Posts Tagged ‘The Art Of Not Sucking’
February 25, 2013
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[NOT EXACTLY the Jiro ethos etc.]
[Watch the film clip here.]
Everybody knows I’m a HUGE fan of the documentary, Jiro Deams Of Sushi, and why: Because I never saw anyone before this do a better job of commmunicating the importance and value of “Mastery”, both material and spiritual. At least, not with film.
Jiro beautifully and succinctly explained his philiosphy in this film clip on You Tube, about 29 minutes into the actual movie. Even if you never intend on renting this superb documentary, this little nuggest I’m sharing I think is insanely valuable in its own right, for anyone who has the smarts to take it fully on board. I hope it helps.
TRANSCRIPT:
Shokunin try to get the highest quality fish and apply their techniques to it.
We don’t care about money.
All I want to do is make better sushi.
I do the same thing over and over, bit by bit.
There is always a yearning to achieve more.
I’ll continue to climb, trying to reach the top, but no one knows where the top is.
Even at my age, after decades of work, I don’t think I’ve achieved perfection.
But I feel ecstatic all day… I love making sushi.
That’s the spirit of the shokunin.
When to quit? The job you’ve worked so hard for?
I’ve never once hated this job.
I fell in love with my work and gave my life to it.
Even though I’m 85 years old, I don’t feel like retiring.
That’s how I feel.
You can see my orignial riff on Jiro and Mastery here (one of my most important blog posts of the last year, incidentally); I’ve also now included it in Chapter 9 of “The Art Of Not Sucking” e-book. Hope it helps.
Also, for anyone who cares, the music in the clip is Max Ricter’s ‘infra 5″. Rock on.
February 22, 2013
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[THOUGHTS ON THE B-BOOK FORMAT]
We have hardback books, we have paperback books, we have Kindle books, we have e-books, we have iBooks…
I’ve had some success with all of those, over the years…
But the format that has given the most joy over time, is the B-book i.e. the blog book.
The B-book is a book that starts life out as a blog post. My first book, “Ignore Everybody” began life that way, as did my friend, Austin Kleon’s delightful classic, “How To Steal Like an Artist”.
Sure, both became mainstream bestsellers later, but only AFTER their magic was already ignited all over the web. In B-book format, both have been seen by literally millions of people. “Ignore Everybody” has been downloaded well over 5 million times over the years, maybe 10 million. That’s an incredible number, really.
Whereas most blog posts get buried and forgotten within days, often hours, B-books keep getting discovered again and again, passed around again and again, forever. The original Ignore Everybody is almost a decade old, and it still gets read by thousands of people, every month. Most conventionally published books can’t say that, not even close.
The disadvantage is, of course, that it’s hard to get people to pay you for B-books. I never tired, frankly. I just assumed if enough people read them, I’d find a way to make a living from it in an indirect way, eventually.
And time proved me correct: a lot of people who first discovered me via Ignore Everybody went on to become gapingvoid art collectors and/or corporate clients. Same is true for the other B-Books I wrote.
“The Art Of Not Sucking” is my latest effort; I’m also currently working on another one about my client, Rackspace.
True, the format may not be for everybody. I’m totally OK with that, to be honest. It’s an exciting medium that, although I’ve been working with it for almost a decade, I still feel like it’s new to me, it still feels like it’s a new world worth conquering. Like I said, it’s exciting.
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56. ALL ART IS RELIGIOUS ART.
[Just added the following to “The Art Of Not Sucking” etc.]
Long before I acquired even the faintest interest in modern art, I was down visiting my dad in Houston, hanging out with a college buddy, Andrew. We were both about twenty at the time.
Looking for something to do, Andrew suggested we should go see the Rothko Chapel, and so we did. I had never heard of either Rothko or the chapel before.
When we got there, all I saw were these big, dark, blank canvases, not unlike the monolith in Kubrick’s “2001”.
I didn’t get it, frankly… I walked out, unimpressed. Some big, black rectangles. Any half decent house painter could’ve made those. So what?
But the visit stayed with me, somehow. For reasons I couldn’t explain, for weeks afterwards I couldn’t get the Rothko’s out of my head. The paintings struck a nerve, one that I didn’t even know I had.
Nearly three decades later, I think I now know why. By painting these big, black monster paintings, Rothko was trying to get the viewer to “gape into the void”. He wanted us to contemplate “The Mystery”, the awesomeness (good or bad) that is Creation, that is the Divine, that is the Universe.
Decades later, I realize that all art– the good stuff, anyway– is trying to get us to do the same thing: Understand the immensity of existence, whatever that might mean.
Do you have to be religious to do that? Of course not. No matter what you believe, call it either God or The Void or the Physical Universe or something else altogether, the immensity is still there. What Werner Herzog calls the “Ecstastic Truth” is still there.
And it’ll always be a mystery; your existence in it will also remain a mystery, no matter what the clever folk in the TED videos may tell you.
So I wrote that line down, “All Art Is Religious Art”.
All art is trying to be a conduit… of Ecstatic Truth.
You don’t have to agree with me, but the older I get, the more I believe it myself, the more I want to live like it IS true.
And we are here. And it’s immense. And it’s a mystery. And…
And maybe it applies to stuff other than “Art”? Like maybe some of the stuff you do, to make a living, perhaps?
Maybe what you do for a living is more meaningful than it sounds.
Just askin’…
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[Note: If you like what you see, please subscribe to my daily cartoon newsletter, thanks.]
[The Art Of Not Sucking is a work in progress, a brain-dump of sorts; it is by no means finished, BY NO MEANS definitive… More later.]
February 21, 2013
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I just finsihed writing my latest book, “The Art Of Not Sucking”. Rather than publish it as an e-book or regular hardback, I thought I’d just blog the whole thing, like I did with my first book, “Ignore Everybody”. Maybe I’ll publish it properly later down the road, but in the meantime, I wanted to make it available to as many people as possible. Enjoy:
INTRODUCTION
When I was attending University in the 1980’s, I went and got a suit-and-tie summer job in a large office in downtown Houston, doing white-collar drudgery for a big oil company.
It sucked.
That summer, I was also in a painful, Nowheresville relationship with a lovely young woman. That also sucked.
That year my college grades sucked, as well. As did my social life and financial situation.
The whole year sucked, frankly. I sucked, my job sucked, my love life sucked, my situation sucked. Sucked, sucked, sucked.
Over two decades later, I’m frankly still quite traumatized by it. Ha.
Since then, I’ve spent a great deal of time and energy trying to figure out how to keep myself out of jobs, careers, relationships and situations that suck, how to keep life from sucking in general.
Learning how to NOT SUCK is one of our most important pursuits.
Sucking is the enemy. Indeed.
So when I was recently asked to give a talk to marketing students at Unibe University in the Dominican Republic, I decided that helping them learn “The Art Of Not Sucking” would be far more useful for them, or at least, welcome, than the usual textbook marketing stuff they have to read on a daily basis.
Let’s face it, “Success” and “Failure” are still too far away in the distant future to be truly tangible most young adults, they’ve still got way too much in front of them. That was certainly true in my case, and every other case I knew well at the time.
However, leaving the comfy surroundings of college life and hitting the adult world and finding out right away that you suck at everything? That everything is going to suck from now on? That’s a real burning issue.
“What if I suck?”
With graduation looming, that’s what college seniors are REALLY worried about. I speak truth.
College kids aren’t afraid of failing, they’re afraid of sucking.
The talk I gave to the kids was so much fun, I thought I’d spread the love some more, by turning my notes into a little e-book and sharing it with everybody. This is it. I hope it’s helpful; thanks for taking the time to download it.
[NB: Many of the themes in this book were covered before, in both my blog and my books, some points more than others. If you experience déjà vu, that is why. Secondly, to make it more fun to read, I did my usual thing i.e. randomly inserted some of my favorite recent cartoons in the mix, similar to how The New Yorker inserts unrelated cartoons into their pages.]
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