience flow + desire to achieve dreams + good attitude + ?? The final element of productivity is good work work habits. Good work habits habits = ?? + ?? + ?? + ?? + ?? + ?? + ?? Let’s identity them.

58

10. Quit in the middle of your second wind. When a dog of inspiration bites your ass, you run and scream through the yard, careful to leave your tape recorder on so as to catch the inspired yelps. Afterwards, you are tired but tired in a good way. The dog gave you a hell of a chase but the running was fun and good art came from it. Two hours later, after a nap and a bath, another dog bites your ass. I want you to, in the midst of the yelping and running, pull that dog off. Leash it. A classic working-habit problem is perfectionism, also known as overworking or not knowing when to stop. There is a famous conversation between Miles Davis and John Coltrane. John has been performing 30-minute saxophone solos during live performances. Miles say, Read Free For 30 Days “John, these are too long. Can you cut them down?” John says, “I don’t know how to stop.” Miles says, “Take your mouth off the horn.” I am asking you to become skilled at taking your mouth off the horn. You already are good at getting on the horn. We just read a 7,000-word chapter about imagination. That skill is fine. During your 12-hour work day sessions, you ought to know how to tell your brain, Let’s take a break. Not only does does this save save you from excessive wear and and tear but, but, in the long-run, long-run, it allows you to produce more work. When you quit during your  second wind, you pick up your first wind more quickly the DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS next day. You have something to get back to. You have a dog to unleash. 11. Be as good of a rewriter as you are a writer. Most of creation is revision. If I spend 10 minutes writing something, I’ll probably spend 50 minutes reading it back, editing, and then stepping away, letting it cool, and spending another 30 minutes trying to figure out what exactly I wrote. That 50 minutes of editing involves me filling up a trash can. I make a version of my idea, “Hmm…maybe the metaphor I need for the imagination chapter can be, ‘The imagination is a butterfly net. Every idea is a butterfly.’” Then I add to the metaphor. “This net can grow to any size. If I have 50,000 ideas, then my net is as big as a house.” I add more. “When I sit on my bed, they fly out of the net and surround me. Whichever lands on my head is the idea I am currently thinking about. Blue butterflies are visual ideas. Red ones are emotional. Yellows ones are memories.” Then I subtract from the metaphor. “I don’t need the color-coordination bit.” Then I add more. “When two butterflies land on my head that represents ideas mingling. Maybe they have a baby. Epiphanies are butterfly babies!” Now 30 minutes are up and and I have a trash trash can full of paragraphs paragraphs explaining explaining my my vision of the imagination. There are several versions. Some with more, some with less. I let the paragraphs cool. After my 50 minutes of reflection, I say, “I love this writing. But I think I have a better metaphor: the beach. The imagination is a beach with sandcastles.” The butterflies are put in the desk drawer. The beach comes to life and the process repeats. 12. Frolic on the first draft. During the first draft, think as little as possible. Get carried away. Say the impulsive thought. A first draft should be an act of love and being impulsive is the quickest way to fall in love. Spray thoughts until the silhouette of an idea is colored and filled with blurted love. Have the madness to outrun your intelligence and arrive at the subject matter before analysis does. Not thinking thinking means means accepting serendipity and and the silly-young, silly-young, self-amuse self-amused d arrangement arrangement

59

of the universe and its inventory of notions and truths and metaphors. You throw words in any order that your pen and hand agree they ought. This conversation is short, sometimes instantaneous, often psychic, and with a priority on keeping momentum going. 13. Please one person. When you work, who is on your mind? Who are you imagining your audience is? You should be thinking of one person. The best kind of person is a person who wants their attention to be held. They lean in and bring their imagination imagination to the content they they are enjoying. enjoying. Create for this ideal. Create Create for your younger sister. Create for your younger self. Make a film John Coltrane would star in. Write a oke Miles Davis would laugh at. Read Free For 30 Days By thinking of one specific person, your work becomes personal. The sincerity neurons in your brain become stimulated. You act with purpose. My go-to ‘one person’ is my biggest fan. I imagine someone who loves my writing and understands what I'm getting at. They catch the metaphors and the inside-jokes. In their head, they’re thinking, “I can't wait until Austin releases more writing. I love his work. I wish there was more out there.” I modeled that ‘biggest fan’ after myself. There are a lot of musicians whose work I know every song of. I've read all of their interviews. They can do no wrong. They can release unfinished work and I would consider it a treasure. Another strategy is to think of Keith Haring. Would he like this paragraph? If Keith would appreciate this humor or that reference, then I’ll use it. He is hip to the vibe I’m going for. David  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS Attenborough is another go-to. Dalton Trumbo is a go-to. This avoids the problem of letting too many voices or opinions influence your work. Vague, unspecific voices dilute your work and ultimately make you less productive. Another strategy is to imagine I’m writing for my friends. We’re in our tree house swapping stories. We are ten years old and cursing, using slang, being gullible and funny. Sometimes I imagine I'm at a sleepover and the lights are out and it's time for flashlights and ghost stories. We’re drunk on childhood. Other favorite audiences are variations on this theme: Italian gangsters sitting around a table in the backroom of a pool hall; black gangsters sitting around a stoop on a city street; 40year-old nostalgic versions of my friends and I; 20-year-old college versions, 10-year-old versions sitting in a basement playing N64; Ocean’s 11 version of us. The list goes on. 14. Work with friends and family. Friends and family are oxygen. These are the people you drive hours for, lend cars to, accompany during risky business, and call The Greatest. We do this because we love each other. We are obsessed with the goodness that each of us carry so casually. Friends are people who know the sound of your loudest laugh. When you laugh freely with friends, your free self becomes comfortable being your always self. Friends create a bubble for you to practice wildness in. They also make it easy to feel motivated. Their humor becomes similar to yours and sparks fires. They pressure you to order a second coffee and third beer. The fact that a friend can say, “I like what you wrote” and renew your motivation, is a miracle. Fr iends iends are divine instigators. They will lead you, push you on stage, incite your temper, and hold the camera. 15. Practice. Practice is where you learn these productivity tactics. Your brain starts to build the neural networks that will help you quit during your second wind or reflexively take a chance. There are few things an artist does more than practice. Sleep might be a contender. Thankfully, for an artist, damn near everything is practice. Talking is practice. Thinking is practice. Staring Staring out the window is practice.

60

Perhaps the biggest practice takes place with your mouth on the horn. In these moments you are discovering what you’re made of. You are seeing yourself perform. You’ll often think to yourself, “I’ve never seen myself do this before. This is incredible.” Practice is fun. While you practice, you are on stage with the saxophone and you you are in the front row being a witness witness to a young saxophone saxophone player player.. You You are working working and and you are also also amazing amazing yourself. I really enjoy watching a young writer write and fortunately I get to see that happen everyday. 16. Draw Pokemon. Read Free For 30 Days I told you last Chapter that between the ages of 6-12, I loved to draw. Recently my Mom took down from the attic a box of drawings from this period. Many of the drawings are of Pokémon and PokéBuildings and Pokéballs and Pokéland and Pokémon on roller coasters and Pokémon in the playground playing on swing sets. One picture is of two Pokémon holding hands. The next picture is of another two Pokémon holding hands but this time the hands are more detailed. I try to draw each finger connecting with the other. I was practicing. But I didn’t realize it. The next picture is of Pikachu and Snorlax. The picture after that is similar but this time Pikachu is trying to shock Snorlax. Pikachu has a thought bubble. “He’s too big,” Pikachu thinks.  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS Then come a flood of drawings with detailed fingers and thought bubbles. In each picture, I’m trying a new technique. If you had asked young Austin if he was practicing or taking chances or trying to flow or achieve his dreams, he would have told you he was just drawing Pokémon he loves. You improve by practicing. Practicing is essential. But you do not necessarily need to practice on purpose. Having Having a purpose purpose helps. helps. But if you practice over over and over over and over over again you will inevitably get better anyway. The boy is drawing because he likes to draw. He likes Pokémon. Pokémon are on his mind. Therefore he will draw Pokémon.

■ Final equations are: Doing something many times = becoming good at it. Good attitude = feeling lucky + having faith + having pride + being generous + letting life surprise you. Good work habits = quit during second wind + rewrite well + frolic on the first draft + please one person + work with with loved ones ones + practice practice + Pokemon Pokemon Motivation = fun + desire to take chances + desire to experience flow + desire to achieve dreams + good attitude + good work habits. In conclusion. Being productive is a result of being calm and being calm is a result of being comfortable with your self and the things you do, the talent you exert, and the goal you pursue. If you do these things for the fun, for the experience, you can expect to have constant motivation and energy. Treat everything like a game. See every problem as simple and regular, no matter how troubling or unnerving. When you do, you will be able to respond with good sense, humor, and

61

composure. You will find solutions, those beautiful and slippery things which often hide in crevices that require the flexibility of non-seriousness to wriggle towards and reach. You can happily attempt difficult challenges because you will be too preoccupied with fun to notice the pressure. succeed. I will achieve achieve my dreams. dreams. I will grab grab the juicy juicy apple on the far branch. Say, I will succeed. These are wishful and boastful and can be delivered with a shrug and smile. They are truths as simple and grand as 2 + 2 = 4. If this casual delivery becomes habit, when you encounter situations where it is reasonable to give up or be frightened, you will instead stick to your playful mood. mood. No amount amount of persuasion persuasion will stir your smile. smile. By being playful, even in the face of difficulty, you find the most creative solutions, the most inspired acts of creativity. You commit acts of bravery based on enthusiasm. Especially in Read Free For 30 Days a state of flow, you are so efficient with your movements that the motivation boost you get from accomplishing a movement is more than the energy it costs. Therefore you are able to go from movement to movement with perfect coasting. Long sessions of creativity feel natural. Creating ten wonderful things in a day, whether they be sentences, photographs, or dance moves, can be usual. Anyone can be prolific. Prolific is a perfectly natural minimum. Creating is easy when your skill level is high enough that you do not get stuck on technical things, and your ease of deploying the skill is smooth. If you are working everyday and spending time with your ideas and the craft that brings those ideas to life, your brain will become uniquely networked with neurons to handle the exact type of art you like to make. Anyone who works everyday can be prolific and creation can come easy. You can come  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS up with three melodies a day or five promising poem concepts. If you are a sculptor and your sculpture takes three years to do, maybe prolific means six square inches per day. I do not know prolific and what it means in different contexts. The point is the conversion rate for the word prolific anyone can be wildly productive and doing so should be a pleasure. Keep finding favorite things and favorite things about the favorite things. Have more fun. Keep having fun, as much as possible. We have crazy things to discover and new ideas to collect. The world becomes fuller as we have fun. You will find ideas that become new doors. Finding the door is euphoric. There is much to discover, much that will grow and rearrange your philosophy. philosophy. You know this already, but to feel it it is more. The more often you feel this, the more you realize you are experiencing an original, one-of-a-kind life. You become more and more in touch with your spontaneous self.

62

Chapter 8 Being yourself I told you in the first chapter, “Take what you hate and destroy it in art. Take what you love and give it a French kiss.” In the second chapter I said, “When the work satisfies you, it is a success. You lived the dream.” In the third I said, “Summon the confidence from inside and create.” Freehind For 30 Days In the fourth, “Once you have viewers, make them standRead on their legs.” In the fifth, “Turn your neck 90 degrees to the sky and watch the sunrise.” In the sixth, "You will build monuments of your identity.” In the last chapter, “Treat everything like a game.” Take these statements and add them up and you get a recipe for independence. This book is about you finding your artistic independence, and by going viral, your financial independence. I want you to be your own artist. As I researched this book, I read the biographies of artists. Many had battles with critics. It was a tragic waste of time. They lost their confidence and productivity and for some like Edgar Allen Poe, Brian Wilson, and Lauryn Hill, they lost their years. We, lovers of art, lost decades of would-be masterpieces.  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS Does anyone remember the critics or the temporary controversies that permanently shook the artists? No. We remember the art. The art is what we grow up with and pass down to our children. I predict a new generation of artists will come, educated in confidence and imagination, and they will forge relationships with their fans and forever focus on the art itself and the pleasure it brings. Art has always been about enjoying one’s self and it always will be.

■

For the final chapter, we’ll talk about the relationship you have with yourself. 1. Everything settles into your intuition. Imagine two young artists. The first one reads 100 books, empathizes with his audience, and does extensive demand and cost analysis. After this, he makes a piece of content. The second artist unscrews the cap to his intuition and lets it spray like a fire hydrant in the summer. In the time it takes the first artist to do research, the second artist has made 10 pieces of content. The first artist knows how to estimate demand and think slowly. The second artist knows how to listen to his heart and create quickly. The challenge for the first artist is to realize that no matter what historical trends or analysis says, when the paint brush hits the canvas, he has to follow his intuition. The second artist needs to learn how to find inspiration in books and empathy and critical thinking. We ought to be both artists. There is a side of you that says, “I need to learn about the market. Who else is making content like the content I want to? Are there great artists I can learn from? Can I learn from their mistakes, their victories?” The other side says, “I know what I’m doing. And if I don’t, I’ll figure out what I’m doing as I do it.”

63

Add these two sides together and you become a powerful artist. You become powerful when you can run through a field of flowers and lose yourself in fragrance, and when you can stand at the chalkboard and explain what strategy makes the most sense. As you practice both skills, they blend into one. Your intuition begins internalizing the wisdom of demand and cost analysis. You can look at a piece of popular content and see what makes it able to go viral (audience size, accessibility, demand, cost of alternatives). You can look at content and see why it will have a hard time going viral (too long, not enough emotional arousal, too similar to what already exists). These size-ups happen instantly, like a nurse looking at stitches and knowing how bad the scar will be. Or an archaeologist looking at a dinosaur toenail and knowing how much the dinosaur weighs. Once your intuition has internalized critical thinking, you can trust yourself. Yourself Read Free For 30 Days means more than it did before you studied. Before it meant: ambitious, headstrong, curious, ready, enthusiastic. Now it means those things plus: well-read, patient, disciplined, and ready for the long-term. 2. I’ll say it in a different way. If your house was taken away and your computer exploded and your life’s work was deleted and the shirt off your back vanished, you’d still be rich. You’d be rich because you are an artist and that means your talent, imagination, memory, and intuition are in your head. The qualities that make you an artist can never be taken away. They can’t be taken away with a court order, an army couldn’t intimidate you into handing them over, and if the world voted unanimously that you are not talented it wouldn’t matter change the fact that you are.  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS You have the beach between your ears. You are carrying a heart. Those are enough tools to accomplish anything either the beach could dream of or the heart could feel for. You are the one spending nights and weekends on the computer, pecking out tomorrow’s books. You are the the one taking taking classes, classes, reading, and trying to better yourself. yourself. You are the one willing to say, “Go, go, go.” And press RECORD on the camera. 3. Let’s Let ’s make content together. Let’s make it here and now. now. You You and me. Tell me something, any old thing: where you grew up, what sort of games you’d play at recess, whether you got along with your cousins or not. Did you have a favorite TV show when you were a kid? Give me something to work with. Anything is good because we can build on it. You tell me, “I loved the monkey bars at the playground.” playground.” I’ll say, say, “Good. Let’s Let’s use the monkey bars as a metaphor. metaphor. Often Often in life, life, you’re hanging and you’re tired but you gotta go forward and swing to the next bar. Sometimes you’re slipping and out of nowhere your other hand reaches forward and makes it to the next bar.” How do you like that premise? I’m sure you can take it from here. Maybe there are other kids waiting for the monkey bars and that pressures you. On the other hand some of the kids watching are amazed by your gymnastic feat. Out of those people is someone you have a crush on. Maybe you fall on her and both of you are crumpled in a heap. You hurt her wrist so you walk her to the nurse’s office. That’s a rough meeting but for you it’s heaven. That walk is Cloud 9. As long your content ends up in heaven or on Cloud 9, that’s a heck of a piece of content, right? Okay, so, take it away, tell me something. 4. Start with what you like. I’ll go first: Riding shotgun; the way skateboard wheels kick up little dust-sized pebbles behind them; the way books feel like like handheld handheld porta portals; ls; the noise a kitten make makess when it’ it’ss so young young it open its mouth mouth to meow but nothing nothing comes comes out; when when you you find find the wine wine bottle bottle you you forget forget you you had; meeti meeting ng someone someone for for the first

64

time and hitting it off; when mom comes home from a business trip one day early; when mom stays on her business trip one day longer; when optimism turns out right; candy cigarettes; old sweatshirts; picturess from picture from my childh childhood; ood; sneake sneakers rs that fit just just right; right; water lappin lapping g on the the shore; shore; tiny cat tongue tongue lapping its water; a new album from my favorite artist and the season of vibe-drenched living that ensues; bacon,, egg, and bacon and cheese cheese sandwich sandwiches es that get you you uncomf uncomfortabl ortably y full; full; meeting meeting someon someonee and knowing knowing immediately that you really like them; fixing a household electronic that you have been fussing with all morning; packages waiting in the mail; frozen juice pops; when you’re running late and so is the person you are meeting; finishing a book and knowing that the world is one droplet more comprehensible; doing something for the first time; white t-shirts; going to the corner store; finding $5; walking into your friend unexpectedly; leaving work early; getting to the liquor store before it closes; getting sucked into a new series; applause; documentaries; albums I enjoy the whole way through; crane machines; full moons; being at peace; peace; doing doing yoga yoga and findin finding g new room in my body body;; walking walking from from a cold cold NYC winter street street Read Free For 30 Days and into a warm building lobby; holdieng hands with the person you love; carving a lover’s name into a tree; reeling in a fish; spotting the end of the trail; driving without a destination; getting there; the seat in the library with the view of Passion Puddle; bonus tracks; warm, soft chocolate chip cookies; arcades with good prizes; finding ways to cheat the arcade; putting my young cousins onto classic music; hearing my sister play guitar.

List whatever you want. A big part of being an artist is discovering how far whatever you want goes. Ask any collector if when he collected his first vinyl album or baseball card, if he foresaw having as big of a collection as he would come to. He’d say, “No. Half of this stuff I never knew of when I started. It was once I got going that I began seeing how much there was, and how much was worthwhile to me. Most of my favorite things I found years into my DISCOVER NEW  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILDtake YOURthe DIGITAL READING LISTS collecting.” The same will be truefor you. It’s a BOOKS fact. If you go forward and explore, long walk home past the park, crash the invite-only party, plug in your music, dance with the Spanish girl, spend the night, steal a book from her book shelf, and get Italian Ice from the pizzeria the next morning morning - if you do these these things, you will discover discover a large list list ofwhatevers that ou want. Make a list and keep going until you hit 1,000 words. Make a list once a month. After a year, you’ll know plenty about yourself, much more than you did when you started. Feel free to make other lists like: Things I Don’t Like, Things I Find Funny, Things That Make Me Cry, Things My Heart Tells Me Are True. 5. The truth is powerful. You can unsheathe the truth and make people’s eyes dart in any direction you point.

Nostalgia Astonishment Catharsis Outrage Enlightenment Empowerment Remember these emotions from Chapter 1? You may have noticed that these can be achieved with the truth. If you want to make someone feel outraged, tell them the truth about an awful situation. If you want to make someone feel nostalgic, remind them of something that happened. If you want to make someone feel enlightened, tell them a fascinating fact. If you want to make someone experience catharsis, be honest about something something worth worth fixing fixing from your life. It took me 6 months to write my first honest paragraph. When I read the paragraph back I thought to myself, There I am. What’s happening on the page and what’s happening in me are one and the same. The paragraph is as honest as a photograph. That felt great. The next time I wrote I tried to do the same thing. It didn’t happen. But I wrote everyday and over time I got better at hitting the truth target. 65

My advice is 1) Practice by doing something you enjoy. 2) Add a twist. Go to a movie and close your eyes as if you were listening to the radio. Go to the boardwalk and win tickets and give them away. Surprise your grandma with flowers and take her out to dinner. Dig a worm out of the dirt and catch a fish with it. Ride a bike down a haunted hill. The twist will give you a new feeling. That new feeling is your next piece of content. We all have truth. Every second of our life is the truth. That’s what makes artistry a lifelong profession. Each emotion can send you to multiple truths, truths hiding under truths, truths stuck together in balls of truths, truths that you’ve been passing by in the hallway your whole life and never noticed, truths you’ve known for years that turn out to be neighbors to other truths you also knew for years. You step back and say, “You two know each other?” Read Free For 30 Days 6. Be sincere. Let’s see two ends of a sincerity spectrum. On the insincere side are commercials. On the sincere side is YouTube. Both of these are short videos. TV commercials have been around for 70 years. Before YouTube, TV commercials were the exclusive creator of short videos. Some five seconds long, some fives minutes. Then came YouTube in 2007 which showed how much commercials were not doing in the short video medium. YouTube crowded with kids sharing their interests, their comedy, the things they cared about. Out came video essays, skits, reviews, vlogs, confessions, and public addresses. These doses of sincerity attracted millions of viewers and spawned innumerable communities.  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS Had commercials experimented with these ideas? Not really. They had been missing out on an iceberg’s bottom of artistic whitespace for ages. Which is a shame because advertisers have more money than God. Most YouTubers had nothing other than their sincerity. The problem with commercials is that commercials don’t care who you are. They only want to express who they are. And they are too unimaginative to know who they are. The success of YouTube is that people step in front of the camera and spill their guts. YouTubers open themselves up and be sincere and, as a result, attract like-minds. Over time, the viewers come to love the YouTuber. This is love the commercials wish they could have attracted for their brand. Hence, you go to YouTube voluntarily and you only ever seen commercials involuntarily. In conclusion, be sincere. People are attracted to sincerity. Don’t be insincere, people are put off by that. 7. Sincerity is truth. Sincerity is truth is intuition is dwelled on is fixated on is empathetic is imaginative is spontaneous is a genuine superpower. Once you can live sincerely on a daily, effortless basis, it becomes easy to feel inspired and and optimistic. optimistic. 8. If you ever forget that sincerity is truth, play for your life. Jerry Garcia, the lead singer of the Grateful Dead, has a good story. One day Jerry takes a sip of weird water and starts to feel weird. As he steps on stage, he looks at the crowd and sees an army of demons getting ready to take him to the 13th level of Dante’s inferno. Jerry decides to play for his life. Maybe if he plays with enough passion, he will be spared. He does play with passion and is spared from the inferno. Whenever Jerry forgets why he’s playing music, he reminds himself that he’s playing for his life. Turn this story inside out and you have an example to follow. Rather than, “If I don’t play, play, I die.” think “By playing, I live. I play because playing makes me feel alive.”

66

In conclusion. I was thinking the most important people who could read my book would be my little cousins Christian and Andrew. They know a genuine side of me. And that reminded me of Childish Gambino's lyrics. Childish said, “See me through my little cousin's eyes.” I realized then that Childish had made an observation about life: little cousins see a genuine side of you. This lyric is an example of what art is. Art is an observation you make about life. Comic books, music, television, chefs, and barbers do this. They express themselves and the ideas they notice. Even my cat Chance is an artist. She expresses herself by scratching at my door and making me get up after I went through great lengths to make myself comfortable and place my Read Free For 30 Days laptop and water bottle and TV remote and mouse pad perfectly. Worse is, when I open the door, Chance doesn't come in. I have to shove her into the room. My other cat, Lucy, if you get within a foot of her she jumps. Meanwhile Chance nonchalantly sniffs the carpet while I try to push her into the room that she just requested access to. See what I did there? I made an observation about my cat. There is no lesson to be learned in my cat story. It’s an observation and that’s enough. Observations can be simple or complicated. They can be about an artist’s environment or ideas in the artist’s head. Art is everything. Therefore, let's pick interesting things. Let's make observations about things we like, things we care about. Art has the potential to be the most pleasant and humane professions you can commit  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS yourself to. Or that you can participate in casually. There is no wrong way to do art. There are only right ways. Any way that you enjoy art is a right way. It's a crime how many artists in present-day and in history do not and did not enjoy themselves. For some reason, the artists thought the art they were making wasn’t ‘good enough.’ That attitude is an ice pick through the heart. It's an imbalance. It's unfair. In 300 years people will look back and say, “Wow, those people born before 2300 were going through hard times. But they were accomplishing a lot too.” I know this unenjoyment will end. I want it to end sooner than later. Always remember that if you enjoy yourself, you will succeed. I am against universal statements. I am against certainty. I am against people who oversell things. I am against people who are optimistic for no reason. And here I am telling you that if you enjoy yourself, you will succeed. If you develop yourself and care persistently, you will discover a lifestyle that you enjoy. Try hard to accomplish this. I want to raise kids in a world where more people are happy. I think happiness is a metric we can agree on. I know there is war and environmental problems and vaccines that need to be invented and government systems that need to be reinvented and important questions about civil rights and artificial intelligence and gene manipulation that we are going to have to answer in the next few years. But happiness is a goal we can work on today on ourselves. We are far from utopia (10 generations?) but we are way ahead of the horse-and-buggy past. We We are in a position to set up the future in an ideal way way.. Technology is growing as fast as ever. John and Jane Doe’s awareness of creativity, art, and happiness is growing as fast as ever. The future will look at us as the generation born in the armpit of hockey stick growth. That’s exciting. I'm excited. I'm excited for you. Let’s go listen to The Beatles and watch some Martin Scorsese.

67

Introduction/Epilogue Edgar Allen Poe wrote a poem called The Raven. Do you remember that poem? That is a poem we we were supposed to read in high school. school. It’s It’s the one about a raven raven that terrorizes terrorizes a guy by repeating the word word “Nevermore.” “Nevermore.” The guy guy is upset upset over the death of his his wife and each time time the raven says “Nevermore” he goes a little more insane. Edgar wrote an essay to accompany that poem called The Philosophy of Composition. The hilosophy explains how he wrote the The Raven. I will summarize some for you. The first thing Edgar decides is that the poem will be 108 lines long. He says, 108 lines is the perfect Read Free For 30 Days length to read a poem in one sitting. No bathroom breaks. The reading experience will be one intense, unbroken moment. The second thing Edgar decides is that he wants a word to be repeated at the end of each refrain. Every time it is used, the situation will grow more grim and the word will take on a scarier and scarier meaning. He figures the long O sound and the hard R are two sounds that have a creepy feeling to them. The first word he think of that has both sounds is “Nevermore.” Isn’t this fascinating? I find this fascinating. When an artist talks about their thinking process, my my ears get big. big. The third third thing Edgar Edgar decides is, Who or What could say, say, “Nevermore”? It’s hard to imagine a reason why a person would repeat the same word over and over. It might be easier to use a speaker who is not expected to speak, like a statue or a painting. Or, an animal. Birds are known to sing or speak somewhat. Parrots are too tropical, too comical  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS though. We need an animal that a person does not expect or want to see. A raven works. In the right light, a raven looks like death. Edgar goes on to explain how he chose the setting, the dead lover, the motive, the symbolism, and everything else. Every step of his creative process is explained. This style of writing, the writing of an artist explaining their work, is the style of writing that I am going for in this book. This is a book about the creative process of an artist who makes their work go viral. Martin Scorsese, the director of Goodfellas and The Wolf Of Wall Street, wrote a book about his movies. He gives the back story, the origin of the script, the casting, and his inspirations. Scorsese is from the streets of Manhattan: Elizabeth Street, Mulberry Street, Mott Street. That’s Little Italy. The stories of the people he grew up around are some of the stories he tells. Hayao Miyazaki, the director of Spirited Away, Away, has a book of essays and interviews which explain his thinking. He is inspired by children, mother nature, and bumblebees. Did you know bumblebees bumblebees move move so fast fast that they see see humans humans as moving moving in slow-motion? slow-motion? Hayao is a man who likes to remind us to slow down. He wants us to appreciate the moment between the moments, the silence between the notes, the space between the words. Scott McCloud has drawn a comic book that explains his thinking. He sees comic books as an art form that began with hieroglyphics. Comics have moved past children’s cartoons and superheroes and are making bigger statements about life. Comics and cartoons are having a renaissance renaissance on the internet. They are the only genre of book gaining circulation at libraries. E. B. White, the author of Stuart Little, wrote The Elements of Style, a book explaining how to write. He says that plain and simple writing is some of the best writing. Clarity is a virtue. Simplicity is a virtue. Honesty is a virtue. Writing is self-revelation. Ted Sorensen, John F. Kennedy’s speechwriter, the guy who helped write, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” has written about how to write a good speech. It’s a chapter in his autobiography. Anyone who is interested in anything, ought to read this. It’s gold. Michael Caine, Norman Mailer, Keith Haring, and Jack Kerouac have written about their creative processes. Each of these writings are treasures. Sadly, not enough artists have opened up about their creative process. I know in the 68

moment of inspiration, when an idea has come to life, there is no camera running. No one is around to take notes. The artist themselves are caught in the moment and busy there. They do not have the time to grab a pen and be their own biographer or documentarian. But I do wish that when the scene calms down and the day goes on and the artist puts their feet up for a rest, that they record what they did. I would like them to find that time. This is a sore point of conversation for me. It bothers me that no where is there an interview with Shakespeare. For all of his millions of words written, not one was about who he was, what books he liked to read, what it was like to write, where he got his ideas from, or what stuff he thought about when he woke up and was lying in bed. Some of my favorite artists whose work I have enjoyed over and over, the spines of their books are worn, and never once will I hear a personal and casual word from them because they passed away without being properly Read Free For 30 Days interviewed or given a tape recorder to let lie on their coffee table during a chat. We are left with great big works of tragedy, comedy and other high-minded values but no answers to questions like, “How was your day?” Coco Chanel is an example. She is a wonderful clothing designer. But I know more about Christian Dior because Christian wrote an autobiography. As an art student, I can study the dresses of both of these people. Once I’ve studied the dresses, fallen in love, and want to know more, for Coco I turn to historians and second-hand information. For Christian, I have Christian himself. His autobiography is full of anecdotes and honesty. Forever after, he will be more accessible to students. It’s one thing to see an artist’s work. It’s another to have them say, “Here is what I was going for.” Artists are entitled to their privacy of course. But I’m a greedy youngster. I want the  DISCOVER NEW BOOKS  READ EVERYWHERE  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL READING LISTS information. I want the detail, the small moments. The few moments we do have from artists, like Edgar and his Raven, are priceless to youngsters like us, several generations removed, attempting to learn. There is a lot to process and keep track of. Being able to hear the direct words of artists is helpful. We can begin where they left off. We can be entertained and drawn into the same beautiful field of study that they were. It’s important for me to find entry ways. I want to learn. If someone is an expert on fashion, please write a book or hire a ghostwriter and share your love. Help me enjoy fashion like you do. I want that sort of love. I want to develop my love. The more I love, the more I am able to enjoy life. When I enjoy life, the fashion, the writing, the music, the people, I’m happy.

If you want me to send you bonus chapters, please write me at [email protected]

Also, thank you to all of my friends and family. You guys are crazy for supporting me and I’m lucky for that. I tried to drop references to you guys throughout the book. Hopefully you caught them. Over the past two years, I’ve been in a intimate relationship with my keyboard and laptop. I’d love to step outside again and hang out with you all. Maybe soon I’ll have a job and some money so I can start buying proper presents for Christmas and birthdays. That’ll be fun. We can go to Six Flags and watch Dragon Ball Z and bake cakes and play board games. Also, my sister drew the graphs on page 12 and 13. Shoutout to her. 69

How To Go Viral & Put Wings On Ideas

Recommend Documents