Entries tagged "money"

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.

Being laid back isn’t as easy as it looks.

April 24, 2013

Yesterday I met with some young entrepreneurs from France. They were nothing like the coneheads. They seemed more kind and soft and human than most young entrepreneurs I see around the Bay Area today. They were excited about their adventure; wanting to connect people and see the car sharing they organized as secondary. It seemed it was still an adventure to them and not a way to seem grown up or important or get wealthy as soon as possible. I took them to my favourite place in Potrero Hill which also happens to be French. But we had burgers. The best ones in San Francisco. The most interesting thing to me about their car sharing business is that people can choose to not charge someone for a ride. What does it mean when we don't charge each other? When do people need to value their work and time by asking for more and when do people discover there's something precious and new they can't get by charging and measuring every thing they do?

Dave Goebel and I worked on a play together recently. He was in the band. I really wanted a drumming lesson from the moment we started hanging out.

Continue reading…

I peed in a small container this morning…

I peed in a small container first thing this morning.

That’s what the woman from the electronic box company help line told me to do.

“The first urine of the morning is the most concentrated.”

Ordinarily these days I’d just pee on the stick directly and then put it into the electronic box that monitors my surge in LH or lutenizing hormone. But my trip to the west coast got extended last week and I started my cycle there. So until noon, the little box still thinks it’s yesterday when I wake up. Thus the pee saving.

It’s the latest of many self-conscious moves I’ve had to make in an effort to get pregnant. I’ve had to check in so much during this insemination process, I’m totally the Mayor of my uterus.

Because we have limited funds, time (I turned 42 on Wednesday) and only as much sperm as we can afford, we have to be precise. We need to make each month’s insemination as high yield an attempt as possible. If next week’s doesn’t work I’ll get maybe 4 more tries. I feel like Luke trying to hit the Life Star.

When the nurse practicioner told me today that she recommended more monitoring every month I had to fight back tears as I explained that we weren’t doing monthly sonograms or more testing because we couldn’t afford it. If I can get pregnant, we’ll need 5k just for the 2nd parent adoption in NY.

It’s running us $560 for a .5cc vial per month. But this is top shelf stuff. Identity release, Grey Goose sperm. Over 66 million per cc. Sperm is ubiquitous. Sperm that can get you pregnant that is from someone who can be known to your kids but not challenge your legal custody is not.

But maybe the pain of all these details are going to pale in comparision to the joy of parenting. Just like coming out in the abstract makes all the hardships crystal clear. But all of those laws and prejudices are simply dwarfed by real love and the truth of who you are.

So tomorrow morning, again, I will pee in a small container.

This post is up here part of @3six5, a fun group project that told 365 stories for a year from 365 points of view curated by @Len Kendall and @DanielHonigman.

Posted via email from subvert with heather gold

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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