Category: meta

It takes mundane, often boring, always repetitive practice. And often a whole lot of it. We learn by doing and not by thinking.

Watch this short creative take about Ira Glass’s advice on storytelling:

This strikes me as relevant to mastering any skill, and reminds me of George Leonard’s “Mastery” (a bit of a summary of Mastery can be found by Todd Becker, who prompted me to read Mastery in the first place — it’s a quick, inspiring/challenging book).

Watching that video reminds me of how I “became an artist.” I did a lot of art/cartooning as a kid and people would say to me, “You’re talented.” Being an artist was then, and still is today, looked at as some sort of “gift” bestowed from the heavens (and or my genetics). I’ve never believed this personally though.

How I became an artist was much simpler: I kept trying to copy the cartoon image of Super Mario over and over and over again, doing it better and better each time. I remember doing it 20-30 times one night for my classmates in maybe 1^st grade. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was inadvertently practicing how to copy something I saw with my eyes and put it down onto paper. Without any prompting or structured learning from parents or teachers, I trained myself as a five or six year old to draw cartoons.

This is the lunchbox that made me an artist:

This is how we learn: practice, perseverance, stumbling, and trial and error.

After an insanely long blogging hiatus, I’ve finally initiated a sitewide “upgrade:” I’m giving up on my old blogging platform (b2evolution, sorry buddy, we had some good times …) and have officially switched over to WordPress.  I’ve also picked up a shiny new WordPress theme via fellow Atlantan and friend John Saddington of TentBlogger.

I’m working on migrating all the old b2evo posts over to WordPress (hoping to enlist some help via a b2evo guru), so bear with me as I undergo this process.

In the meantime, here are a few things that I’m playing with:

• BirthdayShoes.com — my overtly, bizarrely barefoot shoe fan site continues to grow as the minimalist footwear, barefoot running, and toe shoe movements ripple outward.  If I could just find the time to keep up with all the reviews I need to do!
• Google — This is my dayjob here in the ATL.  Lately, I’ve been either researching the retail industry or playing with Google+ (Feel free to add me though if I don’t add you back, it’s probably because I’m having a hard time realizing who you are, so be sure to get my attention somehow).
• Parenting — Do I really need to elaborate on this one?  Our youngest daughter is almost 2 and quite a handful.  Tack on the fact we recently moved into a house we bought in May and Sonal is pregnant (16 weeks today!) and life is busy.  Here’s Avi a few days ago telling me what to do!  The nerve . . . Stay right here, Daddy!
  
• OEM Human (.com) — This site is still extremely “beta.”  Hmm … maybe more “alpha.”  Anyway, this is a project I’ve had simmering on the backburner of my mind for at least a year now.  If you’re curious about it, be sure to sign up for the email subscription.
• LeanGains — Been doing LeanGains for almost a year now.  Hope to post about the program soon.  Geez can’t believe it’s been almost a year.
• Been quite interested in the impact of flavors on body set(ling)point per the works for Seth Roberts, Stephan Guyenet, and Todd Becker.
• Recent reads include Beyond Brawn, The Brain that Changes Itself (awesome book), and most recently, Moonwalking with Einstein.