Entries tagged "love"

Ryan. The Ultimate Lesson in Show Don’t Tell and a More Moving Computer Animation Than Anything Pixar’s Done.

Ryan by Chris Landreth, National Film Board of Canada

My girlfriend Mariko showed me this animation by Chris Landreth at the National Film Board of Canada the other day. It hit me like a rock.

It won an Academy Award and made one of those happy occasions when something superlative won. It is perhaps the best piece of documentary I’ve ever seen and one of the most whole expressions of what it means to make art and what it means to live in suffering I’ve ever seen.

It captures what is handed down from generation to generation. Its characters embody what our mental anguish does to us, literally. It shows what a hold money has on art and why art is oxygen. It has tenderness and such self-awareness and love. And it does all these things compactly in beautiful small, detailed gestures. It is exquisite storytelling. Chris Landreth has committed the greatest act of art: he has paid great attention. And he has cared. And he has not turned even one inch away from the truth.

A note: You will probably cry. I did. But it is the most satisfying and important kind of cry. The kind that lets you know that the very point of being alive has not been overlooked.

But does it scale?

scalespam1
When people ask me about how I scale intimacy when I’m speaking about How to Tummel (Design for Conversation) what they’re asking is “how can I make money?”

Although I’m showing how intimacy does scale. I’m interested in this unarticulated, but intended question.

When you ask “how can I make money?” before “how can I bring value?” (or it’s seed: “”what delights both me and you?”) then you are building from fear.

My biggest problem can be seen in a speech I’ve seen Guy Kawasaki give would-be entrepreneurs “How can I take your money and get it into my pocket,” he says.

Then you’re on a habitraille you can’t get off until you change your very first underlying question. The fear breaks down to an assumption that what matters to me doesn’t matter to you. Therefore I must make stuff that “scales” that everyone else will love NOT what makes sense to me. The emotional basis of this is “I can’t be myself and be loved.” That’s what the market is built on…what we create from our assumptions.

It’s just hard to believe that what we love and how we naturally are could be loved by others as well. Solution: day jobs we hate, alcohol and hockey stick graphs on start-up Powerpoints. It either sucks, or it’s a HUGE HIT.

Sustainable, happy living. An honest living (coincidentally the title of my work memoir in progress) is not either or thinking. You can have both. The answer to most either or questions is both. It’s a major mindset shift but once you make it, everything in your life looks different. And social media gives us the opportunity to connect more easily with more people. The barriers to approaching people are much lower. The barriers to being personal and genuine are culturally (and technologically) dissolving. And when you’re authentic, in public the opportunities that come are different. You can be filtered differently and you will filter differently.

You will see others for who they really and and you will be seen and feel seen. You will share what you genuinely care about and you’ll connect with others about the pieces of that that are valued by others too. Social media gives you that opportunity dozens of times a day. That gives you lots of feedback by which to observe the places of genuine intersection.

I want to keep exploring those places. That’s why I involve multiple guests on the Heather Gold Show and involve the whole room. More lines of thought and caring, more possibilities for intersection. Those nodes, they scale in a big way. But they are naturally the creation of many people. That’s how we find them collectively.

I’m not sure what to call them yet, but I’ve got a couple of contenders: truth and love.



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