Vera Wilde

My latest over-analytical effort to clarify my art business validation plan/next steps failed because I only really care about one thing, and I have to build out from what I care about (and see what happens) instead of building out from what goods and services I can monetize (and making a spreadsheet with decision rules).

Otherwise I can’t function. Otherwise I would sit down at a desk and work someone else’s priorities from 9-5. Otherwise I wouldn’t be Vera Wilde. 

I care about people. Specifically, people feeling free and safe to flourish. That is what I mean when I talk about making world peace through art. Political scientists call this soft power. Most working artists talk about it in terms of vision or message, if at all. Poets call it telling the truth. It’s so much the water of the work of art that it’s hard to talk about it within that ecosystem. 

Anyway. I write haiku summaries for everyone and everything else. So my small task today, before I break down and buy paint because I must paint now, is to haiku summarize me. Myself as an artist. My brand. My good, service, and message. 

 

My Name

Wild truth and faith

take a leap and seek your fate

ideas shape it all. 

 

This is a haiku summary of how I changed my name in an act of self-definition a lot of artists undertake. Most people assume I got married, and I let them. But the truth is, I took the name I needed as an artist, as part of the process of creation that is taking away everything that is not-you to find yourself. You have to have that to offer the world. 

 

My Brand

The butterfly strikes,

laughing. Remember to play. 

Wilde Thinks live that way. 

 

Oscar’s mastery of playing because life is so serious is one of the reasons I took the name Wilde. The butterfly logo and Wilde Thinks name reflect the same core idea that showing up to play is actually the most serious work of our lives. 

 

My Good

Here is a bit of 

truth and beauty. I made it

with my hands, of you. 

 

This is a haiku summary of the butterfly painting/portraits of peace idea I wrote about in my last post, that I was working on in Boston but haven’t properly monetized or made compatible with my traveling life experiment. Yet. I have been afraid to try. I feel ashamed spending money on proper supplies, setting up to paint in public, and pestering people to paint them even though strangers notice me looking at them smiling, recognize intuitively that I think they’re beautiful, and are constantly asking me to take pictures of them with their families as a result. 

 

My Service 

Painting your soul, the

way it shines through your face, and

singing your story. 

 

This is embarrassing. But this is basically what I love doing. This is what the poetry and painting are all about, and the best way to do them in a public space instead of an art cave while connecting with people, honoring them in the way art is about at its best. 

 

My Message

Ideas in arts and

dreams in life—shaping hearts and

letting fly free minds. 

 

There’s a Russian doll idea here. If I have enough faith and focus to say ok, look, this is what I have to offer the world of my soul, and I’m going to make my art as hard and well as I can and hustle and see what happens, believing that things will be ok, appreciating how they already are—then that creates the possibility that I can hone my craft, creates the self-fulfilling prophecy of self-actualization. 

And part of the message of the art is that very idea. So success as an idea is a social contagion in the same way that failure can be. Because the example validates the idea. Provided the truth of the message and my faith in it are Wilde enough to succeed. 

 

What This Means

I think this means I have to focus on developing the butterfly painting good/portraits of peace service idea in an intuitive, active way, by buying paint/supplies and making interactive art in public spaces around London.

This is going to be embarrassing. I should not buy paint. I should not make messes in public spaces. I should not tell strangers they are beautiful and I want to paint them. 

Oh, well. I thought singing at an open mic below my new hostel nest last night would be embarrassing since I hadn’t sung for two months. But I got my free drink and friends out of the deal. They didn’t notice my mistakes because they didn’t know my song. Instead they invited me to sing at another open mic this week. (I am plotting to also read poetry and paint other performers there.) 

That is not one thing. I am bad at one-thinging. This is a form of self-sabotage. Thus, my number one priority right now is to hone and focus on one thing, to then systematically validate at best, or simply more actively do and intuitively test at worst. 

Probably this is not one thing because I am struggling to admit that I just want to paint. I think painting is silly and impractical. I write compulsively too, and think of myself first as a writer. I like how musicians exercise soft power the best, I think it’s intimate, beautiful, and brilliant. I am worried I can’t make a living as a visual artist, because I don’t know anyone who does. But none of those things are reasons to not show up to recognizing the desire—I am dying to paint, all I want to do is paint, if I could paint every day that would be a good life—honing it into a goal by doing, and trying and failing and learning and doing some more. 

“Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,

Which we ascribe to heaven: the fated sky

Gives us free scope, only doth backward pull

Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull.”

—Helena in Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well 

I am a successful, published book author, poet, and painter. I run my own small business making $2 million the first year. And I’m loved beyond my wildest dreams.

At least, that’s what I say to myself in the morning and at night since reading Napoleon Hill and spending the last three months trying to figure out what the hell it is that I would want if I could have anything. (I also love singing and performing, but not as much as writing and painting—or rather, some excruciating shyness gets in the way. What IS that?!)

Mine is a laissez-faire God (who punks people all the time), and He has promised me the world. So part of getting it is the going out and getting it myself (with openness to being punked). After all, success on any terms means nothing to me without freedom on my own. So I have to set those terms and make those designs with the awesome freedom I’ve got. I’m not sure the terms are right. This is hard, but this is a very good problem to have. Assuming my own holy Trinity of art, work, and family is possible, and working backwards from success instead of assuming it’s impossible and not even trying.

 

Make Money

The first practical instantiation of the problem at the moment seems to be making money as an artist. It’s an old problem, and one that highlights the tension between planning, validating, and creating in all businesses. In other words, I am not making money this month. In May, I sold nine paintings in four weeks on my new Etsy store. But then I put my stuff in storage and got on a plane to learn about art businesses I admire and generally follow my heart where it leads this year. Now I am still struggling to get my bearings as a working, traveling artist. Part of the struggle is figuring out how to more actively experiment with commercializing my art on the validate leg of the plan-validate-create triangle of art business doings.

So I’m trying a new experiment. For two weeks I’m working on monetizing one idea. People keep telling me I have lots of good ideas, but [need to listen to the market better through some mysterious market divining rod device they have embedded within, have to more actively validate using their favorite widget, need to forget the market and just make my art as gloriously as possible until I run out of credit because at this point I’ve already gunned it off the cliff, must do more social media marketing, must do less social media everything, shouldn’t have quit my day job, should get a day job in spite of not having a work visa, should eat more, should spend less on food, should be more open to change and surprise, should have more of a definite plan, should go out more and smile, should value my time above all else]… The one piece of advice that doesn’t seem to be contradicted by another as soon as I hear it, is that I have to focus. That’s always been the world’s feedback to me in general. One thing at a time. Hold still.

I can’t hold still.

But I can make a list of rules, ideas translated into goods and services, and concrete hypotheses about their market potential and possible ways to test those hypotheses. Then I can rank them according to how sure I am it’s legal (where 1 = sure and 0 = not sure), cost-efficiency (where 1 = cost-free to test and 0 = costly to test), soul-fidelity (where 1 = feels faithful to my calling and 0 = less so or not sure), predicted workability (where 1 = I think it will make money and 0 = less so), and testability (where 1 = I see exactly how to run a quick series of validation tests to see if it makes money and 0 = I’m not so sure). This will give me a five-point composite ranking scale, to help me pick the one idea to work on while doing exactly nothing else for two weeks.

It’s worth a try to hone in on commercializing even though I don’t have a good track record of doing this. Maybe I don’t have a good track record because making money has never been my primary goal. Or secondary. Maybe I should change that for two weeks in good faith and see what happens.

 

The Rules

As implied by the above criteria, I’m scoring on: ecommerce/travel-friendly, cost-efficient, soul-faithful, workable (makes money immediately), and testable (I see how to validate, adapt, and keep trying to validate).

1. It has to be ecommerce or otherwise something I can conceivably do from anywhere as a businesswoman (so it’s legal without a work permit while I’m traveling).

2. It has to be cost-efficient—which at this stage means, preferably, free. A bunch of my earlier attempted business launch mistakes were about spending money to do stuff I ended up doing myself, or otherwise expending capital before I knew something worked. Classic rookie mistake.

3. It has to be faithful to my soul. My soul wants to make world peace through art. I do not care if this does not make sense to you. Oprah Winfrey does this. Arianna Huffington does this. Jim Henson and Dr. Seuss did this in their own ways, as did Hedy Lamarr and Edna St. Vincent Millay. It is what I am about. I know it when it feels right. I can’t do it if it doesn’t. Period, full stop, sleep on the riverbank, thanks.

But wait! This doesn’t mean I have to sleep on riverbanks! Money is just a metaphor for value. I never really got that before this spring. And then it hit me one day. I’m a poet. I deal in metaphors. I can figure this one out. Money is a metaphor for value. Surely there is something of my soul that the world values. I am basically a good person who wants to develop the goodness in myself, others, and the world. That is basically a hugely valuable thing, and to wind up sleeping on a sleeping bag at Harvard required that value translation equation getting stuck somewhere in translation. And the first sticking point was not knowing and asking for what I wanted. Which involves being valued.

4. It has to be workable. I have to believe it will make money. Otherwise my own (lack of) belief could hurt the chances I can sell the idea to make money. Because ideas shape perceptions and behavior, which shape reality.

5. It has to be testable. I have to see exactly how to test whether and how it can make money. Part of the whole point of this exercise is to better see what I can do to more actively test the commercial potential of my art in various forms. Because that’s where I think I’m getting stuck, and where a lot of artists get stuck. We have to be experimentalists as well as creators, entrepreneurs as well as poets. And those are different hats. And changing hats can be hard.

 

The Ideas

These are my favorite things:

1. Art

2. Peace

3. Writing

4. Knowledge

5. Dark chocolate and miso

These things translate into roughly one hundred million goods and services. (I already made this list, but the earlier draft was even worse than this one.

 

Goods: 

1. Art supplies/supply kits. I’ve already written about this one.

Pro: The most successful Etsy stores by profit and majority of Etsy sales by volume are in this category.

Con: I don’t care where you buy art supplies.

Score: 3. The breakdown is: 1 for travel-friendliness, 0 for cost-efficiency (because I’m not sure how risky drop-shipping is or how much I’ll have to spend on Pay Per Click ads to drive traffic initially), 0 for soul-faithfulness (because I can make the argument, but I have to make that argument and I still don’t want to do it, there’s so much resistance up in there), 1 for workable (in theory), 1 for testable (in theory).

 

2. Fine art. Mine.  Paintings. Like these, but new ones. Made in London.

Pro: I miss painting. It’s how I think, move, be.

Con: I don’t have a studio space or painting supplies here. So this flunks the cost-efficiency and travel-friendly tests. Plus I’m afraid of shipping from the UK. 

Score: 3. Breakdown: 0 for travel-friendliness, 0 for cost-efficiency (because I have to acquire some form of work space and supplies, create the art, and then market it), 1 for soul-faithfulness (which I’m now wishing I’d weighted more heavily, but this train has left the station), 1 for workable (if the 9 paintings/4 weeks Etsy experiment is replicable), 1 for testable.

 

3. Fine art. Others’.  Paintings. I would love to discover and promote other artists’ work that I believe in.

P
ro: I love talking with people about their art, whatever that art may be. I want to learn more from other successful artists and businesspeople.

Con: I didn’t leave a Harvard postdoc, a city where I could make a living doing share economy work, and a country of milk, honey, and CVS to chase someone else’s dream.

Score: 3. Breakdown: 1 for travel friendliness, 1 for cost-efficiency, 0 for soul-faithfulness, 0 for workable (if the art market is hard for me and every other artist I talk to, why should it be easier for me with other artists’ work?), 1 for testable.

Pause to panic: What if everything is a 3?

 

4. Art merchandise. Mine. Stuff like the Beckett button I’ve been meaning to make, on a platform with a better profit margin than the Zazzle store I started experimenting with in May.

Pro: I want a real-life Beckett button to hit when I have tried and failed and must try again and fail again, and fail better. This experiment gives me an excuse to create one.

Con: This sort of thing seems likely to have a limited market, involve low profit margins, require advertising to find a larger market, and get boring quickly… Wait, no, already boring.

Score: 2. Breakdown: 1 travel-friendly, 0 cost-efficient (profit margins are the hard part with art merch—Zazzle loses money—and they matter less with volume, but I don’t have a huge following where that shakes out immediately), 0 soul-faithful (stuff, don’t care about stuff, go away, stuff), 0 workable (just not hopeful about it particularly), 1 testable.

 

5. Butterfly portraits. These are a weird combination of portrait and life story/interview I was doing in Boston. It sort-of involves love-bombing strangers (who have a butterfly of grace shining through in their faces), and is not terribly lucrative as far as I can tell except in fellow-feeling and happiness.

Pro: I love drawing and drawing out strangers about their dreams.

Con: This is weird. I’m not even sure I’ve communicated the concept clearly here. How can there be a market for something I can barely even describe? Is this street art? As a good, this is street art. Street art doesn’t make money. Does it?

Score: 3. Breakdown: 1 travel-friendly, 1 cost-efficient (if I do them with ink and pencil on computer paper for now—although in my experience, people don’t want those portraits, they want proper oil paintings, of course—so I’m not sure about this one but I’m going forward now), 1 soul-faithful, 0 workable, 0 testable (I don’t actually see how to test this because I was doing it organically in Boston, and it’s not happening organically in London—I don’t know why).

Pause to panic: What if everyone thinks I am really weird for doing this? This whole thing? Oh, right. I am. Carry on.

 

6. Writing—poetry. I used to publish (dozens of poems under various names) in journals and such. Occasionally one would pay, poorly. Then I stopped submitting to journals and rewrote a bunch of what I had into a book. Then I rewrote the book. And rewrote the book. And rewrote the book. So that’s a thing that exists now that I like.

Pro: High soul quotient.

Con: Poetry supposedly doesn’t pay.

Score: 3. Breakdown: 1 travel-friendly, 1 cost-efficient, 1 soul-faithful, 0 workable, 0 testable (I don’t see how to validate it in the immediate term, since it requires researching and learning how to self-publish across at least three different digital and physical platforms).

 

7. Writing—children’s books. The Where the Wilde Thinks Are series.

Pro: High soul quotient.

Con: Not ready yet, so what is there to monetize? I could be looking for university, non-profit, grant and/or crowdfunding sources to create and then monetize the series. But I’d rather play the market game first and well, because that will (if done right) help me build skills and brand for doing this more and better, later.

Score: 2. Breakdown: 1 travel-friendly, 0 cost-efficient (I did a survey and people thought I had to make the proper illustrations first, and that requires proper materials I’d have to buy), 1 soul-faithful, 0 workable (product doesn’t exist yet), 0 testable (ditto).

Pause to panic: But this was my rational first priority when I talked with a friend last week. I cannot change my rational first priority from week to week and be surprised when I keep failing to get somewhere with this art business thing! That’s not how success works. One goal. Everything in service of it. That’s how it works. I think.

 

8. Writing—screenplay. I wrote a screenplay in LA last spring, rewrote it this fall, and it needs another good restructuring before I can pitch it as an independent.

Pro: The universe approved. A successful screenwriter friend thinks there is something there.

Con: Also not immediately monetizable.

Score: 3. Breakdown: 1 travel-friendly, 1 cost-efficient, 1 soul-faithful, 0 workable, 0 testable.

 

Services: 

 

1. Portraits of Peace. The global non-profit organization affiliate service version of the butterfly portrait good. I might need to first generate better, more current, open source samples—remake a portfolio of sorts including sketches, photographs, blog posts, and perhaps videotaped or audiotaped interviews—and then shop for a middleman organization like Freedom House, Amnesty, or the UN. But I love talking to people about their journeys and what matters most to them, how they’ve been resilient, their dreams and how they’re moving toward them. I’d like to be traveling around doing positive (truthful) stories with people who are doing under-recognized work for world peace by taking care of themselves and pursuing their dreams—especially refugees in the global refugee crisis.

I care a whole lot about this crisis. 

Pro: This combines everything I want to be doing right now. Painting or drawing. Photographing. Traveling. Talking to people. Drawing selection attention in the information environment to positive stories, success, resilience, and goodness. Giving a voice to our dreams—the party that is most often left voiceless in discussions about prejudice and violence, their causes and consequences. Not one side or the other. Not selfish actors or groups. All. Together. Dreaming. I could also see it giving me an opportunity to teach stuff I used to love teaching, from children’s dance, drama, music, and art, to college-level political theory and behavior.

Con: I just wrote a job description for a job I’m probably not qualified to hold, and don’t know who would hire me to do. The usual workaround for this problem is to just do the job, and then nicely argue with whoever tells me I’m not doing it right. (It’s worked before.) But doing here and now that will probably cause me to lose rather than making more money in the short-term. That’s not the goal. In fact, the post I just linked to is from over a month ago, and it’s totally unacceptable that I’ve only made yay much progress toward monetizing my business in that time. Grrr. Plus, one of the things I want to be qualified to teach in the future is entrepreneurship. How can I be qualified to teach entrepreneurship if I haven’t run my own successful business? That’s silly.

Score: 4. Breakdown: 1 travel-friendly, 1 cost-efficient, 1 soul-faithful, 0 workable, 1 testable (at least I think I see how to validate it by creating a portfolio, but then again, that makes it cost-inefficient I suppose because of the opportunity costs?).

2. Family/Couples/Group Photography. Relatedly, the thing that often happens to me in parks on weekends, in bars at night, when I’m smiling, when I’m crying, and basically everywhere I go and whatever I feel or look like, happened at the South Bank again yesterday. Random groups of people, especially families with kids, stop me to take their pictures.

This happens so often, I asked the last person why he asked. He said it was because I made eye contact and smiled. And then he thought about it and said, you know with the kids, that probably babies like me and families approach me like that for the same reason, and also because I’m so small, like a butterfly. And then I laughed and gave him my business card, with my butterfly logo, and wondered why I have never seriously considered running a photography business even though I love taking pictures, and people are always stopping me asking me to do so.

When I discovered print screening, I combined it with photography to create a special combination portrait—part photorealism, part impressionism. There’s probably a market for that atypical, fun, easy combination of techniques. Possibly an even bigger market for teaching people to do it themselves.  

Pro: Look. An art business model that also uses connection with people, art, and technology to do something a little bit unusual while building on demonstrated strengths!

Con: Is this derivative? Is it legal to do while traveling? Does it require supplies I don’t have? I’m not sure.

Score: 3. Breakd
own: 0 travel-friendly, 1 cost-efficient, 1 soul-faithful, 0 workable (people like this done for free and they can get it, so why pay for it? I mean, what if the reason they ask is just because I make their kids smile, and otherwise they wouldn’t pay for the service at all?), 1 testable (I think I see how to validate this in theory, although I could be doing a more in-depth validation brainstorm for each of these—it would just take even longer and already I’m worried this is a plan/think-not-do sort of procrastination distraction from the doing).

 

3. Writing—poetry—custom poetry services. Some people do this as performance. I don’t have a typewriter to make it appropriately performative. So I guess I would do it as a more niche service, like—custom love poetry for when you are in trouble—hush—or haiku summary research services—just kill me now. But look, it’s the critical voice that says these things are ridiculous. And the soulful voice that says—the world recognizes value, and I am going to seriously experiment with asking it what I can offer others of my soul that they will recognize in this way.  Taking on faith that it is possible to succeed if I try. Recognizing that I have actually done a very bad job of trying while having that faith. Which is fine, provided I correct the error now.

Pro: Relatively original (a serious, sustained experiment in monetizing poetry as service) and high soul quotient.

Con: This is totally ridiculous. I am going to starve to death on a riverbank. (How poetic.) I mean, I have faith that I am following my heart and listening, and as long as I keep showing up to the work of figuring out what’s next and trying it, amazing things are going to happen. The universe is going to punk me in a lucky way when I least expect it. And I’m looking for how that can happen.

Score: 4. Breakdown: 1 travel-friendly, 1 cost-efficient, 1 soul-faithful, 0 workable (I have my doubts about the market demand for poetry services), 1 testable.

Pause to panic: If this obviously ridiculous idea gets a 4, I am doomed.

 

4. Music—I’ve made small amounts of money (and larger amounts of produce) performing, teaching children’s piano, and writing jingles. I could try doing all these things more seriously and systematically.

Pro: I feel I’m being most honest in who I am when I’m singing and dancing.

Con: That usually only happens when I’m alone and sure no one can hear or see me. Excruciating. Shyness. Does not healthy, happy practice habits make. So I’m not really good enough—and I don’t really love it enough to get good enough, because it’s almost physically painful to me to hear all my mistakes. That’s not fun. The whole point of this art-life experiment is to be in a flow state more.

Score: 1. Breakdown: 0 travel-friendly (the keyboard and amp are not particularly portable for a small person), 0 cost-efficient (ditto equipment costs if they’re not portable—which is curious since musicians tour all the time, I just must be missing something…), 1 soul-faithful (too faithful—see also excruciating shyness), 0 workable (not good enough to make money immediately, I know because I tried in Mexico City in April and made pocket change), 0 testable (I don’t see a lot of people busking here, certainly not vocalists alone, and open mics aren’t really made for that either).

 

5. Comedy—I’ve done a little improv, stand-up, and other sorts of comedy-y acting. But as a service industry, comedy is extremely competitive, and I’m not good enough to make money doing it at this point. So (ahem) I could teach. I’ve been trying to set up an improv workshop with a women’s shelter since I got here. This would help me learn by doing, and build up a resume of current work so I might be able to pitch it to companies. Improv for the workplace or whatnot.

Pro: Comedy is fun. This sounds fun.

Con: This also sounds embarrassing. Can I please crawl into my art-cave and paint and write poetry again now? Right. Took away my own art-cave. Riverbank replaces art-cave. World. Home in world. Not starving on riverbank. Markets! Trying! Adventure!

Score: 3. Breakdown: 0 travel-friendly, 1 cost-efficient, 1 soul-faithful, 0 workable, 1 testable.

 

6. Editing.

7. Grant proposal assistance. 

8. Tutoring.

#6-8 are on morethanacademic.com—so the investment of creating a site for the services is done. But, I haven’t built audience/clientele for these services. I’m not sure why—probably because I haven’t systematically tried in all the right ways, because I haven’t even made a proper list of what those ways are—but I could troubleshoot that, probably for each service in a more niche way. I think the market is there. But I don’t even know how to test that. But that’s a different step from this product/service brainstorming. First list. Then (roughly, imperfectly) rank. Then test. 

Pro: So qualified to do this stuff. So happy with one political philosophy tutoring client I have—lovely student, lovely work.

Con: But it’s not my art.

Score: 4. Breakdown: 1 travel-friendly, 1 cost-efficient, 0 soul-faithful, 1 workable, 1 testable.

 

9. Experimental design, survey research, other wonky things my heart isn’t really in anymore. Exactly. 

Pro: I would seem to be qualified to design and run original field, survey, and psychophysiology experiments in combination with qualitative interviews and other forms of research. NSF funding. Ph.D. Harvard. Etc.

Con: Don’t wanna. 

Score: 4. Breakdown: 1 travel-friendly, 1 cost-efficient, 0 soul-faithful, 1 workable, 1 testable.

 

10. Other research/investigation. I can find things out (“research”), but other people can too using the Google. I can find things out from people in real life (“investigation”), but other people can too using the Outside. So. This seems dumb. But I am being so quick here to dismiss things I am well-qualified to make money and help people doing! Let’s at least think it through.

Pro: I am really good at answering tough empirical questions using a range of methods.

Con: I do not understand why anyone hires anyone else to do research or investigative work. Why do you not do it yourself? I’m pretty sure you would learn more that way. This is the teacher in me, I guess. “Do your own homework. Primary sources.”

Score: 3 Breakdown: 1 travel-friendly, 1 cost-efficient, 0 soul-faithful, 0 workable, 1 testable.

 

So for the next two weeks, I’m only trying to monetize my art business by active validation experiments with the single-highest ranked of these things. But, there is a tie the way I have scored them. Portraits of peace, custom poetry services, “more than academic” editing/grant proposal assistance/tutoring services, and wonky things all got four points. I can’t pester people with another survey this soon after the last survey. They will get annoyed and then the world will end. (Ok, I could pester. But I’d prefer not to.)

It seems likely that drafting a short validation plan for each of these four finalists might help break the apparent tie. That looks something like this.

 

Validation Plan  

1. Portraits of peace—this is risky because it entails creating a portfolio to show not tell what I’m talking about before pitching it to an NGO or something. But I kind-of see how to do it. I think. I stumble across amazing people all the time, so it shouldn’t be that hard to interview them. In fact, I often do—but am too embarrassed or busy to do it properly. For instance, I videotaped an amazing, barefoot 70-year-old woman learning to tango at the Mexican hostel. And interviewed her about her life. And then who knows what I did with the interview? I was busy busking, building websites, etc. But she was beautiful, and she taught me a lot. She had lost everything in the Greek civil war. Traveled solo around the world. And was heading to Cuba to dance more. Appreciating other cultures’ music and dance was her art, and she didn’t know it.

Score: 0. This is not specific enough to be a validation plan, and I don’t know how to make it more specific.

 

2. Custom poetry services—this is so ridiculous. But I see how to validate it using tools like Launch Rocket and Google Pay Per Click ads.

Score: 1. At least I see a specific way to run a series of validation experiments. I am super embarrassed that I am even thinking of doing this, but such is trying and failing out loud.

 

3. Editing/grant proposal assistance/tutoring services—this has the best market, lots of people are already doing it and I’m well-qualified to join them, I just have to be more niche, market my services beter, etc.

Score: 1. Again, at least I see how to test it through a combination of that sort of online marketing (PPC ads) and pavement-pounding (joining up with services that already do this—or simply going into university libraries with flyers and such—to find more clients).

 

4. Wonky things—e.g., experimental design and survey research.

Score: 1. I see how to test it.

 

Well, that only knocked out my favorite semi-finalist without giving me a clear winner. And it does have to be one thing to be a proper experiment. And I have to stop dragging my heels because trying new things is scary, and just go for it like making money running my own art or art-like business is the single most important thing in life to me, for two weeks. It’s worth a try. Or rather, a do.  

 

Back-Up Plan

This validation plan sucks. This is me, trying to get unstuck, and it’s long-winded and painful. (As a rule.) 

I don’t even have super-powered clarity on my one goal, still, like I’d like to. But I have to do something next. It will be more efficient, probably, to experiment than to plan better at this stage. I’ll learn more by doing. But I still don’t know what to do. This is what Helena means when she talks about our slow designs when we ourselves are dull. It’s not easy being free, but it’s better than the alternatives.

In the morning, I will wake up—here I snap my fingers and draw a magic circle—with crystal clarity on my one business validation goal for the next two weeks. And if I can’t do anything but buy art supplies and paint and write, even though that’s totally irrational, then I’ll do that instead and see what happens. It’s information for me anyway.

But I’ll do something instead of freezing because the position I have put myself in here is a little scary. And if I fail—in the course of learning to try again and fail better another day—I can always go back to Boston, drop-ship firearms and herbal supplements while driving a Lyft or Uber taxi, Task Rabbit my bunny-tail off (if I ever get approved as a Tasker…), sell paintings at weekend art fairs two hours away, or even (shudder) get a regular job that has nothing to do with art, requires me to sit still, and otherwise disrespects my soul, like everyone else who’s writing a book.

But my spidey sense says I’m gone. For a while at least. I’m going farther, wider, longer before I go anywhere approximating a home other than home in the whole, wide world. Where we have peace when we remember to seek it. Trust when we remember to smile. Abundance when we remember to give and to ask.

We are all doing life improv all the time. Some of us are better at it than others. Most of my friends and family, for example, are better at it than me. So I have to take what can seem like extreme actions to break out of my habits of planning and risk minimization. Some people who make relatively conventional life choices tell me I am brave, but actually they are braver than me. Because as I see it, they are taking much weightier risks.

Lots of people thought I was crazy for leaving a Harvard postdoc to launch my own art business—without even knowing what that would mean in terms of specific products or services (I’m experimenting), or location (I’m traveling). But there’s a rational case for this sort of move. I am actually minimizing the weightier sorts of risk, applying what we know about decentralized information environments to life, and increasing my chances of success with positive selective attention and openness.

 

Qualitatively Different Risks

If you follow your heart without knowing exactly what comes next, one step after another, trusting that you know your desires and can continue honing them into discrete goals, making specific plans to achieve those goals, trying, learning, adapting, and trying again—doing life improv—in the best case, you will succeed on your own terms, perhaps attaining or exceeding your dearest goals.

Or you could end up homeless, hungry, and in debt. 

If instead you stay on a more conventional, well-planned path—in which the next-steps for advancement are clear and set by someone else, as in academia, law, medicine, or someone else’s business—in the worst case, you will succeed on someone else’s terms.

Or you could fail on someone else’s terms. 

One course of action or way of seeking success is not better than the other. The risks are not greater or lesser in the two modes of seeking attainment either. They are qualitatively different sorts of risks.

I choose life improv. 

 

Life As Decentralized Information Environment 

Decentralized information environments are the most efficient ones that generate the best outcomes for everyone on average in economic (market) and political (democratic) terms. If that logic ap[lies to life, then taking your passion and caring to the marketplace of exchange and ideas should also generate the best outcomes on average for individual people. And if you try to plan how that will happen instead of just showing up to play and care—you may overfulfill the quota, comrade, but the outcome is likely to be suboptimal. Thriving means risking.

To be fair, markets and democracies are the worst forms of economies and governments. Other than every other kind.

One of my favorite examples illustrating the decentralized information environment principle in life improv is the story of how Iman got her first modeling gig while working two jobs and going to school full time. A random photographer spotted her on the way to class. She had never seen a fashion magazine—only Playboy—and told him, I’m not that kind of a girl. He said no, it’s not that kind of magazine, and I’ll pay you. How much? she said. How much do you want? he replied. And so she asked for her school fees—a seemingly exorbitant sum—in exchange for the work. She projected grace and was open to unpredictable magic, and asked for exactly what she wanted. And she got it. Plus a career. 

Incidentally, “Iman” means to have faith. So does Vera. 

 

Faith Makes Luck

I’ve written about this before, and I’ll write more on it later, probably in illustrated poem-story form. 

Faith in the sun shining draws your eyes to the sky. Fear of snakes, to the ground. Both exist. But where you look determines what you see. What you look for determines what you observe. And then perception shapes action because we’re intelligent, caring creatures. So having faith shapes the selective attention field that shapes the perceptions that shape what action even seems possible. Faith makes luck. 

In other words, we all have confirmation bias all the time. It might as well be a goodness bias. Because that bias will actually generate self-fulfilling prophecies, whether it’s faith in evil or faith in good. 

This is the first of a series of posts putting early drafts of short, illustrated children’s books I’m working on “out there” to get early feedback. I’m not sure if it counts, but Patton’s Chair is already posted here. Please leave a comment or email me with your suggestions—what you like or think I might try next, what works or doesn’t, whatever. 

Within my Where the Wilde Thinks Are illustrated children’s book series translating cutting-edge social science for a broad audience to make world peace through art—there are three groups of books. The books I want to write—which are perfect and flow fully-formed from my head, the books I am brainstorming how to write—which are a bit clunkier in applying research and are not flowing fully-formed from my head, and the books I have written—which are imperfect, don’t contain citations or exercises, and don’t even obviously apply research. 

Nothing ever feels good enough to share. So I’m asking for feedback on what I have now, while I continue working on the concept in my head, and the brainstorming and drafts on paper—trying to structure before drafting the next one in the series, on policing, and illustrate the other already-written one, on home.

My readers are smart, and I want your ideas and opinions. Please leave feedback in the comments, or email me. 

It’s not a finished product—I don’t even have my proper art supplies or studio on my year-long art-travel experiment—but how can this be better? How can I take even one step towards making this thinglet into the thing I’m trying to make—what is the next step?  Or what direction could I take it in that you’d like to see, just as an experiment? 

 

Potential for Profit and Interactivity Online

I’ve been thinking and writing a lot, on my previous blog and this one, about how to combine art and technology in new ways to counter online hate group recruitment, especially in terms of combatting the (un)Islamic State ons social media. The (un)Islamic State is using social media to recruit and propagandize. Artists and intellectuals have a responsibility to use it better, to make the world feel safe to flourish. 

Here are some ways this book concept might work as a business venture and interactive online/real-life tool for countering hate in this context: 
–    Profit potential as book, ebook, original art through my Etsy store (once I’ve made the oil painting versions of the illustrations), and art merchandise (through a manufacturer with a better profit margin than Zazzle—perhaps through creating art supply kits with supplies for walking through positive psychology exercises like the ones I wrote about earlier this week, drawing from the book, using materials from wholesalers in under-valued markets like India and Greece). 
–    Responding to the meme-ification of terror and the emblematic nature of the (un)Islamic State’s flag by meme-ifying a sort of inverse IS flag. Where theirs is black with a white mock-up of what’s meant to be the Prophet Mohammed (pbuh)’s seal and the Shahada, an orthogonal sort of inverse might look like this—

Which memifies cos you can modify it in the spirit of the story to riff on the Shahada respectfully while emphasizing the freedom of conscience and expression the (un)Islamic State denigrates, like so: 

Although to be fair, Jordan beat me to it. And their new flag is pretty cool. 

–    Another way of both monetizing and making this idea interactive because interactive art is more fun, is to put together and sell art kits that let people make their own State of Peace flags based on this simple design. That way there is a symbol answering the (un)Islamic State’s flag that has visual continuity—but that also embodies the freedom of expression and diversity that their form of extremism denigrates. 

Potential Next Steps

I keep getting stuck trying to validate ideas like this in the marketplace. But potential next steps in doing that are to: 
–    Crowdfund the creation of the book, product line, and website. This might mean designing a Kickstarter campaign, which stock advice says takes two to six months to prep. 
–    Continue researching how to self-publish, and experiment with doing it with other books (like the poetry book I have written that’s ready to roll). 
–    Experiment with drop-shipping art supplies on Etsy immediately, since this might be a way to immediately monetize my art business while developing projects like this. I am not sure how to break this down, but think I’m making headway on it. 

And anything else you suggest. 

Without further ado—the draft. 

 

What Kind of Bird Am I?

It was dark in the forest. But Larkspur didn’t mind. She was used to living in darkness. Darkness was where wings grew. 

She wanted to find her nest though! She looked around for help. 

“Sweet Moon. Why can’t I find my nest?” Larkspur asked.

“That depends entirely, my friend. What kind of strange bird are you?” Sweet Moon replied. 

“I don’t know. No one has ever asked me that before.” 

“Well, there’s your problem. You can’t find your nest if you don’t know what kind of bird you are!”

And with that, Sweet Moon sighed into the morning sky and was gone. 

So Larkspur flew on. She stopped at the first tree that seemed almost familiar. There was a nest in the tree. It was filled with ashes and the wings of a firey bird. 

“What kind of bird are you?” Larkspur asked. 

“I am Phoenix,” Phoenix replied, shaking ashes from her eyes. 

“What’s a Phoenix? Am I a Phoenix, too?” 

“A Phoenix rises from the ashes and flies again into the fire of the Sun,” said Phoenix. And with that, she rose from the ashes and flew into the Sun, her firey tail blazing across the sky behind her. 

Larkspur watched her. She was beautiful. But ashes and Sun didn’t feel like home. So Larkspur flew on. 

Before long, she came to another tree that seemed almost familiar. In the tree there was a nest, and in the nest there was a bird. 

“Honk!” said Gestalt Goose, before Larkspur could say a word. 

“What does that mean?” said Larkspur, fluttering in confusion. 

“Everything and nothing,” replied Gestalt Goose. 

“Oh,” Larkspur replied. “And what kind of a bird sings everything and nothing?” 

“I am Gestalt Goose,” said Gestalt Goose.. 

“What’s a Gestalt Goose? Am I a Gestalt Goose, too?”

“Only you know that. You know by knowing.” 

“When? How” Larkspur asked. 

“A Gestalt Goose first understands nothing. And then, in a flash of insight, understands everything! Honk, honk!” And with that, Gestalt Goose took flight in a flash of iridescence and song. 

Larkspur watched him. He was beautiful. But honking didn’t feel right for her. So Larkspur flew on. 

Before long, she came to another tree that seemed almost familiar. In the tree there was a nest, and in the nest there was a very small and homely bird. 

“Quack,” said the very small and homely bird, before Larkspur could say a word. 

“Who are you and what does that mean?” said Larkspur, more confused than before. 

“They call me Ugly Duckling,” said the bird. “Quackery is my art. It’s what sets me apart.” 

“What sort of art is that?” Larkspur asked. 

“Quackery is learning. Quackery is love of falling. Quackery is doing your own thing no matter what other people say. And keeping the faith that —even if you don’t know it yet—you will find your own way.” 

And with that, Ugly Duckling flew off in a symphony of fluff and quacking. 

Larkspur watched him. He was strange but beautiful. Yet quacking didn’t feel right for her. So Larkspur flew on. 

Before long, she came to another tree that seemed almost familiar. In the tree there was a nest, and in the nest there was a bird. 

“Hello!” said Larkspur. “What’s your song? What kind of bird are you, and could I be one of you? Shall I sing along?” 

“Hello, dear. I am Blackbird. I sing in the dead of night. You can sing along if you love dancing in the light.” 

“Hmm. I grew wings in darkness,” Larkspur replied. “But I don’t sing in the dead of night. And I’m not sure what it means to dance in the light. What kind of bird am I?”

“I don’t know. But you’ll find out eventually—as long as you stay in flight,” Blackbird smiled. And with that, she flew away in a flash of song and light. 

Larkspur watched her. She was small, dark, and very, very delicate. But very, very strong. 

With that, Larkspur flew on. 

Before long, she came to another tree that seemed almost familiar. In the tree, there was a nest. And in the nest, there was a rather large and bright bird. 

“Fluff!” said Peacock, before Larkspur could say a word. And with a fluff and a puff, he grew four sizes and fell out of the tree. 

 “Fluff, fluff!” he continued, landing on his feet and strutting around the base of the tree. 

“I see,” Larkspur giggled. 

“Aren’t you going to ask about me?” Peacock demanded. 

“Yes, of course!” Larkspur replied, although she knew she wasn’t his type of bird. 

“What kind of bird are you?” 

“I am the best kind of bird there is!” Peacock replied. 

“I huff and I puff and I spread my feathers wide. I am Peacock, master of birds, our entire species’ pride!” 

And with that, he strutted off into the forest before Larkspur burst out laughing. 

With that, Larkspur flew on. 

Before long, she came to another tree that seemed almost familiar. In the tree, there was a nest. And in the nest, there was another very brightly-colored bird. He was sitting very still with his head tilted to the side, as if waiting. 

“Hi,” said Larkspur. 

“Hi,” said Parrot. 

“What kind of bird am I?” said Larkspur. 

“What kind of bird am I?” said Parrot. 

“Well yes, that would be a fine place to start,” said Larkspur. 

“To start,” said Parrot. 

“Yes, to start! That’s all I want,” said Larkspur. 

“All I want,” said Parrot. 

“Yes of course, what is it that you want?” said Larkspur. 

“You want,” said Parrot. 

“I do,” sighed Larkspur. “I want to know what kind of bird I am, and to find my nest! But I guess I have to keep flying on.” 

“Keep flying on,” said Parrot. And so she did. 

Before long, she came to another tree that seemed almost familiar. In the tree, there was a nest. And in the nest, there was another very brightly-colored bird. She was standing very still with one leg up on her other leg. 

“Hi,” said Larkspur. “You look like a dancer!” 

“I am a dancer!” said Flamingo. “I dance color and stillness.” 

“That’s lovely,” sighed Larkspur. “But I know I dance motion. And I’m trying to figure out what kind of bird I am. But it’s got to be a different type.” 

“True enough,” said Flamingo. “But it never hurts to know what you’re not.” 

“You’re right,” said Larkspur. “What kind of bird are you?”

“I am Flamingo,” said Flamingo. And with that she pirouetted out of the tree and towards a nearby marsh. 

“Flamingo,” said Larkspur, dreamily. “You were a beautiful dancer.” 

With that, Larkspur flew on. 

Before long, she came to another tree that seemed almost familiar. In the tree, there was a nest. And in the nest, there was a very large and strange bird. Larkspur drew nearer to see him. 

“Hissssss,” said Quetzalcoatl. 

Larkspur flew back with a start. 

“Why do you make that sound?” said Larkspur, keeping her distance. 

“It’s just what I do,” said Quetzalcoatl. “Some birds are birds of song, and love to play. Some birds are serpents who hunt and eat their prey.” 

“I see,” said Larkspur, flying away quickly. 

Before long, she came to another tree that seemed almost familiar. In the tree there was a nest, and in the nest there was a very hairy bird indeed. 

“What kind of bird are you?” Larkspur asked. 

“I am Fox,” laughed Fox. “But be quiet about it. I’m up in this tree for a reason.” 

“Do Foxes not normally live in trees?” Larkspur asked. 

“Only Magic Trees,” Fox replied. 

“Oh,” Larkspur said. “Is this a Magic Tree?” 

“It is now,” Fox smiled, carving a heart in the bark with her bare claws. 

Larkspur smiled. “That’s very pretty. But what kind of bird is a fox?”

“No kind of bird at all,” said Fox. 

“I see,” said Larkspur.  “I guess I had better head on.” 

And she did. 

Before long, she came to another tree that seemed almost familiar. In the tree there was a nest, and in the nest there was an even hairier bird. 

“What kind of bird are you?” Larkspur asked. 

“I am Monkey,” laughed Monkey, hanging from his tail. 

“Could I be a monkey, too?” Larkspur said. 

“Only if you have a tail to hang from,” Monkey said. 

So Larkspur tried hanging from her tail. But she could only really flutter there, and being upside-down didn’t feel quite right. 

“I guess I’m not a monkey kind of bird,” Larkspur sighed. “But what kind of bird am I?” 

“If you can’t find the right answer, then maybe you’re not asking the right question,” Monkey shrugged. 

“Maybe,” Larkspur nodded. “But I have to keep asking anyway,” she said. And she flew on. 

Before long, she came to another tree that seemed almost familiar. In the tree, there was a nest. And in the nest, there was a very large, bright, strange, and hairy bird. 

“Butterfly!” said the Little Boy, before Larkspur could say a word. 

And he reached out a gentle hand as if to stroke her shining wings. 

Larkspur was startled to hear him call her by a name as if he knew her. She was so startled that she drew back as he drew forward. And as she drew back, he reached closer. And as he reached closer, he fell. 

How Larkspur’s heart fluttered with worry for him as he fell! 

But as he fell, the Little Boy laughed. His laughter turned his falling into flying. And his flying turned his legs into wings that took him home for dinner. 

About the Butterfly Bird

The original Butterfly Bird, Quetzalpapalotl, nests in a palace at Teotihuacán—“the place where men become gods”—just outside Ciudad México. His palace is the smallest and most sacred of the three pyramids there—Sun, Moon, and Butterfly Bird. All three, massive pyramids are made of stone. The priests who visited Quetzalpapalotl had to abandon Teotihuacán after cutting down all the trees, and thus running out of water and food on the mountains. Before they had to leave, a few hundred thousand people lived there, at the heart of a flourishing, pre-Aztec empire between 100 and 700 A.D. And the Butterfly Bird was friends with them all. 

What kind of bird are you? 

Today I visited the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, “the world’s greatest museum of art and design.”

The V&A is full of what were formerly luxury goods. It hit me as soon as I walked in that it might be hard to tell what distinguishes luxury goods made in response to market demand now, and luxury goods made in response to market demand in other times and places that you can only look at in a museum now. So I meant to go to Tiffany’s after to ask myself that question, but spent too long at the V&A to make it. 

Luckily, insofar as that’s an answerable question, the stuff at the V&A answers it.

The difference between luxury goods and fine art is market demand. We associate luxury goods with the market economy and art with the gift economy—a totally different spirit. But actually, good movies can be fine art and have mass appeal. And great artists in ages past made luxury goods that were also fine art for their patrons. For instance, Donatello made the Medici this lovely fountain.

The tortoise at the base was a Medici symbol. Brings new meaning to the expression “it’s turtles all the way down.” Fine artists like Donatello cultivated relationships with rich patrons, fellow artists, and apprentice workers (who often did the bulk of what we might consider the work in famous artist’s workshops past)—just as successful artists and other entrepreneurs today cultivate relationships with business partners, venture capitalists, and other colleagues and supporters. The market aspect and the gift or calling aspect of the work were not opposed, although Donatello’s not around to ask about if he felt they were in tension.

How does that easy fellowship of good money and good art mesh with the spirit of the quote in the V&A restaurant-café? Saatchi caused a stir commercializing the museum’s draw in this ad in the 80s:

But the café itself bears a consistent inscription—“There is nothing better for a man than like his soul enjoying good in his labor.”

As if to say—do your work, what you enjoy and lose time doing, and thrive in that. There’s not necessarily a conflict between following your heart and thriving in market terms. Yet this is not a message artists are used to hearing. We’re used to hearing something more like the inscription over the garden at the V&A—go for the wisdom, not for the gold. 

Maybe because we’re rightly squeamish about monetizing everything. Things of the heart—like sex, childbearing, and art—sit in uneasy relation to the market in some ways. Prostitution is still illegal in lots of places, the baby market is a weird gray market in lots of ways, and the V&A, like a lot of fine art museums, is publicly owned. 

According to staff, it’s 60% government funded, with the rest of its revenues coming from merchandizing and other things (presumably private funders). This frees it to experiment with art projects like V&A Music Resident Liam Byrne’s’s one-on-one baroque viola performance, in which the visitor climbs in a wooden chimney and feels the good vibrations of performance as public good.

Liam’s residency is a revelation, reclaiming the intensely tangible and intimate nature of music from the digital world. His project is one that could only happy through a supporting organization like the V&A, that’s looking to contextualize period music and make its own art exhibits more interactive—without profit. 

Yet, art like this also has the perverse effect of making creative work seem less rather than more accessible in some respects. By placing art in a museum, at a remove from everyday life and outside the realm of normal business, it lends credence to the idea that there is a necessary tension between market and gift economy art, or luxury goods and fine art at the upper end of the market.

But just as you can sell the idea of sexiness without selling sex—automobile marketers do little else—so too can you sell the idea of art without selling its soul.

Or at least, that is what I am going to learn how to do this year, whether or not it happens to be possible.

Like anything else, art can be sold as luxury good or common merchandise, experience or public good, idea or thing. Our ideas about its worth and place in the world are what constrain its possibilities. So the art of the possible in art, like the art of the possible in politics, is a matter of the story we choose to tell. 

Oh, how I wanted to be rational and do a thing to make money with art! How I wanted to believe in the market, be yare, and show up and play! And I still do. But I cannot force myself to care about drop-shipping long enough to even try the experiment properly for a week.

This is as far as I can get: the model makes sense in terms of generating value—wholesalers get customers, customers get the idea and customer service, and middle-men sell their services on both sides in all sorts of market contexts all the time to good benefit for all parties. The rationale is good—I build brand for Wilde Thinks drop-shipping relevant stuff like art supply kits (which sell well on Etsy), learn more about merchandising that will be relevant to my primary art projects later since successful art businesses do merchandising, and start making sustainable passive income sooner rather than later to support continued creative production and freedom. 

Where it breaks down in practice, again, is that I do not care. I do not care about cheap crap. I do not care about where you buy your art supplies. I do not particularly want to sell them to you, although I very much want you to be making your art, and am quite happy to give you ideas and encouragement in that endeavor should you so desire. 

But what I care about is my art. And my art—although I can pitch it, I keep hearing I have hustle, and some evidence suggests I do in fact have hustle—is not business.

What I mean is that I see art in business and economics. I see successful businesspeople are doing their art, whatever their business may be. But my own art is primarily writing and painting. Specifically, poetry. Specifically, oil painting. These are the least lucrative subfields of the least lucrative subfields of one of the notoriously least lucrative fields in the world. This is a problem for the part of me that likes eating, sleeping in safe places, and back-up plans. 

And my back-up dreams include memorizing great literature to carry around inside my soul and pretend with other people who have done that totally crazy thing that we are characters from these stories (I have done some acting/modeling in a past life), and getting other people to read this great literature to ask good questions about it even though personally I don’t have good answers about much of anything (I have done some teaching/postdockery in another past life).

In light of these dreams, I am not sure why the credit card companies and bank have extended me the courtesy of risk. 

 

“Change the Channel, Darling“

But first of all, I am being my best possible self by following my heart, trusting, and risking more. I am being a good role model for people I love and believe in like I don’t believe in myself, who I want to see follow their hearts, trust, and risk more, because OTHER PEOPLE are so obviously amazing.

And second of all, being a psychologist, I know this is a problem of selective attention. And I can solve it by paying attention to how things are going to go right when I least expect it.

Maybe this experiment’s failure was even one of those ways. My drop-shipping experiment brainstorming devolved quickly into a brainstorming session for the illustrated poem-story book series Where the Wilde Thinks Are. And although I think I should force myself now to make a list of wholesalers to ask a questions list to, to merchandise the ideas behind the series before producing it—to run the drop-shipping experiment just for a week with minimal capital investment—I just want to produce the series.

Even though I’m so scared about debt and homelessness, I’m not sure I can make the art now. I took away my art studio and supply money leaping in this direction. But this is all I want to do. I took the leap in part because I had such a great flow experience going in my art, I thought—I can do this living in my car, with a pencil and a napkin. (Then I sold my car.)

So I had better just do it. I can’t seem to do anything else anyway. I almost can’t physically move today because I can’t paint where I am, and I need to paint. But I followed my heart here, and I know it was right. I just don’t know why.

Here’s my brainstorming, then, on the first four books in the series.

 

Where the Wilde Thinks Are 

The idea is to translate science to make world peace through art. So I identified the four worst problems I the world—things that curtail freedom and flourishing, but don’t have to. Most of the brainstorming is thing-directed because I was trying to figure out how to do this in a quick-and-dirty way with kits, but I think I’ll end up using it to write poetry and illustrate the stories instead.

You can see it devolve topic by topic into book brainstorming rather than drop-shipping brainstorming. So basically, my business plan is to write and illustrate children’s books combining poetry and oil painting with interactive activities, art supply merchandise, and academical footnotes. This is not my worst plan ever. Furthering abundance, sustainability, safety, and happiness seems like a pretty good goal, even if I am trying to make money for once in my life. (And we all know making money is greedy and being greedy is bad?)

 

1. Abundance.

Economic insecurity is one of the worst things in the world. It makes people feel unsafe to flourish, which is the opposite of world peace.

An arts-and-crafts kit drawing selective attention to the inverse of economic insecurity, to make the world feel safe to flourish, might include:

– the Almighty Dollar

– foreign coins (assorted)

– green things or instructions for finding/making your own green things

– the cornucopia as symbol of plenty—and food spilling out of it (fruit, candy, chocolate, nuts, roast, cakes)

– candles, wildfire

– flowers, blooming, seeds

– googley eyes

– the sun and moon (power)

– justice scales (karma)

 

But you need a book to explain the ideas here, and the science behind them, or the message can get lost too easily. This isn’t about commercialism, worshipping money, or blaming the victim of poverty or bad luck—the way some people misinterpret books expressing similar ideas, like The Secret. But rather, it’s about the science of selective attention as it applies to trust and luck—and those things as they apply to money and networking.

There is a ton of research on this, but researchers themselves often fail to apply it by continually drawing selective attention to inequality, unfairness, violence, and prejudice. What if research on those things actually undermines people’s success in some respects by drawing selective attention away from success? Attentional resources are limited and we are all choosing where to direct them all the time—whether we’re aware of those choices and making them in our own interests, or not. This choice is what makes serendipity happen in lots of ways. 

For instance, in a coffeeshop experiment with self-described lucky and unlucky people, the people who think they are lucky are more likely to see the money on the ground and pick it up, and then buy themselves and a stranger a cup of coffee, make a friend. “Did anything special happen?” the researchers who sent them to the café asked. Special things happened to the self-described lucky people. Because they were tuned into how they were already special. They were open to the universe giving them gifts. They picked up the money lying on the ground. They smiled at strangers.

Relatedly, Covey talks about the abundance mentality in Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Focusing on abundance and success, not zero-sum resource allocation, makes better business outcomes. Game theory bears this out in economics. Plato’s allegory of the cave—risk the unknown or never know what you don’t know—echoes the idea in political philosophy. And recent empirical research on the relationship between trust and country-level economic development is consistent with the same basic idea that if you believe you are lucky, people are good, and the universe is abundant enough that you can go for what you want even though that entails risk—everyone is likely to benefit, you’re more likely to get lucky, and the universe will turn out to be more abundant in the end.

This kind of risk-attracting-good has happened twice in my life when I took what were to me notable risks to follow my dreams, and they paid off. Last spring, I spent $600 (which seemed like a lot of money at the time) on a screenwriting class in LA, I was the only one in the class to get a whole screenplay drafted in the class. I worked hard, had fun, learned a lot, generated a draft. And then I got hit in traffic on the way to class one day, rear-ended, saw it coming and had no where to go to get out of the way. And the other girl’s insurance company paid me $600. The universe took care of me taking that class. 

Six years ago, I quit my full-time nanny job that I worked for the first year in grad school, to move my disabled mom and I closer to campus so I could take a summer Russian intensive. I had always wanted to study Russian, because it’s beautiful. I told the landlord I didn’t know how I would pay the rent, but that I would. He believed me. And the next day, my mom got off the Section 8 waitlist she’d been on for 4.5 years, that I had forgotten about. (I had paid her rent during that time, and it became the new normal; I didn’t think it would ever change.) I told the universe I was really serious about wanting to learn Russian, and the universe heard me out.

Sometimes, I think the meta-lesson about positive selective attention, goals, risk, and trust apply to equal opportunity stuff too, in a way of thinking that will further alienate any academic friends I still have after leaving a Harvard postdoc to make art. But the idea is that if you focus on excellence and fairness rather than discrimination or diversity and failure or inequality, you will generate more excellence and fairness that way because of how selective attention works. So the best thing you can do for women is to celebrate successful women rather than focus on sexism. And the best way to celebrate successful women is to make their success about excellence, not sex.

But that is an academic argument, and one that no academics want to hear to boot. It is not politically correct to suggest that equal opportunity goals are furthered rather than undermined by selective attention on values beyond equality—rather than attention to equality (or inequality) itself. That perhaps, like Mona Lisa’s smile, you have to look beyond fairness to feel its glow in the picture. Some research on colorblind racial ideology supports the extension of this idea to some facets of equal opportunity with respect to race too, although that research picture is complicated.

It doesn’t mean sexism and racism don’t exist if we choose to focus on success instead of failure. It means we want people to succeed and recognize the power of positive selective attention—and the importance of trust to risk, and risk (along with discipline) to attainment.

 

2. Sustainability. 

Environmentally unsustainable social practices are another one of the worst things in the world. Climate change, water insecurity, food insecurity, poor air quality, and other sequelae of such practices have long had serious security consequences. In other words, environmental degradation is another opposite of world peace.

An arts-and-crafts kit drawing positive selective attention to ways we can face this problem with hope might include:

–       a lizard with a regenerating tail

–       a giraffe with an evolving neck

–       recycled paper

–       bottle caps and glue

–       seeds to plant

–       a book to make your own neighborhood story and map, making a game of walking not driving, shopping local, and otherwise contributing through lifestyle to sustainability

–       bear arms for being a very serious tree-hugger

–       ant stickers (because you can lift your weight in sustainability, and together we can take the cake)

–       other things that are too silly even by my standards to post on my blog

 

3. Safety.

Violent crime is another one of the worst things in the world. It’s another opposite of world peace. And art that flips it by drawing selective attention to its inverse thus makes world peace in people’s hearts and minds. 

An arts-and-crafts kit drawing positive selective attention to ways we can make the world feel safe to flourish and defeat the terror of violent crime might include:

–       a symbol of safety, sanctuary, or white light—like a candle

–       a symbol of peace, water, and the feel of being surrounded by peaceful water—like shells

–       a symbol of feeling loved, appreciated, and valued for who you are—like a mirror medal

–       a magic safety net symbolizing the idea that you can try/risk and trust the universe to catch you when you fall—because you must risk the fall in order to succeed

–       a symbol of feeling pure and clean, like white lace, doves, bunnies, daisies (maybe as sticker sheet of these things)

–       a passport book to fill in with a picture of your best possible self, and stamps for places you’ve been (in your imagination or in real life) and want to visit again

–       a translation of procedural justice research in the form of magnetic die that have positive sides coded T for trust, and negative sides coded M for mistrust, where T faces on the die attract one another, and M faces attract on another too—since trust and mistrust spiral in real life

–       an honoring braid set of three ribbons—one to write a nice thing about yourself on, one to write a nice thing about your best friend, and one to write a nice thing about your worst enemy, before weaving them together

–       violent crime focuses on getting something (be it property, control/dominance, or retribution), rather than giving something. So a positive selective attention refocusing solution to this problem refocuses on giving rather than getting. So an arts-and-crafts kit accompanying a book about this could have a set of labels for boxes, or a little bag to decorate, for giveaway stuff to be on the lookout for how you can give what you have.

–       a few drawing exercises geared toward recognition of the idea that the world is a big, diverse ecosystem, where random good things (as well as random bad things) happen all the time

 

4. Happiness.

Depression and anxiety are another one of the worst things in the world. And they’re not just “in your head.” Depression is a leading cause of death and disability in the world, especially among some of the people I respect the most—like veterans. And these problems are the opposite of world peace, because they are the opposite of individuals feeling safe to flourish. 

An arts-and-crafts kit drawing positive selective attention to ways we can make the world feel safe to flourish by beating depression and anxiety might include:

–       enamel paints, representing shiny iridescent happiness

–       blank space, representing possibility

–       a workbook with exercises for drawing out pictures of and next-steps to experiment with different best possible selves—translating an evidence-based positive psychology exercise for a popular audience

–       a Beckett button. You hit the Beckett button when you’ve tried and failed, and tried again. Then you try again.

 

–       an interactive storybook and sheet of two types of stickers that translates Carol Dweck’s research on mindsets for kids. Anxiety and the fixed mindset of judge-and-be-judged is like pox (dot stickers), while just trying and the growth mindset of learn-and-help-learn are like inoculation (bandaid stickers). So doing is the vaccine for fear and failure.

–       a gratitude compass that directs your attention in five different directions (four external, one internal) to help you stay in touch with gratitude, a proven happiness-increasing exercise from positive psychology)

–       an optimism butterfly that directs your attention to five things (four wings and a spine) that have gone right today (another symbolic embodiment of another proven happiness-increasing exercise from positive psych)

–       other things that are too silly even by my standards to post on this blog

 

You’re Welcome?

These are the best answers I can think of to the worst problems in the world.

Maybe my ideas are very silly. Maybe none of these things are even my ideas. MAYBE NOBODY CARES. 

Or maybe my art business drop-shipping experiment that has turned back into the illustrated poem-story series that was my first priority anyway is just not developed enough yet.

Maybe I need to try to re-think of putting together these kits—if I can, cheaply, through wholesalers—as putting together an online art exhibit. I do believe in the ideas behind them. I do see, step by step, how helping other people making art that directs selective attention in these ways is actually a way of furthering world peace. And I do want to succeed as an artist and entrepreneur. Without preaching as a (reformed) academic, or compromising as a (wannabe) jobbing artist.

I’m just not sure I’m on the right track. I’d rather explode paintings and poem-stories along these lines now, but I’m having trouble creating without my sanctuary, my art-cave where I can be completely alone. And I don’t know what to do about that even though it’s a problem entirely of my own making.

I’m also frustrated that these ideas seem so wonky and theoretical. Maybe I should refocus on publishing the poetry book I have already written, to learn more about self-publishing by doing and show people I can write. And just start blogging the two short children’s stories I have written, to get myself illustrating again with the simple tools at my disposal. Maybe I can get reader feedback that way. Maybe I can break my block and do a better job structuring the Lorax of policing that I wanted to prioritize and that I have written thousands upon thousands of words of brainstorming on without managing to structure—if I just make something instead of trying to figure out what to make.

All I know is, I’m still working towards being a jobbing translational scientist-artist in a way that’s true to myself. And showing up to that work in this way right now is the best I can do. So I’m doing it. 

While traveling the world and making art as part of my year-long life experiment, I’m talking to everyone I see doing their art.

All successful businesses are art businesses. They are run by people doing their art—something that is not work to them, that makes them lose time, that they want to be involved in every aspect of. Even if, like me and Richard Branson, they need special help remembering which is net and which is gross profit. 

They have ten other things in common, too.

1. Niche market.

Everybody talks about this in business, and I don’t have anything new to add. You have to distinguish yourself as a business by going niche, pitching exactly what you’re about to exactly who’s interested. 

Application: I want to appeal to people who love poetry, painting and peace. If you think those things are silly, you’re not in my niche market. 

2. Selling an idea or experience rather than a product or service.

Application: Maybe what I’m selling initially—before the whole line of poem-stories I envision is written, illustrated, and produced—is art supplies or other stuff I can buy wholesale and resell, providing value to wholesellers by driving sales and to consumers by giving them ideas and quality customer service.

But what I’m REALLY  selling is still the ideas behind the whole line. And the core idea they all have in common—the idea that we can make world peace with art.

Small decisions, personal creations and interactions, local, mundane existence—the micro adds up to the macro whether what we’re adding up is small-scale greed (the tragedy of the commons) or small-scale celebration of what’s good in ourselves and others (procedural justice).

3. Appealing to the childlike whether or not the target audience is children.

Complicated, sad things have their fans. But Meryl Streep and I have lost patience with all that. 

Good news. The rest of the world, too, prefers honest simplicity and happiness to complexity and sadness. So successful businesses, especially art businesses, give it to them.

Application: Let it be simple, playful, and happy. I know the research mooring is there, I know the big ideas back it up. It’s ok if not everyone gets that or it takes me time to make the books that clarify it. I know what I’m doing is meaningful even if—especially—if it seems silly. It’s actually more likely to succeed the sillier it seems to some.

4. Offering cheap stuff.

Maybe people want to buy a little bit of beauty or peace. Maybe they only want to spend $1. 

Application: What I really want to do is tie in bits of affordable merchandise with books to increase both profit margin and the reach and portability of the symbols in the books. But first I should experiment with drop-shipping things with lower price points than the more immediately obvious artistic stuff I could do this with, like prints of my paintings.

5. Offering consumables even when that is not your business’s main product or attraction.

This is something all successful artsy shops with physical presence in the West offer in some form or another. It makes people happy. 

Application: Since my business is entirely online for the moment—cutting overhead costs like rent and inventory on the drop-shipping model, at least until I have more capital and then might work more directly with lesser-known wholesellers to produce my own inventory in a physical space—I might need to think about how to reincarnate this commonality on the ecommerce model. That segues nicely to…

6. Personalizing the experience.

Andrew Carnegie identified the desire to feel special as one of the primary needs we all share. Businesses appeal to consumers by making them feel special. The individual’s name goes on his Starbuck’s cup.

Application: Really wanting to personalize the experience because I appreciate people who appreciate my art drove me to include a bonus painting (on paper) with every oil painting on canvas I sold last month—with a personal note written on the back. It’s hard to figure out how to do that with the drop-shipping experiment I want to run to monetize before I can even think about remaking my own little art-making sanctuary, where I might create and have inventory and do this sort of thing myself again. But I probably could work with whole-sellers to do at least something in this spirit. Most drop-shippers have invoices with their own business logos shipped with the products they’re selling. So I could try to make those invoices as artful as possible—including an image and a poem, and seeing how people respond. A free gift would be even better, if I could include one without tanking my profit margin. (Everyone loved the extra painting and note.) Maybe I could tie in the price point of purchase with the free gift offer like a lot of companies do in cosmetics, for example.

7. Limited-time offers.

Restaurants and clothing stores have seasonal offers, art galleries and museums have changing exhibits, and online stores have limited-time offers. 

Application: While I build an email list of customers who are interested in the meta-idea of world peace through art—customers who might later want to buy the illustrated poem-book series I’m really excited about producing but need some time to do right, one by one—I should keep in touch with that list. Not just with my journey as an artist, like I’ve been doing with my artist newsletter. But with special offers. This is a nice thing to do for people who like my work, and also happens to be good marketing.

8. Clear calls to action.

Artists are often embarrassed to ask for money for our art. Amanda Palmer and others have written about this. But if you don’t give people a clear call to action, they have no idea how to support your work even if they wanted to. So you are doing something nice for your supporters when you give them a clear call to action. Make it easy for the client to be a client.

Application: I don’t know. Maybe, since what I really want to do is write a series of illustrated poem-stories translating cutting-edge social science to give people easy, fun ways to make the world a better place by ameliorating the worst problems in the world, I should run a crowd-funding campaign. Because what I really want is to feel secure enough financially to rent a place I can turn into an art studio for a few months someplace with low cost of living, like Greece.

But I don’t want to ask for money for nothing. This is the patron, university, arts grant model of art as gift economy rather than market economy product or service. It’s fine. It’s just not what I want to be doing right now. I want to offer properly-priced products that people buy because they give them happiness. And then do the same thing with that money. I guess I think if I find the right niche and offer value, the market will take care of the rest. So I need to work on doing this asking thing better so that, if I have the pricing right, the market takes care of the rest.

One way to do this is to work within a marketplace that makes it easy for the client to buy, like eBay or Amazon. That also cuts my transaction costs by making it so I don’t necessarily have to make another website for this experiment. Not yet, anyway.

Another way to do this is to use the fundraising skills I’ve already practiced more and better—grant-writing and academic fundraising skills. And another way is crowd-funding. Those are two good, less directly market-related options that I could be exploring instead of trying to figure out what exactly drop-shipping is and how I can do it.

At this stage—probably at any stage—one should take angel funding wherever one can get it. Except. Part of this big change for me is transitioning from being an academic  (who publishes poetry and sells paintings) to being a businesswoman (whose business is translational science through art). So I need to be practicing the market skill. Because that is also a communication skill, and my art business is a communication project. 

9. Beautiful art.

Real value. When you travel the world, one of the things you realize is that the cheap plastic crap, Starbuck’s coffee, and glossy pictures you can get everywhere in the West? It’s really nice stuff. You can’t get it everywhere. Market drivers of globalization are at least in part about real value. And that’s true in art as in everything else.

Application: We’ve already established that I only want to offer real value anyway. So all I have to do is do my work, make my art, rely on my sense of what’s true and beautiful. That works out well, since being true to myself for a living is what this experiment is all.  

10. Forget selling.

I know I said something about selling the idea or experience, and making the call to action or ask crystal clear. But when you’re so excited about what you’re doing, you’re not selling anything at all—that’s when I’ve been most successful as an artist (selling paintings, busking, teaching). It’s also when I’ve been happiest to buy other people’s art.

Application: I’m not running a drop-shipping experiment anymore this week. I’m playing a market game with world peace through art supplies. And my goal is to get as many people as possible to play with me, because the ideas are good and we’re going to have a lot of fun. 

So Many Other Things

Other things I know successful art businesses also have in common: Interactivity, immediate gratification, symbols, and a social component. 

Other things I don’t know successful art businesses also have in common: I don’t know. 

And that’s what this year is all about. 

This week, I thought a lot about my conversation Monday with Keep Calm CEO Aidan Fitzpatrick. In part because he was kind, generous with his time, and runs a business that makes the world a better place with interactive art, like I’m learning to do. And in part because something about  our exchange on—and my rejection of—the drop-shipping ecommerce model didn’t sit right. 

Drop-shipping is a way of doing business online that a lot of Amazon and eBay sellers use without knowing what it is. It’s basically the online version of buying wholesale and selling retail—but without the hassle of physical location and inventory. So if it works, you can run your own business from anywhere in the world with minimal capital investment. 

Sounds too good to be true. So I haven’t even tried it. Instead, I’ve thought up a good case against it. This violates the “do more, plan less” spirit of the rules of my year-long experiment in making art and traveling the world. Plus, it turns out to be a bad case. 

Debunking the Case Against Drop-Shipping

Drop-shipping as I understood it on Monday has three marks against it: 
1.    It doesn’t add value. 
2.    It’s not my art. 
3.    It sounds kinda scammy. 

All these arguments are wrong. 

1. Value.

Drop-shipping is the same basic model all businesses work on, in the ecommerce context. People do business with you in exchange for making their lives better in some way. Whole-sellers sell to middle-men (retailers or drop-shippers) because it cuts their transaction costs. You do their advertising, more smaller transactions, and customer service. They make and ship the product. Customers in turn buy from middle-men because it saves them huge gobs of time, and gloms goods and services together in ways that otherwise increase quality of life. Think of Starbuck’s. Do you want to go to Sumatra to find your dark roast, or do you want 15 minutes of peace, good music, and a reliable cup of coffee made for you? 

Personally, I want to go to Sumatra. But, um, not right now. Right now I want the coffee and to finish this blog so I can get to an art exhibit at Buckingham Palace on paintings of paradise while launching my next experiment in monetizing my art business. So I’ll take the reliably good coffee and free WiFi, thanks. 

Far from not adding value, then, drop-shipping is a contemporary form of the way business (at its best) works in general. Probably many drop-shipping businesses, like other businesses, don’t add value for their customers. Probably those businesses fail. I don’t care about the ones that don’t, because that’s not the kind of business I want to run anyway. Karma is a bitch—and she ain’t my bitch. Someone else can sort out the unfairness noise in the justice signal right now.  (We can discuss later how ironic this is coming from a woman who once hung a Sword of Justice in her office, while working on the Justice Database at UCLA and Harvard.) 

So the real question is how to add value in this model, not whether this model adds value. 

2. Art.

It’s very important to me to run my own business as an artist. But there are lots of different things that could mean. I love painting, singing, writing in various forms, reading, exploring the world, long walks on the beach… I’m a whole human being with a complex array of interests and adaptive potential just like everybody else. 

One of the things I keep learning from businesspeople I talk with on my travels is how there is an art in everything. Everything you love. Everything you put your heart in. If you approach it that way, it’s there. You make it art. You practice your art. It makes you an artist.

This means that, just as Jim Henson brought his art to ads and then ads to the public service of making world peace and children’s education through art, so too can artists like me make money first while developing our art in the longer-term. It does not have to be either-or. I just have to try more new things to figure out how to do it at this stage, in this place and time. 

So the real question is not whether drop-shipping is the first-next priority in my latest imaginary ideal art world. That project is The Lorax of policing—an illustrated children’s poem-story allegory for how trust makes security that introduces an iconic counter-terrorism symbol while translating procedural justice research (the way Dr. Seuss translated economics research and political philosophy on common-pool resources) for a broad audience to promote world peace through art in the first of an ongoing children’s book series called (what else?) Where the Wilde Thinks Are. Like everyone does for fun on the weekend. 

But I have to produce the product and build up to the launch before I can even start validating titles. This is too long-game to be my first-priority art business goal. So is the screenplay I need to revise again before pitching. So is the albums or two’s worth of songs I need to rework with a  better accompanist or three before recording and releasing online, again with the proper pre-launch work once the product exists in final form. So even is the old-school painting model that I’m learning still works best for other visual artists, where you work in public and sell mostly commissions using sidewalk sales, art walks, and markets. This takes or seems to take the kind of physical presence and mooring I’ve given up for the year to try different things. 

Instead, the right art business question to be asking here is what I can do that is one of my arts that other people want to pay me for immediately in this drop-shipping context. 

3. Scamminess. The problem here is that drop-shipping sounds too good to be true. Make money online without producing a product. Work for yourself, from anywhere in the world. 

But that’s just because the description is wrong. You are producing a product in drop-shipping. The product is commerce with lower transaction costs for the whole-seller, who pays you by doing business with you at wholesale prices. And if you’re smart, it’s happiness for your customer. Whatever else it is. You have to tell people what it is, and sell it, and make sure they’re happy with it. That’s just good business. You never work for yourself, then. You work for the customer. 

So the real question is not whether drop-shipping as an ecommerce model is a scam, but whether I can do it in a way that monetizes my art, makes people happy, and generates net profit immediately with minimal capital investment. 

The case for drop-shipping, then, is that it requires minimal capital investment, makes money quickly, generates value for producers and consumers alike, and can be done from anywhere without a traditional business or for that matter personal life infrastructure. In theory, it does all that while immediately monetizing art as a business—if done right. Let’s test that theory. 

The Experiment

Being me, I want to run five experiments at a time.

Knowing me—and my tendency to work to the point of near-oblivion on the fractal possibilities of the thing I’m excited about, when experimenting joyfully with a few, small next-steps is sometimes a better idea—I will settle for pitching one drop-ship experiment to my perfect fantasy collaborator for this, and doing one myself. I will only tell you about the fantasy collaboration if it happens and it’s ok to share. I will structure the drop-ship experiment as fully as possible while also actually starting it today. 

The drop-shipping experiment I run solo has to start with what—an idea, who—a target market niche, when—time and cost bounds, why—how my product makes people happy, and how—how I’ll profit by the numbers based on specific wholesaler research, how I’ll know if it’s a successful experiment or model that I should test further, how I’ll do the first few next steps immediately, listen deeply, and adapt, rather than planning the whole thing like I already know the answers to the important questions.

This is just a simpler heuristic for approaching idea validation with the basic questions we ask about all sorts of things. Today I am using the simpler version of all things because I am inexplicably terrified of this experiment. Busking on the streets of Mexico City? Cool. Improv and stand-up on London stages? Bring it. Giving a proper try to a new way of potentially making money as an artist? Hand me the Bachs. This is really scary. Because if I fail, maybe it means I’m a bad businessperson or can’t hack it as an artist. (Of course it means no such thing. It means more experiments.) 

What: That’s a good question. I’m not sure yet what idea to structure this experiment around. 

When: I want to spend under $100 and give this experiment seven days to make net profit. 

Who: Depends on what, but probably my target market is mostly young American women. That’s what I know, and it’s a good market. 

Why: Again depends on the what and who. 

How: Depends on the what, who, and why.

So essentially I’m giving myself $100 and seven days to turn net profit on an idea I haven’t had yet that implements an ecommerce model I haven’t tried before. This is a tough test of drop-shipping to say the least.  

Which is as it should be. Tough tests are the best way to test any theory. New experiments, where you don’t know the results in advance, are the best kind to run. And making the world a better place with art is a worthy goal to take some risks for. And compromise—and learn—and try again. 

Today I met with Aidan Fitzpatrick, Founder & CEO of Reincubate and Keep Calm Network. He was kind enough to give me a whole hour. And I got the best possible outcome of any business meeting—more and better questions, a reading list, and that warm, fuzzy feeling that I’m not alone in the search for intelligent life (and genuine value generation) in the universe.

More and Better Questions

Aidan started out asking me what the ideal outcome of the meeting was. I can’t remember what I said, but I remember how it made me feel: like I was in charge of the interaction and what I wanted mattered. There I was, unemployed, indebted from attempting to launch my own business, crashing with a friend of a friend in a foreign country because my spidey sense says I need to travel and make art right now—and suddenly I was running a meeting with the CEO of a company I admire because it does good in the world using art and ideas.

Maya Angelou said people will forget what you said and did, but not how you made them feel. It’s true. So the question I didn’t ask then that I have to ask myself now, as a businessperson and a human being, is how I can be more like Aidan in this way. When I blog, how can I do a better job making readers feel important, putting them in charge? When I paint, write, sing? On one hand, art is about pouring your heart out. But on the other hand, it’s about offering that outpouring to other people, to keep them company in the world and make them feel like I did in this meeting. Like they’re not just experiencing Harry Potter’s adventures, but in a sense writing them, too.

This weekend, I was a bit stuck on the plan-test-do art business conundrum. Like a lot of venture capitalists and artists, Aidan comes down firmly on the test side for business, and the do side for art. But on both fronts, his answers raised more and better questions.

Like most people I’ve talked with who have a history of making successful products and running successful businesses, Aidan’s businesses tend to happen organically. This makes me feel better about still struggling to write a full business plan.

But making businesses happen organically still takes a lot of work and specifically a lot of dialogue with the market. It takes validation experiments, whether you run them consciously using tools like Google Pay Per Click ads and Launch Rock, or unconsciously like the Beatles playing Hamburg strip clubs until they got their sound, or the feel of their process for making it.

This sort-of radio tuning principle is central to the way markets work as efficient information environments. Visually and conceptually it also shares a lot with Hedy Lamarr’s spread-spectrum singing and missile defense, Pandora Internet radio, and the central insight about mutual recognition that I’m trying to channel in allegorical poem-painting form in the next Where the Wilde Thinks Are (series) book I’m writing, that’s like The Lorax for policing.

I have a lot of work to do communicating what I’m talking about here better, but it’s basically about how deep listening lets us make something much better in collaboration than we could make by ourselves. It’s about the sociality of dreams. And it’s about constraint.

One of the terms of art Aidan introduced me to is that of “constrained media.” Andrew Chen has written about how the constraints of media like Twitter or Keep Calm create communication norms implicitly. That makes me think this sort of implicit constraint is the trick to generating communication norms—positive, respectful, honest, no Mohammed toons—to counter the meme-ification of extremist recruiting online—without being explicit about such constraint when free speech is part of the issue.

It also makes me wonder: What great, unanswered questions of emotional intelligence we can put to this computing resource that is social media, to take the bounds of social knowledge farther like we were able to calculate pi farther using computers? If we can harness its intelligence through the right constraints, what can we learn? 

More and better questions:

–       If online media generates positive communication norms through constraint but social media is too big to effectively moderate, what constraints keep it so you’re effectively inviting people to play a game or conduct a thought experiment with you? How do you make your constrained, interactive content game, not curation?

–       What’s my next step in launching my art business, in terms of harnessing the social intelligence of the live web and constrained media? For simplification sake, let’s say I have three options, one on each pole and one in the middle of the validate-versus-create spectrum.

o   At the create end of the spectrum, I could put out a book in some form—e.g., Kindle—and try to validate the market for it.

o   At the validate end of the spectrum, I could test a series of book covers/ideas using Launch Rock and Pay Per Click ads before writing a thing. I think Aidan mentioned both James Altucher and Tim Ferriss do this.

o   In the middle of the spectrum, I could use Google Pay Per Click to look at click through rates to get the best title for an existing draft, and collect email addresses for bigger launch—treating Amazon Kindle publication not as a test and short-term goal, but rather as a game and longer-term goal. A game where you want to be on the front page first, get a certain number of hits in a certain amount of time to maximize your chances of getting more momentum for more sales.

–       Why can’t I get away from this validate-create duality? It’s dumb. Conceptually, the duality collapses. Creation and validation are one and the same because we’re social creatures—even poets and painters. But in practice, this is a real tension for art as a business.

–       Is it bad strategy to keep learning by doing this way? I read a ton and then talk to people and discover I wasn’t even asking the right questions. I make and toss entire websites, prototypes, cities. (Just kidding—miss you, Boston.) Or is this how all successful entrepreneurs do it—starting with the meta idea and working through the mistakes to, hopefully, profit—but certainly, value generation? 

 

The Reading List  

Ever think to yourself, “Geez this website and business are beautiful, I wonder what the CEO has been reading?”

Me, too.

So I snooped around his office photographing all the books.

At the end, my list was too long, so he gave me a shortlist:

1.     The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen Covey,

2.     Good to Great, by Jim Collins, and

3.     Mastering the Rockefeller Habits: What You Must Do to Increase the Value of Your Fast-Growth Firm,  by Verne Harnish.

One of the products I want to create after I figure out how to launch my art-for-world-peace business is a cure for sleep. So I can work and read all night instead, but still make sense in the morning. 

  

The Intelligent, Caring, and Hilarious Universe

All my business meetings lately seem to end with discussion of the universe. The intelligent, caring, and hilarious universe has been a main character in the story of my life this year. She has lots of eyes, wings, and waves. She’s a metaphor for social networks in some senses—and the way the “alive web” brings machine computing power to emotional and social intelligence.

Aidan asked if I had any other questions, and I used the opportunity to ask for his opinion on the drop-shipping model Tim Ferriss and others propound. Most people love or hate Tim Ferriss, he responded. And in the way being around someone intelligent and caring can up your own analytical and emotional intelligence, his own response—about attention to value—made me put my finger on why I haven’t been able to bring myself to even try the drop-shipping game.

There’s something resembling an easy step-by-step money-making process there. You find a product online that relates to an area of your expertise. You might validate the market for it using Pay Per Click ads on Google. And then you make and advertise a website that resells it. Buy in bulk, sell through middle-men online. You never have to deal with the product. You’re effectively just driving the traffic and taking a cut, as I understand it. Do the same thing with services, like web design, research assistance, or social media management—or other people’s time as you advise them in your book or on your website to play this game—and the same model is called arbitrage. So in the increasingly service-oriented economy, most businesses profit from human forms of drop-shipping.

One of the reasons art businesses are so hard to conceive and profit from is that it’s not really a good or a service you’re trying to sell. It’s an idea. Ideas may help sell other good and services—like the idea of happiness helps sell cars and candybars—but they’re in a different category altogether. And they’re what art sells, what it is. It should be the most profitable type of business in the world, because ideas are free.

Anyway, drop-shipping and some forms of arbitrage are morally problematic insofar as they don’t generate obvious value. Maybe you can help people save money by buying a good in bulk at a huge discount and reselling it online at only a partial discount, so you and the customer base both gain in a sense. But it doesn’t feel right.

The reason I left a Harvard postdoc to launch my own art business even though that is, in many senses, a totally crazy move, is because I have faith. I have faith in the goodness in myself, others and the world—in my ability to recognize and develop that goodness—and in the intelligent, caring, and hilarious universe to recognize that development and reward me. Trying to make money any old way doesn’t keep that faith. That’s not what embracing money as a metaphor for value and trusting that the market has some sense is about.

It’s about making art that makes people’s lives better. But I’m still trying to figure out what that means. 

These three things are next for my art business, and I’m not sure which one to prioritize.

1. Writing a business plan—or seven. 

2. Validating the idea—with qualitative interviews, pay per click Google Ads and/or some other way.

3. Just generating more and better product—e.g., moving books or book-like entities I already have towards actual books on a platform like Amazon’s CreateSpace, to publish online and/or via print-by-demand. 

Making money—which pretty much has to happen online now since I’m traveling without work visas—also has to happen. This creates obvious problems such as space-time existing. Also feeling like the world is judging me and I am losing a game because I am not making money, but one gets over the latter as a weirdo early on. The judging part at least. The game, I want to win. 

So I’ll do what I always do when I don’t know what to do. I’ll figure it out writing. 

 

Writing a Business Plan

It is ungodly stupid that I have invested five figures in attempting to launch a business without writing a business plan. But instead of remedying this mistake once identifying it, I have been stuck for a week on which business plan to write.

Is it the plan that identifies writing as my strongest, most marketable love and creative skill, and finds markets accordingly, e.g., using services like ELance.com to monetize immediately and flow flexibly from there?

The plan that integrates all my completed or partial products—such as the draft screenplay, play, illustrated poetry book, illustrated allegory/children’s book series Where the Wilde Thinks Are, album of original songs, hundreds of oil paintings, meme business idea, editing, tutoring, grant proposal assistance business, and social media strategy consulting service—into a whole vision of what I hope to accomplish in a few years? The plan that hones focus to one of those things?

The plan that involves showing up to the Old Vic saying “Help me, I’m a poet!” and having magic happen, or the plan that involves inventing an acting resume to make it happen in the cliquey theater scene beyond the really only lovely people I’ve been fortunate enough to meet so far?  

For a lot of people who have trouble thinking big-picture, making a business plan is probably a good first-next step at any stage of business launch. But if you are, like me, so over-analytical you have decision rules for ordering dinner and you need a plan to make a plan to make a plan—maybe planning is not the first-next step. Maybe planning is a sure-fire way to dig yourself into a hole in your head where the sun don’t shine. Maybe you gotta take that idea outside first and last. 

 

Validating the Idea

Maybe validating the idea is the next step. A lot of business gurus recommend this as a first-next step at any stage of business launch anyway. You can do it with interviews—a.k.a., talking to people. You can do it with Pay Per Click Google Ads that only cost you if the idea is going to make you money anyway, in conjunction with a landing page on another platform. You can do it by identifying successful businesses doing stuff like what you think you want to do, and asking for their business plans. (Ok, this last thing might be a combination of research, plagiarism, and networking rather than idea validation.)

Validating makes more sense to me than planning, because it offers the prospect of the market narrowing possibilities for me. Why write seven business plans and then ask people what they think trying to figure out which is the best, when I can ask people to show-not-tell me what’s good? It’s more efficient to test first, plan later. 

But. What product do I put out there as an artist—without investing ten years making the perfect product, or three months (or even three days) making a book ready for publication, or painting a few hundred more oil paintings? How do you validate art as a business idea without generating the product? 

That is not a rhetorical question. I have no idea. You probably wouldn’t try to validate a movie poster and then make the movie if people clicked on it online. You would want a more in-depth validation in the right market for a product that took the kind of investment a movie takes. 

So validating probably comes before planning for me and most artists. That’s an important insight to share because it’s not something most business bankers or mentors, Chamber of Commerce branches, and other usual sources of start-up information will tell you. It’s an insight from the venture capital community that I seem to have accidentally started talking with. That’s actually a different community. I think. They’re the people who profit from successful start-ups first, other than entrepreneurs. So of course bankers who make decisions off forms will want a document showing you can do forms—the business plan. And venture capitalists who make profits off your profits will want proof of concept that people want to buy what you’re selling. 

But it’s not obvious how you validate your business ideas as an artist without generating the product. 

 

Generating the Product

As far as I know, generating the product means painting the hundreds of paintings—without knowing (or particularly caring) whether someone will buy them. It means writing blogs and books and things to communicate, think, learn, share what you’re learning, and hone questions about what you still don’t know—without knowing (or particularly caring) whether someone wants to read them. It means crawling in the shower to record songs alone on your M-Track without knowing whether you’ll even be capable of singing them in front of anyone else. (And then doing it on the streets of Mexico City.)

This is the problem with art, and indeed with all ideas. They’re internal before they’re external, inchoate before they’re social. But it’s a particularly sticky problem in art as a business. Because sometimes the process is the product. And you have to show up to play to know what that means.

That sounds pretty fuzzy and risky. So I’m not satisfied with it as an answer to the question—plan, test, or do? It’s just as far as I’ve gotten right now. 

 

Making Money—or Being Too Busy Working for Myself to Bother

So what’s the worst that happens if I quit my life to pursue art? This is a question I stayed up many nights asking before deciding I would just have to do it to see. An illustrated short story—When I Am Living in My Car—resulted from that process.

Maybe that story itself is a product I can use to test different answers to the plan, test, or do question. It makes sense to see if I can trouble-shoot silly technical problems with my illustrated books—e.g., the largest one tends to crash Microsoft Word because it’s not made for image-heavy text files—by putting the images and text together in an app made for making illustrated books in the first place. And then I’ll have a product to offer, to try finding markets or validating book ideas before deciding where books fit in my business plan, or whether it’s likely to be lucrative or make me popular to try to become the Dr. Seuss of community-oriented policing and other forms of humanism.

If it seems to work and is easy enough, I can publish other things that way, like the illustrated poetry book I think highly of as a work of literature and art. If it doesn’t seem to work, then I know what else to try next.

I seem to keep running lists of common desires and the goods/services I see successful businesses around me providing to fulfill them through my head now, like I used to run lists of what had gone or could go wrong, dissertation hypotheses, or things to do. It’s funny because they’re not original, most of them work off an arbitrage model (or nested-doll arbitrage models), and I don’t know how they relate to art as a business yet. But I get the occasional flash of obvious insight, like how commercial art tends to make people happy just like commercial food tends to sell on the emotions it evokes. People want good food, coffee, sleep, sex, to feel important… And people want to be happy. You can make people happy with intellectual honesty in news and you can make people happy with genuine soul in art. There’s no necessary conflict between story-telling and market success. 

I slept on my stuckness last night, and awoke with the kind of clarity I rarely get and more rarely share. I have wanted to write a book and have a baby since I got my B.A. and an office job at 20. Ten years later, I have a PhD and walked away from a Harvard fellowship, alienating my academic friends to whom that move was unimaginable. But it was overdue. If I could do anything all day, every day, it would involve standing in a kitchen dancing and writing. This sounds simple and old-fashioned.

It’s actually insanely ambitious and depends on me understanding cutting-edge technologies and accordingly swiftly-changing markets. Because how people are reading is changing with social media, Kindles, self-publishing, and other aspects of the current communication and entertainment revolution. A recent Variety survey showed the five most influential figures among 13-18 years olds in the U.S. were Youtube stars. 

Besides, I want the book to be Literature—and to keep producing—and to make a lot of money (millions) making a lot of people’s lives better (millions). Plus I want to love and be loved. Not just write any old book. Not just have any old baby.

If the universe were a waitress, she’d probably be smacking her gum with her hand on her hip, glaring at me before flipping her order-pad closed and walking away about now. Pie-in-the-sky, right? 

Maybe not. Knowing that I primarily want to write books and work from home—while traveling and working or volunteering abroad frequently—I can come up with three next-steps each to solve the plan, test, or do conundrum. (When in doubt, do all the things.) 

Business plans are important because honing your desires into goals involving specific ends like time and money, using the power of your unconscious and conscious minds to formulate specific plans for achieving those goals in terms of means, and changing the plan as you learn—this level of taking your dreams seriously predicts success for all sorts of good reasons. So I’ll start writing a business plan that omits everything but writing, but assumes I have to be flexible around market demand in what I write in the short- and medium-term. This means (1) picking a template, (2) writing a draft, and (3) bouncing it off someone who knows what a business plan should look like. 

Validating artistic products without investing a lot of time in creating them is important, and successful commercial artists who didn’t lose their soul—Jim Henson comes to mind because I’m reading this great art business book that uses him as an example—often manage to do that. If it’s easy enough to learn to create ebooks or print-on-demand books, though, I’d really like to try validating the market for a few things I already have written by making the manuscripts into books, and experimenting from there. This means (1) picking a publishing platform, (2) pouring in an existing manuscript, and (3) picking a validation platform to experiment with next. 

Doing is harder in some ways on the road, outside of my own space, and not knowing how the money part of this life experiment is going to work. Like a lot of artists, I have to give myself permission to do it like it’s my job. Because it is. So this means (1) reviewing Henry Miller’s 11 rules,  (2) finishing the first draft of a short, illustrated allegory for community-oriented policing and racial-religious mistrust spirals, Whoa, Listen to the Music, and (3) visiting with Hedy Lamarr (in my imagination) in one of the longer projects that keeps coming back to me as a possible priority for this year, Interviews with Dead People.

Hedy knows a lot that’s important to the policing allegory anyway, because she invented a technology that contains a central insight about mutual recognition. Always match. Always start with “yes, and.” Always sing at dinner parties. 

And this is why I write. 

Since my business idea is getting bigger rather than smaller, I’m trying harder to make myself go outside to validate it before writing a business plan, or seven. This led me to East London yesterday to talk with people about ISIS.  

 

Experiment  

Designing effective validation experiments for a business idea is just like designing experiments to test any other idea. It involves four elements:

1. Hypothesis: Client (moderate person) has problem combatting extremist group recruitment online. This applies to all hate groups with online presence, the best organized of which is ISIS/ISIL.

2. Riskiest assumption: Peers would respectfully, effectively contest extremist narrative if they knew who, when, and how to target online communications to at-risk community members.

3. Method: Interviews, pitch, concierge service, in that order.

4. Minimum criterion for success: I expect 6/10 East London moderate Muslims to indicate IS online radicalization is a pain point—a significant problem they worry about—and they’d use a tool to address the worry.

 

Result 

Wrong.

 

Responses fit into the following five categories:

–       Talk to someone else

–       Be afraid, be very afraid

–       Don’t you know 9/11 was an inside job, the U.S. is arming ISIS, and Russia is going to nuke you personally for trying to police the world?

–       They are already surveilled, won’t this feel like more targeting? (From white secular people, ironically lumping all Muslims into one category but making a good point nonetheless)

–       Take it offline, talk to people, get people into more positive cross-cultural dialogue and experiences through orthogonal stuff like music

 

Things it was suggested people want that would make better business ideas than “world peace through art”:

–       Food

–       Housing

–       Rides

–       Ways to make more money

–       Art lessons

 

Lessons Learned

First, the framing makes a big difference. “Combatting online hate group recruitment” is different from “defeating ISIS with art.” The former sounds dainty and academic to me, while the latter sounds exciting. But no one else likes the latter, so I should probably stop saying it unless I can get a few million dollars to make pop-up divine art to freak out foot soldiers in Syria. (But if you have a ton of gold leaf and combat experience, call me.) 

Second, the cognitive stickiness of conspiracy theories is really important. We’ve known for a long time that majorities in several Muslim countries don’t believe Arabs are responsible for 9/11. And the alternative theories tend to involve powerful conspiracies, like the U.S. Government, Israel, a global Zionist conspiracy, or whatever.

It’s a lot less comfortable to believe that there is no man behind the curtain. The contemporary analogue of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem—the embodiment of a boring villain, arguably a bureaucrat in a bad barrel more than a bad apple per se—is just as much a teenager on Twitter recruiting for ISIS as it is a faceless bureaucrat enforcing equal laws with unequal consequences. Sometimes, I think we have so much power with social media, democracy, and the market that Eichmann is all of us. If something is wrong and we don’t right it, whose fault is that? It doesn’t help to blame ourselves, but we’re empowered to change things. 

Anyway, you can use this cognitive-stickiness-of-conspiracies knowledge by pointing out how much sense it would make for Russia to support ISIS—a godless foe using other people’s perceived superstitions to destabilize an oil-rich region and hobble a competitor superpower. One could envision a whole social media campaign having fun with that. 

But it makes more sense to focus on the bigger picture of why conspiracy theories are so sticky and how to change the focus of the discourse about crime and security, war and peace.

The bigger picture looks something like this:

This is a very rough application of Bayes’ rule, which says that weird people are weird. Subgroup membership matters. In security, it means that bad cops are going to get a lot more press attention than good cops as a general rule. That’s a problem for security itself if procedural justice research is right that perception is reality, trust creates security and mistrust breeds lawlessness. 

The universe of media attention and policing can be broken up into four categories—no media attention for bad cops, no media attention for good cops, media blitz for bad cops, and media blitz for good cops. Most of the good police work is not going to get media attention, in part because of privacy protections, as I’ve written about before. And it’s non-obvious what distinguishes good from bad policing—police helping versus hassling people—in the majority of police interactions, in the first row there. Is it in the trust or mistrust a person already has of police in general before a particular interaction takes place? Or the tone of voice and language police use, their professionalism or personality? Or something else?

Community-oriented policing research tends to suggest it’s all of the above—but who cares? These universes of the majority of policing aren’t what make the news anyway. Those paparazzi boxes, in the second row of the Bad Cop-Good Cop table,  are more heavily populated by outliers, or statistical anomalies. Minority occurrences make up the majority of reporting on policing.

Which is not to say they’re unimportant! Abuses are horrible and should be systematically reduced through institutional reforms that make better barrels as well as investigations that identify and punish bad apples. It’s just the context of the media environment. And it has its own consequences. Namely, it undermines the public trust that makes people more law-abiding and thus makes communities safer. 

Third, people seem pretty unhappy with the state right now because of the stuff in the bottom left box. There’s a lot of anti-surveillance backlash, protests against actual or perceived police abuses, and the like. But there might not actually be a market demand for security services like combatting hate group recruitment on social media (a.k.a. defeating ISIS with art). Maybe Hobbes was right that the first responsibility of the state is to provide security for its citizens. And maybe that provision is something that the market delegates to the government precisely because no one wants to pay for it individually, but we all need it collectively to do anything else.

If that’s the case, this explains why calls by people like Representative Cory Booker—for a better entertainment/arts industry response to ISIS radicalizing our young people on social media—seem to be failing to mobilize an effective response. Industries respond to market demand, and the market doesn’t get Bayes’ rule. So people who care deeply about truth and justice are more easily mobilized against security forces and in favor of the perceived underdog—doubtless a solid moral intuition in lots of cases. But not when the security forces actually are generally law-abiding and the underdog has a dirty bomb.

Police  mistrust creates a tragedy of decontextualized moral intuitions. People mistrust government for lots of reasons, many of them independent of the police or security forces—it’s kind-of an American tradition. But if the market isn’t going to make us safe—we need government for that after all—and government is too centralized to deal with the doubly decentralized threat of terrorist recruiting on social media—we have a problem. 

I was hoping my experiment would bear out market demand for a website and/or app to decentralize, localize, and make a fun art game of the response to extremist recruitment on social media. I was hoping it would show how Usaamah Rahim’s death in Boston last week could have been prevented by ordinary people using ideas to combat ideas before police felt compelled to use force to prevent a radicalized person from using force. Maybe I was wrong. 

Or maybe I need to use different language, talk to younger people, and ask for help on the Internet. 

June 13, 2015 is the 49th anniversary of Miranda v. Arizona, a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision about the bounds of interrogation.

On the 49th anniversary of Miranda v. Arizona, some will celebrate civil rights and the Warren Court due process revolution that created nationalized criminal procedure as we know it. Others might lament the perceived erosion of those rights. Few will celebrate the woman to whom we owe our Miranda rights.

Patty McGee is an unsung American hero. We should honor her on the anniversary of the Supreme Court decision that swung the law-and-order pendulum back towards liberty.

Patty was a teenage rape victim. She was so shy, she barely spoke. This might have been because she knew that she was mildly retarded, which made her self-conscious. And yet, she insisted on speaking out and telling the truth—even when police didn’t believe her, and for a time declined to investigate her case.

One night, Patty was walking home from work. It was just a few blocks from the bus stop to her house. Ernesto Miranda drove up, grabbed her, tied her up, drove off, raped her, and took her $4. He restrained her with ropes he kept dangling in his car, before and after the attack.

Dude drove around with rape ropes dangling in his car. The police had a thick file on him that suggested a pattern of abduction, rape, and robbery. It seems he did this with some frequency—but no one pressed charges. No one before Patty. As he left, told her to pray for him.

As is normal following trauma, Patty’s statements were not fully coherent or consistent. So police asked Patty to take a lie detector test. This means police tied up (to lie detection equipment) and questioned a teenage rape victim who had been tied up and assaulted. Then they told her the results were inconclusive, and declined to investigate her case.

Patty went back to work. But like the majority of rape victims following an assault, her functioning was impaired. She couldn’t walk home anymore. So her brother picked her up at the bus stop and drove her the few blocks home.

On their way home one night, Patty saw him. Miranda, his car, and the ropes still dangling inside. Again, Patty spoke up. Her brother tailed the car. Miranda fled, but they got his plates.

Police paid Miranda a visit, and the rest is fairly well-known American legal and cultural history. Miranda confessed and was convicted. His confession and conviction were thrown out on appeal to the Supreme Court, reaffirming our Constitutional right to remain silent—and with it the sacred nature of internal space, and the bodily line of it that the state may not cross.

We contain sanctuary. The internal cave, in Plato’s allegory of the mental space of exegetical experience—where the metaphysical dwells somewhere in the physical, before words—is not terrain that can be taken or taxed. And we only owe our confessions to God.

Miranda was retried and reconvicted without the discarded confession. Patty testified a second time—something many rape victims are too afraid or traumatized to do once. She was the least likely victim to achieve this success, and it got her no material benefit. We don’t know what it cost her, but we know the second trial had to be rescheduled around the birth of her child. While Miranda was imprisoned, Patty had gotten married and was pregnant.

Miranda was retried and reconvicted. He didn’t serve much time, and was later killed after a bar fight. His killer ran away down a back ally. The killer’s accomplice couldn’t be convicted because he shut up after police read him his Miranda rights.

History books don’t usually mention Patty McGee, the quiet woman whose speaking up institutionalized our right to silence. It wasn’t until 2005—over 40 years after Patty’s ordeal began—that Congress passed a version of the Violence Against Women Act forbidding police from requiring rape victims to submit to lie detector tests as a condition of proceeding with investigations.

After Miranda, the Court recognized the spiritual aspect of the Fifth Amendment. The privacy of mind and fact that you only owe your confessions to God. The sacred internal space where no man may tread—even for the security of a whole nation. Because undermining the values for which we stand, far from making us safer, degrades our security.

Far from opposing it as a value, our liberty is our security. Evidence-based procedural justice research supports this moral intuition: people who don’t think the police act fairly are less likely to cooperate or behave in law-abiding ways—undermining safety for the community as a whole. Conversely, when the people feel safe to flourish, they work together better to create that very safety.

So on the anniversary of Miranda, we should celebrate Patty McGee. She advanced our liberty, and with it our security, by trusting in police. Ironically, her voice reaffirmed our right to silence. Her response to violations of her own sacred internal space—physical and mental—caused the state to better recognize the sacred nature of that space for us all. And most textbooks that talk about Miranda don’t mention her, because she did what resilient people do after trauma. She lived her life on her own terms, not defined by what had happened, but by her own desires and success. 

One of the things I’m thinking about doing to put off writing an actual business plan is interviewing people who run successful businesses something like the one I think I want to run. The most obvious examples are the Keep Calm Generator folks—who I haven’t identified yet, but someone must have this logo and slogan trademarked and profit from at least some of the mass of merchandise, even though the Crown came up with it?—and Randall, the guy who runs XKCD and made enough money from drawing stick-figure web comics to have a giant pool of balls in his house. 

Don’t you know the bureaucrat working propaganda during the Blitz who came up with Keep Calm wishes we’d had the Internet and ready access to copyright lawyers back then, if he or she is still alive today? That person would be filthy rich if the government didn’t own her work.

There is a similar market and social need opportunity today for images that answer ISIS, or as I like to call them—since they’re not Islamic and they’re not a state—ISISn’t.

And it needs to be professionally designed, like the ISISn’t flag and the Keep Calm meme alike. Hopefully I can learn to do this myself in a free trial of Photoshop. But first, the ideas.

Here is where I will further brainstorm an anti-ISISn’t flag, logo, meme, image, slogan thing out loud on my blog, because this is how I think.

 

Characteristics of Keep Calm

The Keep Calm logo and slogan is the best model for what I want to do here. It shares six characteristics with other successful memes.

1. Its simple, professional visual design and text are easy to take in and remember. Even easier because it rhymes (almost). There’s nothing to digest here. You get it at a glance.

2. The text and image alike are easily customizable. So people get the immediate gratification of the creative high that leads people to do crazy stuff like leaving Harvard postdocs to go sleep on couches or in hostels around the world. Must be a powerful feeling, that creative high.

3. It uses positive selective attention to answer negative information and material warfare. Where the Nazis said, “Blitz! You’re all going to die in a fire!”—to paraphrase—it did not make psychological sense to respond, “Jinx! You’re all going to die in a fire, too!” or, “Chillax, people, you probably won’t die in a fire, but we live in a probabilistic universe in which shit is going down, so we really can’t say, but please pretend everything is fine or the opponent wins!” (Which is exactly the problem with terror in free societies. Just making the information about it available terrorizes people, in which case the terrorists win.) 

Keeping it positive empowers people to respond to violence and prejudice with resilience and toleration. That’s exactly how we must respond to home-grown violent extremist recruitment on social media.

4. It’s pretty.

5. The Crown symbol tells you who the speaker is, so you’re situated in a conversation. It’s personal.

6. The message talks to you, too. It identifies you as the audience, so again it seems personal.

Other examples of great slogans include Obama’s “Yes, We Can” and Uncle Sam’s “I Want You.” But you don’t see these still on posters, mugs, T-shirts, and bibs everywhere tchotchkes are sold. You see that not just around London with “Keep Calm,” but also online in the U.S. It’s well-situated enough in terms of speaker and audience to feel personal, but simple, pretty, and customizable enough to have staying power.

Now let’s play a fun game where I apply that in theory to creating an anti-ISISn’t meme analytically before drawing a bunch of terrible drafts.

 

Keep Calm and Defeat ISISn’t

It’s gotta be simple, customizable, and pretty—and preferably rhyme or otherwise be catchy, easy to remember. But how do you use positive selective attention to counter hate group recruitment? Who’s the speaker? Who’s the audience? What are the relevant symbols?

And—not a new problem, but a more difficult problem in the Internet age—how do you keep a good meme from going bad?

 

Positive Selection Attention to Counter Hate 

I’m not sure how well you have to know ISISn’t’s message to counter it. But it probably doesn’t hurt. So I read the Twitter and Facebook pages of three of their top UK recruiters—Abdul Muhid, Anjem Choudary, and Mizanur Rahman. And studied some of their main Youtube channels—TheMercifulServant (whose tagline is “Allah is only merciful to those who show mercy to others”), AbuBaraa 01, . TheMercifulServant glorifies death and dying for Allah, but a lot of the other social media content is about life and making life safe for Muslims. So there’s an apparent tension there.

Choudary is easily the most interesting of these guys. One of the most interesting things Choudary says is: “Democracy violates the sanctity of everyone & everything BUT The Shari’ah guarantees protection of Religion(Islam) Life Honour Mind Wealth.” To which one user, Nathaniel Kahn @CodeSpins, responds with “remember bitches NO ALCOHOL” and a picture of a man holding up a beer. But it’s an attack on democracy that doesn’t require followers to give up wanting wealth or material comfort.

Another of Choudary’s anti-democratic posts reads: “Nations run by democracy are plagued by Rape Robberies Gambling Suicide Promiscuity Abortion Porn Alcohol Shari’ah erases ALL these evils.” It seems to be a pragmatic argument, not an idea-driven one. We can argue the material realities—e.g., ISISn’t affiliates, like Boko Haram, and other Wahhabist extremist groups are known for using sexual violence as a weapon of war. (This is not a Them problem, but an Us problem—rape is a common problem in war, with war. Since war normalizes violence and thus violence against women.) 

But the really interesting thing about Choudary’s use of Shari’ah as an alternative to democracy in these sorts of posts is that he assumes there’s no interpretation in Shari’ah. No human hand in applying God’s word to man’s world.  

That’s implausible. It’s important to draw attention to that implausibility, to the interpretation innate in application of law to society. Because Choudary is right that the idea of Shari’ah as a form of or influence on government is a politically important one today. He writes, “The defeat of Communism & failure of Capitalism to provide solutions to the world’s problems leaves Islam & the Shari’ah to fill the vacuum!”

Of course proponents of communism and capitalism alike might argue that pure forms of both those ideas have never been implemented as systems of political or economic governance—just as Choudary and ISISn’t argument about Shari’ah is that they have a special monopoly on it even though it’s all been done before. So one can’t claim that any of these systems has failed. Unless of course one is making generalizations on Twitter to recruit gullible young people to an intellectually dishonest cause.

Everyone interprets theory to make praxis. But propagandists claim they’re not doing it. The laziest way possible of doing this is to say your praxis comes from God. So
Choudary puts words in God’s mouth, writing: “Promises of Allah of things to come: Defeat of occupying Jews, Conquest of Rome, Conquest of the White House, Domination of the world by Islam.”

Choudary’s White House Tweet got 64 Retweets and 44 Favorites. A bunch of people called him out, mostly snarkily and on the White House bit, some asking what he was smoking, some offering him Jesus or peace.

But it’s not easy to pull those open-source lists of WHO retweeted or favorite that, and with one click target THOSE social media accounts with some form of respectful, positive, persuasive response. And that’s what needs to happen to counter ISISn’t social media recruitment.

Someone needs to make a tool that makes it really easy for other users to counter this crap. But first that someone has to monetize (if it’s me, since I’m not independently wealthy and this is a job)—and set the tone. Because it won’t be a short-term project, it won’t be an effective tactic if it’s not respectful and persuasive to people with confirmation bias—that is, ISISn’t supporters who live in their echo chamber—and it won’t work if it’s not easy and fun enough that a bunch of people do it despite the perception of some risk. In part because, just as with any other form of resistance, the individual risk diminishes the more people do it.

(Anyway, perceived risk shouldn’t be a big deterrent to the same people who think about risking their lives fighting FOR ISISn’t. Except that logic assumes people are rational. Pause for laughter.)

Some people are already doing stuff like this really well, and we need better ways to promote their voices, too. For example, this gorgeous Nasheed about not hurting or judging other people has over 5,000 views on Youtube. It uses art and capitalism—it hocks T-shirts at the end of the video—to make Islamic arguments against violence and prejudice. You could conceivably quote from it to counter ISISn’t propaganda that rejects art and capitalism.

Back, then, to the Keep Calm and Defeat ISISn’t brainstorm.

Positive selective attention to counter this particular hate group’s online recruitment probably needs to focus on:

–       Life. Life not death being a good thing for your well-being. God loves the faithful and wants us to thrive.

–       Democracy. Religious influences on secular governments in democracies being common, constructive, and collaborative. If you want to make society better through these influences, you work through the system to do it. Anything else is like saying sports are stupid because you never win, and then refusing to play the game.

–       Success. A lot of the negative selective attention ISISn’t is using to recruit on social media is about injustice (e.g., police abuses) and failure (e.g., of tolerance in liberal democracies or capitalism as an economic system). So drawing attention to justice, toleration, and entrepreneurship, and how we can build out to increase these good things together, is the positive selection attention field analogue to emphasize.

Michael Jackson and Oprah are the masters of positive selection attention. I don’t know how to apply that right now, I just know it’s true. They focused on lovely things (“heal the world,” “it doesn’t matter if you’re black or white,” “you get a car”) while confronting horrible things (violence, racism, poverty and its loops). It can be done.

Speaker and Audience

The speaker emphasizing these things has to be us. Regular people who control social media in free societies. The beloved community that is overwhelmingly law-abiding. The Abrahamic ummah that is overwhelmingly tolerant and peaceful. And peace-loving believers, religious and secular—believer in any kind of goodness, in the future, each other, hope for our world together. Regular people making fun of shit on the Internet.

The audience is the same. It’s an Us, not a Them. Because ISISn’t recruits in particular, and hate group recruits in general, are regular people who are persuaded by ideas, images, and the appeal of belonging and sense of purpose—or what Andrew Carnegie identified as the desire to feel important—just like everybody else. What’s really sad is that they’re people to whom arguments about injustice and immorality appeal. ISISn’t recruiters use images of children starving in Syria, real examples of racism and police brutality, and other things we all agree are horrible to recruit people who care about truth and justice to an equally horrible cause. We need those potential recruits working on truth and justice in more productive ways. These are really valuable lives we’re losing on both sides.

Possible Symbols

If Keep Calm was the opposite of the blitz’s command that Londoners panic, what symbols are like opposites of ISISn’t’s glorification of death, rejection of democracy, and focus on failure? What symbols celebrate life, democracy, and success from the point of view of all of us, to the point of view of all of us?

Anonymous has got that spirit. But first of all, that set of symbols is taken. And second of all, there’s something hypocritical about the lack of transparency there. Democracy is about coming to the market place of ideas, showing your face and your wares, seeing what happens. It’s risky. It’s personal. The more everyone does it, the less risky and yet more personal it is. So generally I’m a fan of Anonymous, but I’m up to something different here out of faithfulness to the idea of transparency and its function in the marketplace of ideas. 

Life and the idea of choosing life has been a bit coopted by the anti-abortion folks in the U.S. But maybe you could symbolize it visually with a riff on Happy Human, Keith Haring, the XKCD sort of comic tradition.  One could also envision a modified traffic light, an acorn, or a tree of life, like so:

Democracy is hard to symbolize visually in the West. My most ready mental images are of ink-stained fingers in post-Saddam Iraq, people in the streets during the Orange Revolution, and scenes from Rihanna’s “American Oxygen.” The problem with democracy—as I’m sure many others have already said—is that it’s the worst possible form of government, except every other form. So it’s hard to think of visuals symbolizing it that don’t involve mess, argument, protest over injustice, the tolerance paradox (wherein we tolerate intolerance in liberal democracies, so arguably they contain the seeds of their own corruption or destruction—e.g., cross-burning is protected as free speech in the U.S.), open flame, and loud noises (fireworks, concerts, arguments).

Certainly though one might symbolize the spirit of democracy in the form of a freedom hive, the spirit of toleration in a combination of religious symbols like lots of people have already done, or perhaps a flame. Although the Olympic flame, symbolizing human achievement, might be better as a symbol for success.

Of course, any good image or slogan can be coopted. Information warfare is like any other form of competition—it’s a continual dialogue, an arms race of words and images. That points to perhaps the biggest danger of making a Keep Calm and Defeat ISISn’t meme along with a social media tool to combat hate group recruitment online. ISISn’t can steal it. 

 

Haters Gonna Hate 

ISISn’t managed to steal a Nike slogan for jihad. (Just Dua It is one of their most successful memes. It’s so brilliant I wince every time I write it because I’m spreading it. I’m spreading it right now! Aaaah!!!)

So I like to think that if I keep the focus positive enough, like Keep Calm, it will be relatively hard to make what I make work for evil. But the reality is that—as in all realms—anything I can make that is awesome, they can steal and make evil.

That’s why I have to make the social media tool that combines meme generation with easy, decentralized targeting of ISISn’t social media followers. Because the arms race of online hate group recruitment is one in which propaganda flies so fast, no centralized group can combat the hate. It has to be a game everyone is playing, for everyone—the vast majority of regular people who want peace—to win.

I think my next steps are probably to brainstorm more while talking with people here in London who have actually been recruited and turned back (or not), make some proper drafts to pretest or brainstorm with real people in those targeted communities here, and play around with building at least a draft version of the tool to pull lists of people who follow ISISn’t propaganda into lists that others can target for respectful dialogue to change the available narrative.

It’s very hard to fight confirmation bias, the bias that what we already think is right. That’s part of why art is so important in this equation. Images, music, and allusion work better than argument, force, and proof. Which is why hate groups can become powerful in the first place. 

I have always been an artist. But I have never before believed that if I clarify my desires, hone them into goals, and plan to achieve them, that I can.

On one hand, believing in that art of the possible places a lot of value on the preferences that seem to come from within. And on the other, the belief itself comes from a deepened understanding of how social markets are. If businesses thrive by giving people products and services they need, making their lives better—then all successful businesses are art businesses in the sense that their owners are doing their own art. And I want to help the world thrive through art, then I can be a successful businessperson, too.

Yet, the sociality of markets also means that I have to hone my desires into goals that serve others. 

Lately, I have gotten really good at the meta level of this process. I want to make the world feel safe to flourish through art, and I have some ideas about how to do it. 

But—much to my chagrin since I’ve been trying to “launch my own art business” for months if not years—I have not actually written a business plan. 

 

Why No Business Plan, Dr. Wilde?

Hear me out. There is a really deep insight behind the spirit of this stupid mistake. 

Plans are bad. 

Or rather, inflexible plans that keep you from adapting, constantly integrating new information and connections, and otherwise going where the water is are bad. 

Central planning doesn’t work for economies, so why should it work for careers? 

The same problems apply—the information environment changes too fast for centralized government agencies or even a single person exploring the world to know far in advance what goods or services are in what demand, what consumers want, or how to respond in the moment without, you know, responding in the moment. 

So life improv is the most efficient way to run your career as a business. By life improv, I mean showing up to play. By showing up to play, I mean things like listening to people without knowing what (if anything) you’re going to say in response. Or getting on a plane to another country with a one-way ticket and no place to stay. 

But conventional business wisdom—and indeed conventional wisdom across the board—says you need a plan. And these two things don’t have to conflict. You can show up to play within a plan. Provided it’s a non-plan plan. A flexible plan. A plan you update, adapt, or throw away and rewrite entirely when it’s not working. 

But first you have to make the plan. That’s a problem for a lot of creative people. 

 

Plan Not Do is Artist Death

We all have analytical as well as creative skills. The systematizing part of the brain that wants to sort colors into some kind of order, and the messy part that wants to move with the music to smush them all together into something new—and turn the canvas upside-down to try again if we don’t like the result. Planning gets in the way of doing when we insist on knowing the result before we start. 

This is artist death. More broadly, this is why perfectionism is the most common cause of procrastination. It’s an attachment to outcome that keeps us from being open to the process. That’s not just bad for creativity, or work production. It’s not the most fun way to live, either. 

Civil society depends on it being safe to risk, in art and life. That’s part of why libertarian thinkers like Friedman and Hayek supported a negative income tax or minimum income. Because when you know the worst possible outcome of trying your hardest to achieve your dreams is short of homelessness and hunger, you’re more likely to feel safe to show up and play. And that helps society flourish, because it helps people flourish. 

That’s also part of why I’m bouncing around London without a permanent address or income, trying not to find work so much as to implement my artistic vision and meet people who can help me do that in more social ways. 

In some ways, it definitely works, this “show up and play.” I did improv on a London stage Sunday night, and met amazing comedians and lovely people doing it. For someone who has struggled with social anxiety to the extent of barely speaking for months at a time, it was magical to be my happy performance self without fear, all of a sudden, with the right new people in the right new place. They didn’t even know I hadn’t done an improv performance before. So I learned I have to some native extent that skill set that I’ve long fantasized about developing but never been brave enough—or had a good enough plan—to try. 

Last night, I did stand-up—or rather, my far too academic facsimile thereof—at a mostly poetry, filmed open mic. Seeing how well I present on-camera was shocking. And getting help writing actual jokes on my material after was great fun. So now I can do that again, and keep learning or relearning how to talk about what matters to me in ordinary language, honed into one-line jokes that “show not tell.” Good writing isn’t just rewriting. It’s also good talking. And for that you have to go outside. And going outside is easier in a big city, when you don’t have a proper place to hide away anyway. It’s pretty hard to be agoraphobic when you’re couchsurfing. 

Every night this week I’m doing something like that, culminating (I hope) in an open mic Friday with an amazing pianist I’m really excited to sing with. My intuition is that all these performance throws—pushing myself outside my comfort zone to develop my expressive and presentational abilities like I’ve always wanted to—are serving a bigger purpose. I just don’t know what that purpose is yet. I wish I knew. And I don’t know. And I can’t know. And I have to keep embracing that and showing up to play. 

 

Still, I Need A Plan

I will not plan myself out of doing. I will not plan myself out of doing. I will not plan myself out of doing. 

But I’ve been reading about how to write a proper business plan, and I want it done yesterday.

There are lots of great resources and templates out there for doing it. It probably should’ve been the first step in thinking about leaving my Harvard postdoc to start my own art business. But the intuition about what was next was so strong and so much better developed than the analytical thinking about it, which mostly agrees with people who tell me what I’m doing is totally crazy. (Lucky for me, I have a tendency to take that as a compliment.) 

I’m still not sure how to write a business plan, though. I could write seven—one centered on the book series Where the Wilde Thinks Are, one on the new social media tool and satire site Memes, Bitches, one on music, one on stand-up, one on painting, one on screenplays, one on other writing—and ask people to vote on them. But often artists need to pursue several projects at once for creative and material reasons. 

Plus writing seven business plans seems like a bit of a waste of my time and yours.

Plus it’s “plan not do,” and validating potential business ideas through experiments makes more sense. But first I need a plan to validate. I’ve done this ad hoc a bit with painting sales on Etsy, art merchandise sales on Zazzle, and editing/tutoring services. But I want to do it much better and as part of a bigger picture. 

So I need to know better where to start. Do you start with the There, the point to which you’re trying to get from Here, and work backwards? Do you start with the genre of product or service you want to be offering, with validating experiments to see what people actually want or need? Do you start with the thing you can’t help doing because it’s your calling (cf Jewel, Hedy, Vincent)? I think you have to do all three at once. But I don’t know how. 

All I know still is that you start by showing up to play when you don’t know what else to do. 

Because no matter what you do with your analytical mind, and no matter what you do as an individual, the creative and the social river flows. 

And you should invest in my company to create it.  

Between Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and whatever new thing is invented between now and the time I publish this blog post, the universe of social media is vast and ever-expanding. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the amount of information and the newness of the technologies conveying and producing it.

But social media needs a new tool that recognizes how powerful images are, and someone should give me a million dollars to keep investing in creating it.

Or rather, I should practice asking here so that when I actually ask in the right venue—Kickstarter? Crowdfunder? A company that links investors and companies, like Seed Equity?—it’s a proper pitch.

Proper pitches have three elements: the story, the service, and the scratch.

Ironically for a story-teller, the story is the hardest part of this for me to put together. I’d really rather sit down with you and have tea. But being able to present the story professionally is also the most important element of all. For instance, for Kickstarter, you have to write a proper script to make a proper video to make a proper pitch. Story is a necessary but not sufficient condition of all proper pitches. So here goes story. 

 

Story

I left a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Harvard to start my own business as an artist. Like many bold decisions, it seemed over-determined to me at the time—like I couldn’t do anything else, so why even try to figure out why it was the next step or what came next? I am going to speak and help other people speak truth to power while drawing more selective attention to positive stuff instead of counting up abuse cases, because that’s what will really make vulnerable people safer. 

This decision seemed totally crazy to everyone around me. Especially to the very few people to whom I said at the same time—I want to make world peace through art. And the one person to whom I said—I want to defeat ISIS. And the nobody but God to whom I said—why doesn’t everybody understand with flashes of light and insight how the information environment is where security comes from, because the story we tell about reality shapes it, and that’s why You started out with the word? (Christianity shares this belief—about the sanctity of the word—among many others with Islam.)

In my job as the post-doctoral researcher on the Justice Database, the first national database of police behavior, I traveled around the country pitching Database participation to police departments. The essence of my pitch was that other professional fields, like medicine, have national comparative datasets that let them help each other discover how to make best practices better. In addressing the concern that the data might be used to “name and shame”—like media reporting on racial disparities and police use of force often is—I cited Carol Dweck’s work on mindsets. Dweck shows a “growth” orientation of learning and helping learn, as opposed to a “fixed” orientation of judging and being judged, correlates with success across a wide range of contexts—educational, professional, and personal. The Database project has a “growth” mindset orientation, and that’s one reason why participation in it is confidential unless departments self-disclose it.

This work brought me to the biggest law enforcement leadership conference in the nation, where I had something of a religious experience involving singing policemen. I also heard Representative Dutch Ruppersberger III (D-MD) of the House Appropriations Committee and Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh C. Johnson talk about ISIS/ISIL and the problem of homegrown violent extremists, who seem to sometimes be radicalized on social media.

I also learned to pronounce the word “meme.” (Say: “me-m.”)

Then I stayed up all night making counter-terrorism memes and learned how to use Twitter. I am the least probable person to figure out anything new about social. I’m just beginning to understand how social networks work in real life. I just got a smart phone last April because my job required it, and had texting blocked on the phone number I never gave out anyway before that. 

Except. I care like a girl. And my lack of prior expertise in social media made me approach it like I approach all new things I want to learn: like it was mine to make a big mess with until I made something I liked.

Boy, did I make a big mess. I’ve basically always been solvent except for federal student loans from undergraduate. But I went into five-figure credit-card debt doing stuff like paying search engine optimization “experts,” social media managers, and web developers to help me actualize my idea. They didn’t. But I learned from what they did wrong. A lot. Every mistake was like a seminar, and I have no problem paying for education. This stuff is so new that there really is no better way to learn than by doing—and anyway we know more generally that testing before you’re ready and making mistakes is a great way to learn. 

So that’s the story. I had published poetry for years, organized a local stand-up comedy group, exhibited and sold art, and otherwise “done art” for about ten years. But I had never before put together how it could interface with my academic credentials and professional experience to be of service. 

 

Service 

The new social media tool I want to create is going to be of valuable service to society in general and vulnerable groups in particular in four ways. 

1.     Big-picture service.

Making the world feel safe to flourish through art.

People don’t know what I mean when I say this. I know what I mean when I say this. I’m still working on closing that gap. 

2.     Correcting for reporting bias.

Drawing selective attention to successes rather than failures, context rather than outliers, positive stories of improvement rather than the negative ones of violence and prejudice that tend to dominate reporting on safety—as exemplified by how we call these sections in newspapers “crime” beats, and reporting on what government forces do abroad is mostly “war” reporting. What’s lost in these characterizations is not just the ambiguity innate to what Tim O’Brien and others have called “true war stories,” but also mindful use of the power of selective attention to generate the outcomes on which we focus. It’s important to use that power wisely in part because it correlates with better outcomes—as in the placebo effect.

And also in part because there are systematic reporting biases that cut the other way. For example, we don’t hear about the vast universe of cases in which ordinary policework does not harm or helps people. Privacy protections rightfully keep us from knowing when police help citizens in mental health crisis or abusive relationships get to safe places. And being busy probably keeps regular people who might be stopped speeding and let go with a warning—who might then drive more safely—from thinking much of the experience. So we’re likely to hear only about the relatively small universe of cases in which something goes horribly wrong in police interactions. That type of reporting bias then hurts public perceptions of police, which in turn hurts community trust.

It’s nobody’s fault. It’s not a plot. The media are not bad. It’s just that all the incentives in reporting are structured so that media attention centers on what goes wrong instead of what goes right. And that has consequences.

One might argue that those consequences include cases like the recent death of a young Boston-area man who “liked” an ISIS-affiliated Facebook page and allegedly plotted to attack police, prompting police to confront him first.

That’s not just a one-off. Procedural justice research shows that trust underpins security. People are more law-abiding and cooperate with police more when they trust that police act fairly. Thus trust makes security while mistrust breeds lawlessness and insecurity. So addressing reporting bias by drawing attention to the broader context and the positives is actually one of the best ways to make vulnerable people safer from prejudice and violence.

Those biases hurt public perceptions of police, which in turn hurts trust in government and actually makes people less safe. This is a national security issue because of associations (psychological and material) between local/state police and federal security forces, despite their separation in the US—as the Boston attacks show. 

3.    Giving people space to create.

Spaces, actually. 

a.     Memes. Currently, I envision the tool as a website featuring tabs for repositories of subgroups of memes on five main themes, plus a generator that lets you customize those memes or create your own. This is like the successful Keep Calm Generator model on steroids.

b.    Discussion forum. I’m not a big fan of these myself because they’re usually negative—adversarial, unforgiving of mistakes, generally not the ethereal equivalent of sitting down with a friend for a cup of tea. I want to create a positive space, but without micromanaging it. We’ll see how that works with a few simple rules (e.g., this is a respectful space—no hate speech—that means no Mohammed Toons here or in the memes section).

c.     News aggregator with cover meme generator. Aggregated news using the Paper.li platform plus a front page aggregator to let you see a bunch of covers at a glance. And has a meme generator too, so you can make your own headlines on the covers.

d.    Merchandise creator. No meme generator is complete without a link to creating your own stuff. It’s so easy to make an Etsy or Zazzle store. I did it for my oil paintings on this website. Why not do something like that for memes?

That is not a rhetorical question. I’m not sure if there are legal problems doing this with images I’m using for satire but didn’t create—which is most Internet memes. So for sure I can sell my own merchandise here, but I need to research this question further. Which is one reason why I need more funding, to keep investing in asking experts for help. Even though sometimes the help experts can give you is that you had better figure it out yourself.

4.     Gives people a new tool for creating dialogue, too—for reaching out to political opponents. The three main challenges in countering radicalization of young people by groups like ISIS are the echo chamber effect, the decentralized nature of the Internet, and the free speech laws that characterize Western legal regimes.

a. Echo chamber. The echo chamber effect isn’t new to the Internet, but the Internet makes it worse. It’s also sometimes called information Balkinization and is one instantiation of confirmation bias, a common cognitive bias in which we tend to look for information that confirms we’re right. Being right feels good, so we seek out information sources that tell us we’re right. Thus people who agree with Fox News tend to watch Fox News, and people who agree with Rachel Maddow tend to watch Rachel Maddow. 

In the context of radicalization, this means that forums where people advocate for ISIS don’t get a lot of traffic from people who might offer alternate narratives. This is a problem because it makes radical views seem normal. 

b. Decentralized mess. Moreover, the decentralized nature of the Internet—large, sprawling, and created by many people doing their own thing, together—makes it effectively impossible to surveil. This is why national security agencies want to capture massive amounts of data to trawl through later in directed investigations. It’s simply not possible to keep up with the expanding universe of social media in real time. Even if it were, encryption is making it harder for law enforcement to follow open source communication trails, like emails seasoned terrorists might exchange with recruits after making contact with them on social media.

c. Free speech. Dastardly free speech strikes again! 
Even if you could keep up with hate groups on social media, you couldn’t take down most ISIS propaganda. Especially the really good stuff that uses memes, music, art, humor, and literary or Quranic textual allusions. Because we live in a free society. So far from refusing to negotiate with terrorists, have to engage in dialogue with them in the marketplace of ideas that is the Internet.

That dialogue has to be local, and it’s best if it comes directly from the same communities whose members are being radicalized. So this tool needs to use location information from Twitter and Facebook users’ public profiles to match, e.g., ISIS account followers with other folks from similar locations. This way, people who want to reach out to folks in their own communities who are effectively tuned into Radio ISIS online, to offer a different song? It’s easy for them to do. Because it should be easy, and it’s not now. 

This is a translation of basic community-oriented policing principles to social media.

I can’t believe no one has already done this.

But I can also see how creating a tool for users to reach out to social media followers of particular groups like ISIS, to decentralize the response to hate groups’ recruitment on social media and encourage political dialogue, might be more controversial than the rest of this project. This kind of tool has obvious abuse potential. It could be used by political parties to run smear campaigns, or hate groups to send threats. And I’ll do what I can to engineer it so that doesn’t happen.

But any communication tool that helps people address particular networks can be abused in a free society. The potential for good outweighs the potential for bad. We know from field experiments on political behavior that people are easily shamed into behaving better next time when you tell their neighbors how they misbehave. All you have to do to increase voting is tell people you’re going to tell their neighbors if they don’t.

So making people who follow ISIS-associated accounts on Twitter or like them on Facebook  into neighbors—making it easy for people who are near them to reach out to them for dialogue—ups the emotional ante of the simple Follow or Like act that plugs people into social networks that have sometimes had the apparent effect of encouraging violence. It does this without government surveillance. It does this without using information other than what is already open-source. And it does this in a way that might encourage dialogue before radicalization occurs, potentially saving the lives of crime victims and potential criminals alike. 

So that’s the service component. The new social media tool I envision makes the world feel safe to flourish   through art by focusing on what is good and how we can do more of that as a society, giving people space to create art and hold dialogue with political opponents in that spirit. There are lots of such spaces already, but none of them makes it really easy to change the narrative coming at people who express support for hate groups on social media. 

 

Scratch 

Money is a metaphor for value, and this new social media tool is extremely valuable because it fills an important gap in the information environment, appealing to a mass audience with broader impacts for society at large. 

Right now I see it as a website like Facebook or Twitter. The website makes money in the following five ways:

1.     Short-term: Donations using Venmo or PayPal.

2.     Short-term: Zazzle store (merchandise).

3.     Medium-term: Ad and/or product placement revenue. 

4.     Medium-term: Converting the Zazzle store to other forms of merchandising with better profit margins (but more start-up and maintenance costs). Xkcd followed this step-wise merchandising model. 

5.     Medium-term: Divine pop-up art kit on Etsy. Just an idea at this point, for putting together the tools to let people make their own “art in place” more easily. Probably another one of those things that I know what I mean, but not yet how to show and tell other people what I mean. 

 

Basta

Enough. That’s it. That’s the first draft of the proper pitch for one of four elements of my art business. And it only took me four months to get clear enough on in my unspoken language to draft!

To be fair, this is a draft proposal for revolutionizing counter-terrorism by creating a new tool that brings community-oriented policing into the information age. It has to be done from the private sector because we live in a free society where the government doesn’t run the media. And it has to be done by an artist with some science and politics chops—maybe a history of earning National Science Foundation Political Science funding—and maybe some expertise in policing. WHERE WILL YOU EVER FIND SUCH A PERSON? (Hint: She’s crashing at a friend of a friend’s in a suburb somewhere far, far away. Smiling at you sweetly. While typing this. Planning her third new website in two months instead of figuring out where to sleep next week. Details.)

 

Details 

I need to talk with lots of smart people about lots of details, and I’m not sure how to get a hold of them. Mostly I don’t even know who they are. So I’ll plunk down some of the details I’m stuck on here, hope people with relevant expertise are willing to read this, and do what I can do for outreach—post around on LinkedIn, talk to strangers in bars, read, and keep playing around with problem-solving myself.

1.    Building the site. Which platform is best for a site like this—WordPress, Jigsy, something else? I used Weebly for one website I recently created and Square Space for this art website that I made last month. But those tools aren’t equipped to handle the meme generator and forum elements of this new social media tool, tentatively MemesBitches.com. I’m afraid WordPress probably is, and I’ve not been comfortable working in it before. Might have to learn.

2. Designing the logo. The draft site logo inverts the ISIS flag—a black flag with the Shahada (statement of faith), a white circle that’s meant to evoke the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH)’s seal, and old timey Arabic font. 

Today, I played around with a black flag/white lettering inversion of white flag—for peace—black lettering. First I tried making an actual black seal using a black candle. But it came out too gray.

When I darkened it though, it looked a bit like a bullet hole. Which really is the opposite of the idea here—world peace through art. 

Plus that font doesn’t work. Neither does this one, although it’s more evocative of the old-timey font. 

Plus the ISIS flag is actually done at a high level of professional work.My edges are too rough. I made these draft inversions using my camera phone and Microsoft Word. 

To be honest, I really thought I could do this while living in a car with a napkin and a pencil. But I would like a big table and some oil paint now, please. 

3. Making and improving the hate group follower algorithm.

Right now, anyone can manually identify who likes or follows a known ISIS-associated account on Facebook or Twitter. (I started making a very partial list of such accounts here.) 

Manual might be best at the beginning. But we should have an algorithm for that and keep improving it constantly to keep up with changes in the information environment. Somebody has probably already done that, but making it from scratch will do if they don’t want to play. 

4. Figuring out how to show-not-tell the pitch.

I suspect this means making something like a functioning draft website and troubleshooting it until it either works well enough to fund itself, or attracts start-up funding. I probably do need to secure funding for the project at some point, since my credit will run out eventually. But doing makes more sense than talking about doing. So if you know how I can do this better, tell me. I’m learning. And if you want to help me, tell me. I’ll help you learn. 

One of the things I always struggled with as an artist was accepting myself. I think I thought art didn’t do anything useful. But now I understand stories and images to be the stuff of life. They can give us faith, hope, and love. Or they can take them away. 

Imagined Critic: WHO IS THIS PERSON TO BE WRITING ABOUT RUNNING A BUSINESS WHEN SHE’S POOR AND HAS A PH.D. IN THINKING BUT WHAT HAS SHE DOOOOOONE? 

Consider this an early draft of a commencement speech I want to give at an arts and entrepreneurship magnet school in ten years—when I’ve gone from Harvard to homeless (“housing insecure”) to running a multi-million dollar arts empire. Or at least being debt-free while vagabonding from job to job like a jobbing artist. 

1. Pick a model—horizontal or vertical.

Then make your model horizontal if you thought it was vertical. 

Do you want a broad customer base or a narrow one? Are you targeting social networks with lots of people or just a few? I think of businesses that try to offer low-cost (a.k.a. properly priced) goods and services to as many people as possible as horizontal, and fancier stuff targeting elite markets as vertical. (Horizontal and vertical are also terms of art in political economy and business that means something else that’s not important right now.) 

Hokusai was the horizontal model master of the hermit kingdom. 

He made cheap prints, illustrated poetry books, snack bags, lanterns—you name it, he painted it, and sold it as such a low price that everyone could afford it. While turning a profit. But he didn’t really get the hang of it until he was about 70. 

Starbuck’s also works on the horizontal model.

And they do what all wildly successful businesses do—the founder saw something cool he thought people really needed or wanted, and offered that. Instead of first asking what he had to give, or what he wanted, and working the problem of business from that side of the equation. 

You have to work both sides. This is what most businesspeople get that most artists miss. 

The two groups are not so opposed as all that, though. The more I travel and talk with businesspeople, the more I realize all businesses are art businesses. In the sense that everyone who is doing a good job offering properly priced products or services is doing a form of art, and most small business people are doing something that is their art—is one of the things they have to offer the world with passion, devoutness in a sense, and the service orientation that characterizes all social purposes. 

We’re living in an age when there’s really no excuse for not working on the horizontal model. If you’re a portrait artist and you spend a month on an oil painting of a client, yours is probably a vertical model. But you can probably make it horizontal too with a few tweaks. E.g., work on getting clients who are famous enough that when you paint them, you can use and sell the likeness commercially to broader markets. 

 

2.    Engage your audience about your work in the context of that model. 

One of the most common novice business mistakes is investing in your business idea before validating the model—being sure people actually want to pay for the product or service you’re providing. Validating is about dialogue. Dialogue is scary because ideas are perfect in your head and early criticism can hurt the creative process. And because you often don’t know what you’re doing in that process until you do it, in my experience. But you have to show up to the dialogue anyway. 

J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter) and E.L. James (Fifty Shades of Gray) built online fan bases before publishing and hitting it big with their books. 

There’s a lot of talk about social networks and personal branding in contemporary business discourse, but you can engage in this dialogue anonymously if you prefer, too. Banksy is a great example of that. Anonymous is another. Anything you don’t want out there, including your identity itself, doesn’t have to be part of the exchange of information in the dialogue. The anonymity can actually become part of the branding—as long as you own it. 

 

3.    Gun it off the cliff before you’re ready.

Jewel was homeless for a year after her boss fired her for not sleeping with him. Hedy Lamarr let a guy on a boat rename her before getting back to acting in America after fleeing her creepy husband and Nazi Germany. And Edna St. Vincent Millay—probably the highest-paid performing poet in history—grew up drifting from town to town reading great literature out of a trunk, and lived for a time in the smallest house in NYC with her starving actress sister before making it big. 

People will always need story-tellers, because stories give us hope and strength. 

But story-telling is not a profession that lends itself particularly well to linear planning. 

Waiting until you have a plan will not make you a plan. 

Waiting until you are good enough will not get you good enough. 

Signaling to the universe that you know what you want, that you work continuously to hone your desires into specific goals with money and time values, and that you are open to flashes of insight and network magic to make and implement plans to achieve those goals until you succeed—that’s what correlates with success in every realm. 

There are a lot of people who don’t want to believe this because it means maybe they’re choosing to forego their dreams by not being that specific and risking everything for them. 

But the research literature is pretty clear that the “if you dream it, you can do it” principle holds water for horrible things. For example, if you want to kill yourself and think of specific means, and rehearse doing it, and attempt suicide—those are good predictors of suicide. 

If you want to succeed and think of specific means, and rehearse doing it, and try and try again—those are similarly good predictors of success. 

Cynicism asks us to believe in our power to fail and not succeed, but that’s inconsistent logic. There’s not a formula for succeeding on the first try, but there is a formula for success. And it’s going for it until you get it. 

Even when part of going for it is showing up to play without a plan. 

 

My Aim

It was very hard for me to make a specific aim, to define what it would mean to me to succeed as an artist—taking seriously the idea that if I can hone my desires into well-formulated goals, then I can plan, try, fail, adapt, try again… And succeed. Reading Napoleon Hill helped me work through this, although I am still internalizing the idea that I must try and try harder, and believe in myself, to succeed. It is terrifying. I have to let go of the fear. Sometimes, I have. And sometimes, I worry that I don’t know where I’ll be sleeping in a week. Like that’s a problem. 

I still have to get to the point where I know my own desires and goals well enough to review them morning and night, orally and in writing, in the form of an autosuggestion. Autosuggestion is about tuning yourself in to the positive selective attention field within and without, being most alert and aware to information that will help you succeed—the signal among the noise. It’s hard. It’s a Kuhnian shift in being. But we’re all always tuning into a particular signal or set of signals all the time. It’s the only way we can make sense of the mass of sensory and other information around us at all times. So we might as well be deliberate in the tuning. 

I want to make the world feel safe to flourish through art, making $2 million in a year by offering my best service in the following four ways: 
1. Being an increasingly competent stand-up comic and poet-singer, performing. 
2. Running MemesBitches.com, a humor and news website decentralizing the response to global security threats like ISIS. 
3. Publishing books and ebooks starting with my illustrated poetry book Push Coast and the illustrated allegory series Where the Wilde Thinks Are (including the draft of Patton’s Chair I blogged last week). 
4. Selling paintings and essays I make while traveling the world. 

All the processes go together. That’s how creativity works. 

This is my work. Telling the truth and celebrating beauty while giving people hope. 

And I could spend all weekend researching small next steps—where to sleep after next Wednesday, how to make money while traveling, where the 3-5 open mics a week I need to be doing are in these parts, how to better apply these hard-learned business lessons to my own art business. 

But I want to work on the coming-together vision of the website that I think has the power to give other people a place to channel their own creativity to make the world feel safe to flourish through art. There’s nothing more important in life. Other than occasionally remembering to eat. And trusting that the worst thing that can happen when we really go for our dreams simply can’t be as bad as the best thing that can happen when we don’t. 

Going where the water is in faith communities, thought patterns, and business is just smart. But I’m still learning to do it better all the time.

 

Going where the water is in faith

Today, I got baptized.

I knew First Church Cambridge was the right church when I walked in the door—despite having never been there before. Not just because of the rainbow flags and Black Lives Matter sign in the yard. Or because it was the only place in town that would baptize me before I begin my year-long experiment in traveling the world and making art. (Funny story: I called a bunch of churches and they all had rules I couldn’t follow—classes, timetables that wouldn’t work since I’m going vagabonding now. So they turned me away. Even when I cited John and pointed out that was rather un-Christian. I had given up when the last one I tried called me back and welcomed me.) 

Those of you who followed my last blog, that I half-regret deleting now, may remember that I have been having dialogue with my soul and seeing butterflies everywhere for months. Aside from the painting gallery, featuring a butterfly series, and my recent accidental pilgrimage to Mexico City—where butterflies are a common motif—I have been creating photographic evidence of the fact that there really are butterflies.

Everywhere.

The universe is punking me.

And I like it.

You can call it synchronicity, serendipity, or selective attention. That last one is what cognitive psychologists call the thing, and it’s very real. It’s one of the mechanisms whereby ideas shape reality. Our beliefs shape our emotions, which shape our thoughts, perceptions, and actions in the world. So philosophers rule the world. And so I’m learning to pay attention to my successes instead of my failures. This way I can “go where the water is” cognitively—see my strengths and pitch to them to generate more successes.

 

Going where the water is in thought

This feels weird, because for years I’ve made lists of my failures instead of successes. Mistakes made to learn from or avoid repeating. Regrets to worry—to remedy or release. But worrying them in the first place defeats that purpose. Listing successes is a much better idea. 

Listing them publicly even is embarrassing, but is what a lot of successful people do. I am unusually embarrassed to credit-claim sometimes. For example, I hold three higher degrees, but have never walked at a graduation ceremony of my own.

So here are things I have done that I consider successes (in chronological order):

– Over 50 on-stage performances as a classical pianist, winning numerous awards including cash prizes.

– Won family Christmas tree gambling at 12.

– Painted application to private high school—not an arts school. Accepted, skipped 7th grade.

– Perfect score on SAT Verbal at 15.

– Accepted to a bunch of honors colleges early, skipped 11th grade, entered college with over 30 credit hours from AP and CLEP tests.

– Earned $30K + a new computer in 30 minutes writing Rapoport Service Scholarship application at 17.

– Isolated at new school after giving the scholarship check back and transferring, I decided I really wanted to be around kids and make art. So I brainstormed how I could get paid to do that, pitched children’s dance, art, and drama teaching to the City, and got a part-time job as teenager while a full-time college student that let me design and teach my own classes including Storytelling through Dance.

– Secured coveted hand modeling (main character/first-person POV) position with Rosetta Stone, confirming what we always knew—like David Duchovny, I’m “different from the face and body boys.”

– Dozens of art shows in Virginia c. 2005-2010, sales, continued production.

– Dozens of publications including poetry, short fiction, and memoir in literary journals, op-eds including Guardian publications under two different handles (both not my current name), comedy including The Morning News, McSweeney’s, The Big Jewel, SCQ, regular political satire at the now-defunct Democracy.com while it lasted, ditto Yankee Pot Roast contributions.

– Walked into a theater and got my first adult part at my first audition without having prior association with folks there. (I was Annie in the Sarah Ruhl comedy The Vibrator Play at Live Arts.)

– Ran local stand-up comedy group in Virginia 2010-2014.

– Finished my BA, MA, and PhD at UVA despite not having a high school diploma or family support.

– Gave back Russian summer language intensive funding because couldn’t figure out a way to do the course plus my full-time job that I had kept for the first year of grad school. Cried for a week, realized this was a lifelong dream, languages are gorgeous and I always wanted to learn Russian. Got funding back, found closer housing for mom and me, quit job not knowing how would pay rent, made it work. (Lesson: When you signal that you are gunning it off a cliff for your dreams, the universe takes notice.)

– Got my first (only) choice job as a Postdoctoral Scholar in Psychology at UCLA working on the Justice Database, the first national database of police behavior.

– Got Harvard Kennedy fellowship through that job.

– Had religious (faith) experience, got back in touch with everyone I know in my family after years of estrangement, and honored everyone including the father I haven’t seen for 21+ years.

– Left academia when it finally became clear to me that I’m an artist, and I get to ask the world for what I want, show up and play, and give the universe an opportunity to play with me.

– Created a new art website and Etsy store after spending a month volunteering in a Mexican hostel, singing on the streets, and brainstorming how to monetize art. Sold 9 paintings in 4 weeks.

– Formulated the right question at last in relation to this new life experiment in making life and traveling. How do I make the world feel safe to flourish through art?

– Took a first crack at answering the question today in a song, “Stain Louis.”

 

Going where the water is in business

It sounds so obvious, but it’s right and there are so many ways to go wrong. You go where the water is in faith, or finding your way in relation to the search for truth and community more generally. You go where the water is in thought, or orienting your beliefs to success since ideas shape the world. And you go where the water is in business, offering goods or services that are so valuable, people will be happy to give money for them because you’re making their lives better.

This is how free markets work. One of the things that economists don’t talk about enough is how these interactions are predicated on trust and caring for oneself by caring for others. 

Lately I’ve been studying successful businesses. Not just by reading and talking with local businesspeople, but by accident, when I’ve been getting help that I am simply acting like I can afford. For example, when I moved all my things into storage Friday.

I could’ve done it myself. But I had muscle spasms for months after moving myself down two and up four flights of stairs from Cambridge to Boston overnight in August, in the great bedbug imbroglio of ’14 of which we shall not speak. And that was roughly 250 oil paintings and a thousand pounds of books (back now from my ex) ago.

So I paid a Task Rabbit. His name was Aaron, and he didn’t just help me move heavy things.  He managed his time and other people’s. He problem-solved on the fly. And when I talked to him about what he was doing, because he was obviously a business genius, he told me all about the share economy.

The share economy exemplifies going where the water is in business on a high-trust model. It’s exemplified by a relatively new set of services including Task Rabbit, AirBNB, and Lyft. These services let workers set their own hours of availability and sometimes their rates. And they let clients get simple things they need to make their lives better, on demand, from vetted strangers who come to them.

Need someone to wait in line or move boxes? Hire a Task Rabbit. Need a place to stay in a strange city for a month? Search AirBNB. Need to get to work? Call Lyft. It’s cheaper than a cab, and will probably get you a driver faster since the drivers are already decentralized, on the road, closer to you rather than congregated in centralized spots around a company.

No one has applied the share economy model to art yet.

On one hand, maybe that’s because it’s not possible. Or maybe they already have, in crowdfunding services like Kickstarter that let people support specific art projects. But that’s pretty centralized and funds what the artist wants done instead of making artists’ services available to a wide range of clients on a horizontal model, on demand. Or maybe they already have, in ways that haven’t quite taken off yet or that I just don’t know about. 

On the other hand, this might not have been done yet and there might be a big pot of gold at the end of the share economy artist services dealer rainbow. Lots of people deal art, but no one is dealing artist services the way they’re dealing these other things (personal assistance, housing, rides). Maybe that’s because demand isn’t there, or maybe that’s because it’s a bit harder to think how you would structure this form of the same general business model.

On the third hand, in the dystopian universe in which I continue over-analyzing everything all the time, I probably need to start waiting in line for people—for $50/hour—while I keep writing poem-songs about policing, learning how to self-publish, painting, getting back to stand-up, and otherwise prioritizing my art over everything else while asking my two new favorite questions—How do I make the world feel safe to flourish through art? And how do I apply the share economy model to artist services? 

Because while I’m learning to better go where the water is in all things, I also gotta eat.

Quick, while I finish packing to throw my stuff in storage tomorrow and begin my new life experiment traveling and making art—what is the meaning of life? 

In related news, my Etsy store listings are all deactivated for now. Because the paintings are about to be inaccessible. Hopefully I’ll make more on the road. Then I’ll have new active listings, and blog them. I also might be live-blogging a book once I decide on one of the ten many folks were kind enough to vote on earlier this week. 

Speaking of which, the book vote survey is still open. The clear first-place winner, so far, is the series Where the Wilde Thinks Are. This also happens to be my business name. And a play on the last name I took after Oscar Wilde, who is my daddy. 

Here is one of the draft manuscripts in that series. “Patton’s Chair” is an allegory about American loss of moral authority following post-9/11 violations of rule of law. 

***

Once upon a time, a timeless soldier was reincarnated as an American General during the Second World War. His name was Patton. 

Patton was an infinity-star General. He served for thousands of years. His service as Patton made the world safer for human flourishing. Among other accomplishments, Patton did a very good job studying at West Point and leading the Allied Forces to victory by designing D-Day and the successful liberation of Occupied Europe.

When people would ask him about the secret to his success, he would just smile. Usually, Patton knew better than to tell them anything close to the whole Truth. Whole Truths are really quite large and unwieldly. Some of them can’t even be put into linear narrative without the speaker falling off the edge of the world.

But sometimes, Patton would need to stop, be still within, and listen to his heart. This might happen by a hillside that he knew from a past life was once a battlefield. Or at a cocktail party when mortality was discussed. Or even in the heat of a battle, outside Time.

So Patton knew he could not usually say exactly what his heart said. It spoke in a language some people wouldn’t understand. And most of the time, actions spoke louder than words anyway. 

But he knew he needed to listen to it and use what it told him. He would just have to be a faithful translator of the secret language of his heart. 

Patton’s favorite place to listen to his heart’s secret language was his magic chair. After a long day generalling, he would always return there, settle in, close his eyes, and put his hand on his heart, the better to feel his feelings. 

One day, Patton came home from a nice swim in the cosmic ocean with Hedy Lamarr. He was drenched in Truth and Time, dripping centuries all over the good carpet.

When he walked by his study to say hello to Push Coast Crow, he stopped and gasped.

His chair was missing!

“What—where—with the—MY CHAIR!!!!!” Patton stuttered.

“Caw. Caw,” Push Coast Crow replied.

“WHAT HAPPENED?” Patton asked.

“Caw. Caw,” Push Coast Crow replied.

“Was it the Nazis?” He asked.

“Caw.” Push Coast Crow shook his head sadly.

“The Russians?” He asked.

“Caw.” Push Coast Crow hung his head lower.

“Japanese?””

“Caw.” A single tear fell from Push Coast Crow’s perfect beak. Where it fell on the floor, roses sprang up and continued crying Forever.

 “Who then?” Patton asked.

“Caw,” Push Coast Crow said, very softly.

“What?” Patton asked.

“Caw,” Push Coast Crow repeated, just a little bit louder.

“WHAT?!” Patton replied.

“Caw caw caw caw caw,” Push Coast Crow explained.

“THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE,” Patton said.

“Caw caw caw caw caw caw caw!” Push Coast Crow insisted. And then, nodding sadly: “Caw.”

Patton leaned on the door frame, slumping into his puzzlement. His hand wandered to his head, first scratching the top and then holding his whole body up at the temple and cheekbone.

“Caw?” Push Coast Crow asked.

“Yes,” Patton replied, but his voice was strained. He cleared his throat.

“Yes.” He heaved a sigh and stood up straight.

“Caw?” Push Coast Crow asked.

“Yes, please,” Patton replied.

Push Coast Crow brought Patton his scotch and pipe.

“Thanks,” Patton said.

Push Coast Crow and Patton sipped their scotch and lit their pipes. Push Coast Crow perched on Patton’s shoulder but did not kiss his cheek. He knew sometimes the General needed space.

For a long time they stood in the study doorway together in silence, smoking and staring at the empty space where Patton’s chair had been.

Finally, heaving a great sigh and resettling his weight on his other foot, Patton put his hand on his heart and closed his eyes.

“I feel…” He said, his voice trailing off. He shook his head.

“I feel…” He began again, his voice catching with emotion. Push Coast Crow kissed his cheek. Patton nodded and pet Push Coast Crow’s iridescence-streaked, black head and back. Then he took a deep breath, closed his eyes again, and resettled his hand on his heart.

“I’m angry,” Patton said.

“I’m really angry,” he went on. As he said it in calmness, Patton’s anger grew so hot that his pipe—which had gone out in his quiet reverie—relit at that moment and started smoking again. 

“Caw,” Push Coast Crow nodded, flying some small distance into the study to give the General some space.

“But my anger,” Patton sighed, “is actually part of a much larger, massive cloud of grief.”

“With violent storms of anger, betrayal, loss, guilt, abandonment—and above all, shame.”

“I’m so ashamed, I can hardly stand it,” Patton said. And with that, he sunk down on the floor with his head in his hands.

“Caw-caw,” Push Coast Crow said, flying down to comfort him.

“It’s not ok,” Patton replied.

“Caw caw,” Push Coast Crow said. “Caw caw caw caw caw caw caw caw caw caw?”

“I don’t know,” Patton said. “I just don’t know.” Patton and Push Coast Crow were quiet and still for a long time. 

Then, Patton closed his eyes and put his hand on his heart one more time.

“I’m afraid. I’m afraid of the consequences, not for me, but for others, if I don’t get my chair back,” Patton said.

“I’m afraid for what is good in the universe. I’m afraid for the butterfly of grace and goodness that transforms in darkness and flies in people’s faces. I’m afraid for the world that it won’t be safe for her to be amazing, like she can be when she feels safe, if I don’t get my chair back.” 

Patton shivered. Push Coast Crow drew in closer, nuzzling his nose.

“Caw?”

“You’re right. There’s always a lighter side to the dark half-wheel of Emotion,” Patton sighed, pulling a lighter out of his still-damp pants pocket and steadying the fire below the wheel.

“I feel faith in goodness that I can’t explain,” Patton said.

“I feel, too, the darker side of the coin of peace: acceptance that I can’t control outcomes,” he said.

“Caw caw,” Push Coast Crow said.

Patton sighed.

“You’re right. I should be feeling hope, too.” And he closed his eyes, furrowed his brow, and pressed his hand harder over his heart. And then he sighed and was quiet for a long time.

“There it is!” He exclaimed suddenly, raising his eyebrows in recognition.

“I feel hope that we all want to make the world safer for human flourishing. We are really on each other’s team. We can learn from our mistakes and solve problems together,” he said.

And there Patton and Push Coast Crow sit to this day, waiting for his own country to give Patton back his chair. 

A few months back, I heard a sound that changed my life. It made me feel so safe and valued that I cried, and then began to remember my dearest dreams—asleep and waking—in a way I hadn’t for years. It was the sound of singing policemen. 

At the Major City Chiefs/Major City Sheriffs Conference, the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police Department Honor Guard carried three flags—U.S., Canadian, and UK—on stage before the largest gathering of law enforcement leadership in the nation. They sang all three national anthems. The crowd of national law enforcement leadership stood, hands over hearts. And the love—the “abstract splendor” of a patriotism it’s fashionable to reject and important to question—was palpable, present, and not at all abstract. 

Experiencing that room full of song and honor made me realize law enforcement is like a religious community. It’s tightknit, sometimes wary of outsiders, has its own unique characteristics in the aggregate, and holds its values sacred. 

Police hold honor sacred. In the U.S., that honor is about protecting life, liberty, and property, and upholding the laws that stem from that first principle. That mission helps society as a whole feel safe to flourish. 

Celebrating that mission is about celebrating our shared core values. Focusing our limited cognitive resources on that positive plane of attention actually helps make people safer. Procedural justice research shows that when communities believe police act fairly, they’re more likely to share information, cooperate, and otherwise behave in law-abiding ways that increase safety for the community as a whole.

Conversely, stereotyping police as prejudiced and violent is harmful for society in three ways. First, like any judgmental stereotyping of a particular subgroup, it runs counter to our shared value of tolerance. It’s ironic for the people who protect that value with their lives to be subjected to the same form of group judgment-based bigotry that this country was founded to protect persecuted minorities from. 

Second, mistrust of police weakens security according to procedural justice research. People who don’t believe the police are legitimate are less likely to talk to them and obey the law. Just as trust strengthens rule of law—people who think working together will do good, are more likely to do it—so too does mistrust weaken it. 

Third, research shows that—across educational, professional, and personal realms—a “learn and help learn” (growth) not “judge and be judged” (fixed) mindset correlates with success. So an inclusive, positive attitude that acknowledges citizens have much to learn from law enforcement as a community and vice-versa is much more likely to help improve outcomes everyone cares about than the adversarial alternatives. 

And we have a lot to learn form police. They’re the only ones who know the realities of police work. We might think we know from the media, citizen accounts, or civil rights organizations what American policing is about. And those sources are important. 

But there are also a lot of biases built into the way we get our information about police from any sources other than police themselves. For instance, police are often required to keep their successes private and let their failures be public. Think of privacy protections in cases that can result in serious bodily injury or death—from domestic violence to mental health crisis. The subset of these cases where police succeed in helping vulnerable people through times of danger are generally not advertised. But the times they fail—and people die—are more likely to be public. Thus privacy protections and other considerations create reporting biases that hurt public perceptions of police—and that in turn hurts the community trust that helps police and people work together to make the world feel safe to flourish. 

Ironically, feeling the goodness of the men and women I sang with at that policing conference was part of what led me to quit the job I had researching the singing policemen. Naturally inclined to mistrust authority and work to remedy its abuses, until a few months ago I was the postdoctoral researcher on the first national database of police behavior. 

But the police I meant to help—systematizing national data collection to establish what the national numbers are and which agency policies and practices can decrease racial disparities and use of force—instead helped me. They helped me feel safe to be myself. Critic, yes. Activist, frequently. But first a singer of songs, a writer of poems and dreamer of plays, and an artist who gives thanks.

I’m thankful for the rule of law American police overwhelmingly work to uphold every day, at no small personal risk and without the kinds of endemic bribery and corruption that are commonplace in many other countries. I’m thankful for my freedom of movement that is essentially unprecedented in the history of human society, although I don’t always do a good job making use of it. And I’m thankful for the freedom of expression police protect that lets me make all kinds of creative noise without fearing anything worse than my own stupidity. 

Because to paraphrase FDR, there’s nothing more stupid than refraining from making and learning from stupid mistakes. 

Certainly he scored it, bold, and black, and firm,

In that Indian paper—made his seniors squirm,

Quoted office scandals, wrote the tactless truth—

Was there ever known a more misguided youth?

—Rudyard Kipling, The Man Who Could Write

 

It’s the last few days of my moving sale. All my paintings are over 50% at my Etsy store. The current listings go inactive Wednesday night before my stuff goes in storage and I go vagabonding next week. So now is the time to grab what you want! 

As I prepare to put my stuff in storage and travel the world with a backpack making art, I want your help picking my next writing project. To vote on a list of possible book projects for me to prioritize this year, check out this two-question survey. 

I want to pick the project that:
1.    Best celebrates security—in the sense of helping the world feel safe to flourish—through trust. 
2.    Feels most important in the sense of giving good to the world.
3.    Is most exciting to readers and therefore might have an actual market instead of just being another thing I produce—like a dissertation or hundreds of oil paintings! 

Warning: My writing is powerful. So you should help me pick the right project now—before somebody gets hurt. Here are a few of the things my writing has accomplished in the past—and might accomplish in the future—with a key distinguishing the two at the bottom: 
a.    Earned $30,000 plus a new laptop in roughly 30 minutes. 
b.    Probably cost me a high school diploma.
c.    Established a narrative for a breakaway sect of ISIL (which we’re not calling the Islamic State) that supports religious liberty and art. 
d.    Started an argument that got me a job. 
e.    Challenged the dominant narratives of race and crime in America in a way that contributed to trust and flourishing. 
f.    Gotten the White House to call me on demand. 

So take the survey where you can see a one-paragraph summary for each project. Please take a few minutes to tell me what book you want to read, and pass the survey on to others so I get a bigger sample. I value your opinion, and appreciate your support as I follow my heart.  

Writing Accomplishments Key: Past or Present?
a. Past. An essay I wrote in about half an hour won a three-year Rapoport Service Scholarship Stipend at the University of Texas at Austin. I returned the first $10,000 check and computer when I transferred to UVA in 2002. 
b. Past, obviously. I published Gordon, the student newspaper, as a junior at Indian Springs School in Indian Springs, Alabama from 2000-2001, during which time Vice Principal Roberts’s rein of terror was existentially threatened by my uncanny ability to apply White Out to a Time cover. 
c. Possible future. See #s 1, 2, and 6 on the survey.
d. Past. Three cheers for the Cavalier Daily and the UVA Women’s Center. 
e. Possible future. See #3 on the survey.
f. Past. I didn’t get Joe on the phone though. Sometimes everybody needs an editor. 

 

“Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.”—Sun Tzu, The Art of War
 
How do you recruit a growing army of creative young people while destroying and looting some of the world’s most precious art, forbidding instruments in music, and killing people for basic expressive acts like shaving or voting in an election? How do you generate “a still-steady inflow of foreigners, ready to give up everything at home for a shot at paradise in the worst place on Earth”? This despite apparently having few resources, formal allies, or a vision of the future that does not end in apocalypse?

You run a better information game than your opponent. And boy is ISIL—which we’re not calling the Islamic State because it’s not Islamic and it’s not a state—running a better information game than the West. Artists have to step up and solve this problem, because it’s an assault on the human spirit, divine creative experiences, and the freedom of conscience that allows us to create.
 
ISIL is the Justin Bieber of terror. It sprang up overnight with no warning, a bunch of young idiots love it for no readily apparent reason, and it’s not going away. 

In fact, its forces took the Syrian city of Palmyra this week, and it’s driving me crazy. 

Probably we have to go to war to defeat ISIL. But to paraphrase Sun Tzu, we want to win before we do that.

Here are ten things artists and other everyday heroes can do to combat ISIL before it succeeds in launching an overt, larger-scale terror attack on U.S. soil. It’s already responsible for domestic attacks including a recent one in Texas that resulted in a few cartoonists’ deaths.

 

See a problem or something I left off the list? Leave it in the comments. I haven’t talked with anyone about this, so it will be nice to get hive help improving my thinking here. 

 

10 Things Artists Can Do to Fight Terror

All of these things apply the same basic insight that free expression—not bloodshed—best combats abuses of free expression. Each could be a separate post, and maybe will be going forward. 

Everything that directly targets ISIL-affiliated accounts should probably be done anonymously via Tor and blind email and social network accounts. 

 

1.    Don’t call it combat or fighting terror. 

Oops. 

When people focus on terrorism, they feel afraid. That’s a victory for terrorists. This is also an extension of a more basic rule of good writing—use positive phrases. Instead of “don’t use negative phrases,” for example. It’s clearer and prettier. That’s Orwell and Strunk & White on good writing. 

It also happens to be a better cognitive strategy for directing selective attention to what you want instead of what you don’t, and this matters because attentional resources are limited. 

So first we have to be clear about what we’re up to. We set the terms of the discourse. Armies fight terror. Artists tell the truth and celebrate. 

When you tell the truth, it enlightens. You get high. And you can help people envision better lives, believe in the goodness in themselves and others, and thus make a better world. 

In cognitive psychology, this is a trick of positive selective attention. It often gets a bad wrap in reporting as if it’s disingenuous. But it feels good and can be honest. Think of the power of Harry Potter or Oprah—or reporting on the Peace Corps or successful policing, military, or disaster relief efforts instead of tragic mistakes, abuses, or failures. 

Stories of hope make people’s lives better. There’s less attention to the positive realities even though they’re just as real, in part because the primary sources for them can seem interested and thus less credible. After all, a crime victim the police help isn’t likely to go to a reporter with her story rather than getting on with life. And who but the Peace Corps is going to report on Peace Corps success stories? Small operations like Utne Reader and The Sun have long recognized and tried to fill the resultant media gap in stories of hope. 

I can do this by traveling the world making art, interviewing people, and writing one of the book projects on this list you should take now to help me pick one. 

Maybe I should also start a list of positive media forces to interview, pitch things to, or emulate. For example, I really like (and have published with) the following: 
The Science Creative Quarterly
Dissertation Haiku
The Christian Science Monitor
McSweeney’s 
Feathertale

 

2.    Offer and Strengthen Alternative Identities.

A lot of ISIL recruits weren’t that religious before finding the group. They were isolated, alienated, and desperate for community, purpose, and a sense of worth.

And a lot of the people whose communities they’ve wreaked havoc on are gonna be in a similar position after ISIL is defeated. So stemming the tide of recruits and helping rebuild both require offering and strengthening alternative identities. 

Those are exactly the same identities ISIL undermines by destroying precious art, architecture, and artefacts. 

But there’s too much richness and beauty in the world for it to be destroyed completely. What remains needs to be celebrated. And maybe God will replace some of what has been lost. You couldn’t ask for a better answer to a movement that destroys art in the name of God than a series of sacred apparitions like Juan Diego’s Lady of Guadalupe, Charles Angrand’s Good Samaritan, or any number of other religious visions celebrated in art. 

You don’t have to have a lot of resources to create divine pop-up art. One could imagine creating a simple how-to guide and supplies kit. One might do that on Etsy in the not-too-distant future. 

 

3.    Tell the Whole Truth

We tortured. That’s a problem. 

Stop. I don’t care what you think about the terms, the context, or other possible justifications. It was illegal, immoral, and didn’t work. Instead it backfired, because security is about trust. Procedural justice research bears out the evidentiary basis for this common-sense logic. Evidence shows that when people trust that police are legitimate, they’re more likely to cooperate and behave in law-abiding ways. When they don’t, they’re less likely to talk to police and follow the rules. 

So it’s unsurprising to see direct links between these post-9/11 American detention and interrogation practices, and the development of the Islamic State. Recent revelations linking coercive interrogation practices in domestic police departments with those abroad are probably hurting national security in similar ways. 

This is a problem because we have a free press and freedom of speech—the U.S. stands out even among Western peer nations in refusing to outlaw hate speech—and want to shine light on serious problems to make them better. But circulating photos and stories of terrible, uncommon abuses that are not ongoing also provides more fodder for the terror propaganda machine. Even showing photos of the abuses at Abu Ghraib for purposes of denouncing them activates the same negative neuronal networks of anger, distress, and hopelessness as showing the photos for purposes of terror recruitment. Most people’s physiology actually changes after seeing images of threat, which in turn changes what part of your brain you can use to process information. So the threat cues in photos of abuse activate the lizard brain, and fear rules thought below the level of awareness. 

So we don’t have to keep talking about the same mistakes, or even hold Congressional hearings into whether crimes were committed. Those moves actually make people feel less safe by drawing selective attention to threat even though the threat (e.g., of post-9/11 torture) is not ongoing. f

But to make the world feel safer to flourish, we have to integrate the trauma of our national mistakes into a coherent narrative in which we’re learning to do better going forward. That integration means making best practices better in policing at home and abroad, doing more community trust-building in domestic and international security. This way the attention is on the improvement and not the mistakes—learning and helping learning instead of punishing and being punished. This so-called growth mindset predicts success across educational, professional, and personal realms. 

4.    Make Better Jokes

At the coolest policing conference ever this winter, I learned three important things: 
–    ISIL uses memes to recruit home-grown violent extremists, and the law enforcement community doesn’t know what to do about that.
–    Memes rhymes with seems! Language is so funny out loud. 
–    Apparently I seem emotionally distant. No one has ever told me that before in a bar. Because usually no one can get close enough to hit on me. 

So there’s a memification of terrorist recruiting using Western logos and funny pictures and stuff on social media. That memification looks like this. Only I’m not posting an image because I’m not spreading the disease. I’m making it a stupid dialogue instead. 

Jihad Parrot: Just Dua It!
Loser: Omg, I am totes radicalized. 

No really, we have to stop them. They have LOLcats. 

Terrorism was already a decentralized problem, but the Internet decentralized it more. The reason terrorism works so well in game theoretical terms is that a big, powerful actor can’t 100% defend against a bunch of weak, decentralized ones. Think Arnold Schwarzenegger in “Kindergarden Cop” surrounded by 500,000 small children. 

Arnold cannot defeat the children. Stop. I don’t care how strong he is. That is not the point. They’re kids, he can’t punch them, they’re chaotic, there are too many, and anyway have you ever tried teaching kindergarten? 

Arnold has to instead convince the children that he’s a very nice man. This is called soft power. 

Memification of counter-terrorism messaging 

You answer decentralized, funny, values-focused social media messaging with decentralized, funny, values-focused messaging. They use memes; you use memes. They use funny pictures; you use funny pictures. They talk values; you talk values. 

This requires honoring your enemy’s anger, which can be a very hard thing to do. It requires a form of forgiveness. 

Memification of counter-terrorism does NOT look like:
– Drawing pictures of the Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him (dishonors enemy’s anger)
– Lobbying Congress to hire a bunch more people who specialize in Facebook (social media is so new that most people and companies claiming to specialize in it have no idea what they’re doing)
– Trying to put memes back in the box (you can’t put information back in the box)

It DOES look like: 
– Setting ground rules (see above) to create a safe discursive space for free competition in the game of the responsive messaging. To control the rules of the space to make boundaries where there are none, you have to use carrots not sticks. For example, I could run a contest where the most effective counter-terrorism meme got its own Zazzle store and you’d make money from that. Or we could just, you know, agree to not get ourselves or other people killed. Whatever floats your boat. 
– Asking and answering the tough emotional questions before making a discursive move. Those questions are: What am I feeling? What is my opponent feeling? How can I accept both those facts without judgment and honor them? 
– Assuming people are good and so fronting values is always both correct and good strategy. 

That’s conceptual. The to-do list of a better memification of counter-terror looks something like this: 
–    Make a public list of popular ISIL recruiting accounts and websites (e.g., Anjem Choudary, Abu Baraa, and Abdul Muhid on Twitter). 
–    Make another public list of methods of searching for such accounts and websites. 
–    Put a meme generator by those lists. 
–    Link in a meme bank so there’s a growing repository of relevant alternate memes. 

Don’t make the mistake of assuming someone is already running this ship. Congress is wondering why no one is already running this ship. NO ONE IS ALREADY DOING THIS TOTALLY OBVIOUS AND REALLY IMPORTANT THING TO DO. OMG. WTF? LOL. 

Once those lists exist in a public place, it’s easier for everyone to find them—ISIL opponents and sympathizers alike. That’s a problem if the accounts stay active. But one might also make it harder to maintain the accounts through DDOS. 

 

 

5.    DDOS ISIL Recruitment and Propaganda Accounts 

DDOS, or direct denial of service attacks, are an established form of peaceful protest—but they’re still illegal. 

Here’s how someone else says a person might execute a DDOS attack without getting caught if you wanted to, but I don’t really know how to do it and you shouldn’t because it’s illegal. 

Note that the known ISIL recruiting/propagandizing accounts are still up even though people seem to think the security state is all-powerful and disregards the law. The accounts are still up because the police and national security agencies are tightly constrained in what they can and can’t do, especially when it comes to media. And they’re law-abiding. Otherwise, rest assured they would have taken these suckers offline a long time ago. 

Sure, some of it is probably intelligence-gathering—leaving validated information sources up to listen in. But contrary to what a lot of people make of revelations about mass surveillance from document dumps like Edward Snowden’s—which was so big even he didn’t read all the documents he leaked—the Internet is actually too big to surveil. 

There is no man behind the curtain. There’s just you and me, and all our friends. And the trolls who apparently have nothing better to do. And some NSA wankers who can’t handle this ISIL shit because the Internet is too big to surveil. But apparently they can look at your dick pics. Sleep tight. 

 

6.    Make Better Terrorist Propaganda Magazines

Make a better Dabiq, the ISIL propaganda magazine—reach your target audience with alternative narratives immediately. 

 

7.    Make Better Images from the Frontlines

This requires embedding with volunteer forces like some U.S. veterans with combat experience who have traveled to Iraq to help anti-ISIL militias there. 

There’s a reason ISIL has recently targeted journalists and especially photojournalists in the region. And without Western ground troops for reporters to embed with, or civil stability to enable grassroots reporting, it’s hard to create an alternate narrative of what’s going on. So this gives ISIL a monopoly on the image war, which is a default win.

 

8.    Support Volunteer Fighters

I’m not sure how to safely bolster support for volunteer forces. Because if you compile a list of names and locations for donations, it can be used as a target list too. But I’m sure there’s a way to do this that doesn’t jeopardize safety. 

 

9.    Support Public Art

It may seem frivolous when everything else is insecure, but art gives people hope—and freedom of expression helps us reclaim public spaces that have been marred by violence. So it seems important to support public art around the world. I’m sure there’s a way to do this that also measures art’s effects, maybe even testing how different forms of celebrating faith, peace, and freedom affect people’s well-being, sense of safety, and even perhaps the willingness to cooperate with law enforcement that in turn helps make communities safer.  

Doing this at home and abroad at once also serves to underscore the common humanity that underpins peace and resilience. 

 

10.    Stop Calling them Amateurs and Paperclip their Propagandists

This is an elitist response to a populist problem. But probably a lot of ISIL recruits change their minds once they see how bodies on the ground don’t really smell of myrrh and roses. It’s a problem helping these people get out without getting killed. We can’t exactly resettle them in Peoria. 

But we can resettle their propagandists, the information scientists who are probably running their show behind the scenes. We did it with Nazis, the so-called Paperclip Scientists. And we might as well do it sooner rather than later with these guys to take them out of action. 

Because ISIL looks grassroots, but actually has high production values. Look at an ordinary, good quality Youtube cover video. Now look at an ordinary, good quality ISIL video. CNN marks it “amateur video.” But there’s nothing amateur about it. There’s panning without shaking on uneven ground. I couldn’t do that. Someone probably has a tripod or a fig-rig to pull that off. If you can find a version with audio, it’s better than it should be for being outside under windy conditions with noise from multiple directions as recorded by a phone. Someone probably bothered with a lav mic in a war zone. Who does that?

Professionals do that. The grassroots appearance is part of the messaging, like it is with a lot of apparent overnight successes in the music industry and other businesses. But the professionalized administration behind it is part of the same old song and dance including Baathists in Iraq and the Assad regime in Syria. This isn’t new and I’m not the first person to notice this. It’s just really scary and sad, because it means creative tools that can be used to put more light and joy into the world are instead being used to organize and celebrate prejudice and violence. 

And that’s not very social at all. 

You may recall I have been up since dawn playing with my friend Craig and his List like this is a form of market research. I have been trying to systematically test where there is what demand for what products and services I can offer, since I’m having trouble monetizing my business. 

In the course of that effort, I learned better what it means to go where the water is on this terrain. As in, targeting areas where there are more people, and specifically more people who are likely to want what you got. And I tried very hard to go there. 

But this still doesn’t feel right. 

In part because I just got through a few of these Craigslist posts for my editing, tutoring, and grant proposal assistance services—with a ton of other high-population, probable high-demand for these specific services areas with Craigslists picked out and queued up to target next—before Craigslist gave me an error. Something about exceeding acceptable posting from that email address for the day? 

Sooo. Market research is definitely not what Craigslist is for.

Even though what I’m doing is also EXACTLY what Craigslist is for—matching up people offering goods and services with people who want them.

Hmm.  

This is a surmountable problem. I can reread the terms of use to figure out what I’m doing wrong. Or I can just switch email accounts, or wait a day. But that’s not the real problem. 

 

Spidey Sense Says Something is Wrong

I obviously need to be monetizing a business. I obviously need to be trying new demand-driven, market research-based sorts of ways of doing that. 

But if I give this latest experiment in that vein my all and fail, I won’t feel gratified that way you can feel gratified failing when you have given something your all. Because you get back up and try again when you fall down and you care. But this isn’t what I really want to be doing. 

I don’t want to post ads for editing and website building on Craigslist. I can do that stuff! If you need it done, you should pay me! I can help you and I need the money! Or I could help you find other people to do it cheaper tbh and you could pay me an arbitrage fee, because that’s probably a better system for both of us as long as I’m doing quality control! 

But guess what? I can do a lot of stuff. For example, over ten years ago, I worked as a: 

1. car mechanic,

2. research assistant,

3. administrative assistant, 

4. children’s dance, art, and drama teacher, and

5. victim advocate. 

At the same time. While a full-time student. Caring for a seriously ill parent. Uphill both ways in the snow. (Yawn.) That was fun, College. Don’t ever come back. 

 

My Turn

Now I have a PhD and basically the same job options because my own work is more important to me than anyone else’s. There is no amount of money you can pay me to give you my time today. It is mine and I have work to do. 

Huh. 

So I’m figuring out how to experiment with being without a permanent place of residence while traveling and making art. And I think I had better keep honing focus on exactly what I want and go for it. In fact, I seem to be fresh out of the capacity to force myself to do anything else. 

 

Important Not Urgent

This is what I want to do now. None of it is urgent in the sense that it meets people’s immediate needs—stuff at the top of their totem pole that they would pay other people to help with every day, like getting healthy, tasty, affordable food to eat, or having more time and money. That’s the stuff the latest online business class I’m taking, from App Sumo, says to focus on. I see ways to do it. I just don’t care. 

The stuff I care about is important in the sense that it adds quality of life. At least, that’s the most sense I can make of what I seem to be intent on doing next. 

Now I am going to:

1. write books, 

2. make art with my hands, 

3. sing and make jokes in public despite remaining mildly agoraphobic, seriously perfectionistic, and going days without speaking when I can help it, and 

4. defeat ISIS. 

Doing all of this will require efficiencies. 

Conveniently, my plan to defeat ISIS accomplishes all these things. So I should be at least making a terrible pitch of that plan. Not to mention scaling back on the framing a tad so I can under-promise and over-deliver. Probably? Maybe? 

I am afraid to talk about my plan. It feels weird. But it has felt weird to express myself for months, and that’s not conducive to getting stuff done. We’re social creatures. So I am going to talk about it. Next. But first about why I am afraid. 

 

Focus on Fear 

I could make a shortlist of evidence-free, emotional reasons why I am afraid to talk about my plan. And I probably will, because my brain is in part a list-making device. And evidence-free lists let that part of my brain do its obsessive-compulsive list-making thing without fooling itself into thinking it is reasoning—when it is actually emoting, fighting intuition and insight, or doing something altogether irrational. 

But first I have to say what we all know—that doing what you are afraid of is generally a good idea. This is mostly because the feared outcome usually doesn’t come true, isn’t as bad as you think, or turned out to be clouding creative work that changes the game altogether.

So here is my deal with myself. First, focus on the fear. Then, make a terrible draft pitch of the plan. And then, take a walk in the sunshine in my beautiful city. 

 

Reasons why I am afraid to talk about my cherished plan for world peace through art

1. I will get in trouble. 

2. Someone will steal it. 

3. People will think I’m crazy. 

4. It will be obviously stupid once I start hashing it out more properly. 

5. Once articulated, it will turn out to detract from other, dearer dreams that I don’t yet know are dearer to my heart despite having less social import—like writing poetry, painting, and smelling flowers. 

6. What if somebody else already has a better plan like this one, and I mess up their plan by talking about mine since some of this might work better if nobody talks about it, we all just do it independently? 

7. What if OH MY GOD JUST TALK ABOUT THE PLAN ALREADY SERIOUSLY ENOUGH WITH THE HAHA I PSYCHED MYSELF OUT!

There are advantages to being largely out of patience. Plus I can see counter-points as soon as I write out the fears. To wit: 

 

Reasons why my fears are stupid 

1. I will probably not get in too much inescapable trouble for just writing stuff down on the Internet. People are busy. I am not hurting anyone and I am not anybody’s problem. I can probably get away with a lot since I don’t have a functional family or a job or anything. What are you gonna do—give me the cold shoulder or fire me? 

2. If people want to steal my good ideas and can implement them better… Maybe that’s for the best. Plus, this is a total rookie fear in any creative enterprise. The far greater risk than theft is inaction. Plus, it’s all in the execution anyway—the fun, the process, the fluidity. And those aren’t things that can be stolen. 

3. K. Let people think I’m crazy. As long as I’m having fun. 

4. K. Looking stupid is generally how you get better. I’m all about the improvement. 

5. K. Learning about my actual preferences by acting on what I think they are and finding out I’m right—or wrong—turns out to be a great way to figure out what I really want. 

6. If somebody has already started implementing or been thinking about a plan like this one, we should work together. How are we gonna coordinate to do that if we don’t talk about it? Creative collaboration and discourse make big projects like this better. This blog can always disappear. In fact, I can always disappear. It’s actually not that hard to change your name and move across the country a few times. Kinda fun tbh. 

7. More do, less fear = more fun. 

 

New Plan 

Ok, I lied. First-next, the walk.

Then, pathetic attempts to make myself post more Craigslist ads for services I think people want—editing, tutoring, grant proposaling! web design and building, online store building, social media management! —but also secretly know or believe everyone can actually do themselves, insofar as they are important to do at all.

Social media management, I suspect, is not actually that important for businesses’ bottom lines in relation to other stuff, and I suspect the base rate of success of such services actually improving businesses’ bottom lines is quite small. But this is just from mucking around in the social media world for a few months, spending money and learning a bit about how things work, what services people offer, and the effects they seem to have or not have. 

Anyway, I thought I needed help with all those things—and I learned a lot from a lot of people about all of t
hem! But ultimately, I did a better job doing them all myself. And I’d rather teach you to do them yourself and go write one of my books. That works out better for everyone. I guess I’m not a big believer in expertise over education. I’d much rather have a big teach-in for creatives who want to start their own businesses, make their own websites, and that sort of thing, than sell over-priced services to people who can’t really afford them. 

Finally, I give up on all excess nonsense and hash out my crazy book-art-play-peace plan. Out loud, on the Internet, as it were. It will be terrible. I won’t be able to bring myself to post big chunks of it. Just some. And just some of it will not suck. I will do it anyway. If all it does is pull the idea out of my side like a burr, fine. Then I can move on to making a survey summarizing ten possible book projects with a paragraph and a graphic for each, and figuring out how to market test or otherwise validate or improve the appeal of a book before writing it. 

Also? I was a terrible mechanic. 

After a few hours spent posting a mere 25 Craigslist ads, the Internet and I reached a consensus that this was probably a stupid way of testing for demand for the products and services I can think to offer.

 

To recap, I recognized my failure to monetize a business in a few months as… A failure to monetize a business in a few months. Typical but suboptimal. Thought about why that happened. Decided I needed to figure out what I could offer that would sell like my car. And made this list of 14 things that might be like that thing if I pitched them to the market. 

Then I started moving like a researcher. 

It’s always a mistake to move like a researcher when you can move like Christopher Walken. 

My new business friends who are good at framing things like to say they’re not mistakes. They’re free seminars. So here’s a free seminar I made this morning. 

 

Morning Seminar: Go Where the Water Is

 

My first mistake was approximating equalization. This is wonky social science terminology for not randomizing groups to treatment and control like in a true experiment, but just planning on doing something like every other. Or in this case, posting each of the 14 possible goods/services I brainstormed to one Craigslist market every 14 cities on the global list of Craigslist markets. 

That’s how I wound up posting about my oil paintings to Bemidji, Minnesota. Which was about when I decided this was dumb.

That was also about when my posting speed improved. So it started driving me less crazy to do this dumb, repetitive task! But Craigslist also picked up on my improvement and said—whoa there, you can’t post that fast. 

Don’t they know they’re providing me free market research services? 

The positive way of saying this is: not all market research is created equal. I don’t care about how the effects of my ads scale to tiny markets. I only care about big ones. So I should have started by crossing off the Bemidjis or just circling the Detroits. You go where the water is in all areas of life. And in market research terms, that means testing in larger populations, especially where you’re more likely to find people like you.

I can vastly improve on the first idea of how to do a little market research—approximately equalize 14 Craigslist ads across global Craigslist service areas to see who responds to what—by going where the water is. That means: 

1. Target demographic centers. More people (within the Western context) = more business. So I want to post to Detroit, not Bemidji. 

2. Tailor tests. More artsy types = more art business. More colleges = more editing and tutoring work. Etc. So maybe I wanted to post about my paintings to Santa Fe, not Daytona Beach. 

3. Grouping products and services. My list from earlier this morning of 14 products or services really condenses to six groups of products or services. Reframing things within categories ensures that a potential client who’s interested in one thing (like paintings on Etsy) gets the chance to express potential interest in a closely related other thing (like art merchandise on Zazzle). 

The old list looked like this after I coded it for easier “approximation of equalization” and Excel stuff: 

Products and Services to Test Demand for on Craigslists A
1.    The paintings I’m selling on Etsy ? Etsy (E)
2.    The art merchandise I’m selling on Zazzle ? Zazzle (Z)
3.    Painting commissions ? Commissions (C)
4.    Website and online store design and building—I made my own ? Web (W)
5.    Social media management—making a business social media presence across platforms, and teaching the fundamentals of how to engage the right networks and maintain them yourself ? Social (S)
6.    Market research—what I’m doing right now with Craigslist, and more in-depth experimentation in other ways using other tools ? Research (R)
7.    Editing and submissions advice ? Editing (E2)
8.    Tutoring ? Tutoring (T) 
9.    Grant proposal assistance ? Grants (G) 
10.    Start-up consulting/Entrepreneurship coaching ? Start-up (S2)
11.    Positive selective attention coaching ? Positivity (P)
12.    Low information diet coaching ? Low-info (L)
13.    Books, my precious books ? Books (B)
14.    World peace through art ? Peace (P)

 

The new list looks more like this: 

Products and Services to Test Demand for on Craigslists B

1. Art: paintings on Etsy, merch on Zazzle, commissions on website. 

2. Editing, tutoring, grant proposal assistance (for which I already have a website up and running). 

3. Web support for business: website and online store design and building + social media management.

4. Market research and start-up consulting. 

5. Positive selective attention & low-information diet coaching. (Both of these things are about cognitive and emotional resource management, but that’s not the best possible language to pitch them with.) 

6. What are actually my pet projects I’m not sure I can monetize on an immediate timetable if at all, but doing what I want is the point of all of this, so I might as well try—my books and my world peace through art plot. 

 

New Plan

As much as I hate to spend a few more hours on Craigslist not knowing if this way of testing for demand for services will work at all, it seems important to at least follow through on the revised experiment. That means whipping up ads for 2-6 in the updated product and services list, matching each category to appropriate areas by common sense or intuition, and giving it a go. 

This will get tricky when I get to #6, which is probably where I should have started since it’s the most important set of possibilities to me. But it will also take the longest to work through.

Market research for unwritten books is tricky. Commercially successful authors of recent note like J.K. Rowling have established fan bases online through fora and other community-building. I don’t have anything that fancy set up. So I probably want to create a survey summarizing ten possible book projects and ask my blog readers, Facebook friends, and Twitter followers to help me by voting or saying what they want. The trouble with that is that it doesn’t involve money, and we know that attitudes (I like/don’t like this) and behaviors (I will actually give you money or not for this) can diverge quite a bit. 

And I don’t know about posting my world peace through art proposal. It’s beautiful in my head and might sound stupid outside of it. Plus, if it’s a good idea, maybe I should just pull it off anonymously. That’s often how I work best. Plus, the SCORE (retired executive) members I got free Small Business Administration advising from thought I should be pitching a bolder, crazier plan to the Internets—but I’m pretty sure this one is actually too crazy to put out there unless I pull it off first and then talk about it later, if it works. That’s how I did college apps (two years early without a high school diploma), my name change (no one in my family knew for over a year when I legally changed every part of my name), and relationships in my 20s.

This social network stuff is hard, new, and weird. But you can see—at the long end of the statistical tail of success stories—how when it works, it really works. And in the middle of the distribution, people have better health, emotional, and financial outcomes when they have strong social support networks. You don’t build them by quietly trudging along or gunning for something other than your dreams. Although I’m not sure how you do build them. Or indeed how you know your dreams without just trying a bunch of stuff to see what feels right and what works. But I’m also not sure how you get success on any meaningful terms without pouring all the crazy out of your heart and onto the fire. Someday maybe that will be a seminar. For now it’s a plan. 

 

I wanted to raise about 23k in a few weeks before throwing all my stuff in storage and taking off to travel the world making art for a year because it feels right. But I am not really making any money. So I figure it’s time to think about this some more. Namely, it’s time to think about where demand is for what. 

Craigslist offers two ways to test demand systematically. The first way is checking for what people are advertising for.

When I check what people are advertising for on Craigslist, sexism makes me too angry to even.

A whole lot of people would rather pay me to trip over a coffee table wearing a short skirt than solve the world’s problems. Meanwhile I have a ten-point plan to defeat the Islamic State. But you would rather lick my toes? Fantastic. How’s 3:00? If we don’t all die in a fire before then.

The second way Craigslist offers to test demand systematically is advertising and seeing how people respond.

I figured out this would probably be the best way to test demand for the different products and services I can offer by selling my car. I wasn’t selling hardly any paintings with lots of effort. But in under 24 hours, I sold my car for more than I bought it for over two years ago. People need cars. The price was right. The market worked. Maybe the same principle holds for the other things I have to offer, if I pitch them right. Let’s see.

 

The Experiment

 

Markets 

Craigslist serves five main regions globally: the US (420 lists), Canada (55), Europe (95), Asia, Pacific and Middle East (65), and Oceania —Australia and New Zealand (2). Of these, it might be weird to post in English in the European and Asian markets. But I’ll do it anyway. Exchange rates make doing business in Canada and Oceania different from doing business in the U.S. And goodness knows within the U.S., a major metropolitan area is very different from a small town, a Southern city is very different from a Midwestern one, and all bets are off in the West.

I could analyze the differences between these areas in greater detail, decide which ones matter most, group the Craigslists, and then randomly assign different ads to different subgroups of the markets the lists represent.

But I don’t care about any of that right now—I just want to know where there’s a market for what, and then think about how to increase profit after I start making it. So at the risk of missing a lot of information, I’m basically mixing up all the categories I could break the Craigslist markets up into like they don’t matter. This gives me a total of 637 lists to advertise products and services on, to see what people want to pay me for and do more of that (as long as it’s fun and doesn’t involve my toes).

Notice that Craigslist is providing me free market testing. This is very nice of them. Thank you, Craigslist.

 

Products and Services

There’s a lot of stuff I could do for money. I’m not gonna do most of it. Here is the shortlist of exciting things I could do for money that I’m not going to try just now: drop shipping, day trading, gun running (legally with a federal firearms license), drug peddling (legally with online supplement sales), and prostitution (also known as getting a job).

If I get really desperate, I’ll try day trading. Like a lot of women, I’m pretty good at it on paper and not super comfortable risking real money because it feels like gambling. But that is actually part of what makes women better traders.

The whole point of this life experiment is to figure out what I want and go for it. So I only want to offer products and services that I really want to be providing, that I think make the world a better place by adding obvious value, solving people’s important problems.

Here are the things I can offer that fit that bill:

1.     The paintings I’m selling on Etsy

2.     The art merchandise I’m selling on Zazzle

3.     Painting commissions

4.     Website and online store design and building—I made my own

5.     Social media management—making a business social media presence across platforms, and teaching the fundamentals of how to engage the right networks and maintain them yourself

6.     Market research—what I’m doing right now with Craigslist, and more in-depth experimentation in other ways using other tools

7.     Editing and submissions advice

8.     Tutoring

9.     Grant proposal assistance

10. Start-up consulting/Entrepreneurship coaching

11. Positive selective attention coaching

12. Low information diet coaching

13. Books, my precious books—the ones I want to write, not the ones I have in boxes for storage now, those you can’t have

14. World peace through art

 

I might come up with a few more. Probably I should stop there for now though. 

That’s only 14 product/service “cars” to test across 637 Craigslists. That means I should be able to test each “car” in at least 45 markets. I want to keep track of where I post what, so I’ll do that in Excel. (I will force myself to do that in Excel.) 

Overall, this should give me a more informed sense of where there’s demand for what, which products or services to focus on selling more of, and how much value the world places on things other than my toes when I point out what I have to offer and how it can be useful.

 

Materials and Next Steps

I’ve been meaning to do this for days, and it always feels “too late.” Like, why didn’t I do this five years ago? When is the perfect time to do it? What is the perfect way?

This results in it not getting done.

So today I’m writing these 14 ads and posting them on 637 Craigslists. It is not the perfect time and they will not be perfect. It will be done though, and I’ll learn something.

I’ll probably report results early next week. Probably nothing will happen. Experiments are weird like this. This isn’t even an experiment in the proper sense of it—I’m not randomly assigning anything, I don’t care about statistical significance, and I’m not even defining outcomes of interest in advance because I don’t know what to expect. I just want to see what happens. 

In a week, I’m putting all the lovely original oil paintings on my online gallery in storage. So if you’d like to buy one to support my life experiment in making art and traveling, now’s the time to visit my Etsy store.

After that, you can still get art swag at my Zazzle store. Or turn up Ringo and ask me to paint you a postcard. 

I’m perversely excited about all the mistakes I’ve made in just a few months of attempted business launches. Better to fail earlier and harder, and learn, than not.

Had I not gotten super cool-looking—but statistically insignificant—results in pilot testing for my dissertation research… That everyone I talked to was sure would pan out—but didn’t… I might have gone in a different direction… And not been crushed when the initial results turned out to be wrong.

Had I not gone along to get along in relationships for many years, I might have started asking for what I want sooner.

Abject failure can generate better outcomes than early, middling success. 

And boy have my initial business launch attempts failed. Here are three things that seem to have gone horribly wrong—and how they underscore what has gone terrifically right. 

 

Horribly Wrong Sequencing

I quit my job before monetizing my business. 

Don’t do that. 

Unless of course you’re called. And then accept that your sequencing will look screwy to everyone else. And you will figure out what is next as you go, because you are showing up to what is next in your own life, on your own time. 

 

Horribly Wrong Investing

I invested five figures in launching my business. Before adequately testing the business model. 

Don’t do that either. 

Unless of course you’re trying to figure out how this business thing works. And then accept that risk is part of the game. And a lot of apparently successful businesspeople actually lose more than they gain. Risking and trusting are integral to producing better individual and aggregate outcomes. As long as you listen to the outcome of the risk, and adjust. 

 

Horribly Wrong Goal-Setting

I tried a bunch of different goal-setting exercises, like Napoleon Hill’s autosuggestion and Tim Ferriss’s dreamlining. There are a million different forms of the same basic exercise here. They’re all about directing positive selective attention to actualizing what you really want. Which requires first knowing what that is. And figuring out what you really want is actually a LOT of work. 

Do that. 

Throw it away. Do it again.

It’s hard. We’re all looking for the golden ball in Robert Bly’s terms—which is an allegorical way of saying we all lose touch with something, maybe just by being born, maybe by growing up (or trying to). And knowing what we really want is part of getting back in touch with a certain holiness, so we can get it. 

 

How Three Wrongs Make Right

A lot of failure in asking—for painting sales, publications, editing clients—has desensitized me to the horror of it. This increased comfort with failing enabled me to sing my own songs on the streets of Mexico despite barely being able make noise in my own apartment sometimes. It enabled me to ask my housing lawyer to get my damages back from the great Cambridge bedbug imbroglio of ’14 (don’t ask)—or file in district court already, because it’s been eight months and that little mess tanked my meagre savings. (I’ve been asking nicely and sleeping on a sleeping bag since September. It’s like a little camping party in my apartment.) 

And it enabled me to ask Richard Branson for advice on Twitter. 

He answered. 

 

This is brilliant. This is right. I still haven’t figured out quite how to apply this to my own goals. Simple is hard. 

I also still haven’t gotten baptized—a goal for the day—despite calling over a dozen churches. SIMPLE IS HARD. 

But I’ll get it. Because I know how to ask for what I want. Politely. Persistently. And I’m doing it. 

 

More importantly, I’m figuring out how to ask other people what they want. Systematically. So I can give them what they need and profit from helping them. 

Just like research turned out to be much more about learning what I didn’t know I didn’t know, than testing my original hypotheses—which were almost entirely wrong—so too business turns out to be much more about learning what problems I can solve for people for fun, that I’m not even sure they should pay me for because I love doing this stuff… That asking, listening, changing, asking again, listening, changing, asking again game that vocalists play with accompaniment in improv, and radios can play too. It’s all chaos. It’s all good. That’s how social exchange works—decentralized, unpredictable, fluid, and better than anything you could imagine before showing up to play. 

It’s basically the Bill Murray of business planning. Show up. Do what people need. Have fun. Poof. “No one will ever believe you,” but you better pay taxes on it anyway. 

At least that’s what VERY preliminary results of my first market tests show. More about that soon. 

Making the time to prioritize your own work, spending money like you believe investing in your dreams is a good investment, and articulating exactly what you want like it matters and you can get it aren’t mistakes. They’re steps. Just like any failure. 

 

“I must now go a long way… I must face a fight that I have not faced before. And I must go on a road that I do not know.”—Gilgamesh, Tablet III, 2100 B.C.

“You don’t wanna stay on your farm in Kansas forever and sing that same song over and over to the animals that don’t pay you any attention.”—John Waters on the message of The Wizard of Oz

 

Roads and doors keep appearing among the 200+ oil paintings I plan to sell in under 2 weeks at over 50% off in my Etsy store before putting what remains of my stuff in storage and starting my year-long life experiment in traveling and making art.

Roads and doors are journey symbols.

Please help me sell all my art in a few weeks to follow my dreams by buying some paintings, and consider also donating to the Wounded Warrior Project for Armed Forces Day (which was Sat.) and Memorial Day coming up next Monday. Warriors are journeyers, too. 

 

Roads

There’s something about roads.

There was a time in my life when that thing was fear.

Statistically speaking, driving is a much greater threat to American lives than terrorism. Every time you drive a two-lane road, your life is literally depending on a stranger staying on one side of an arbitrary yellow line.

Roads depend on trust. 

At some point, I got over the fear and drove alone from LA to Boston, camping along the way and taking the photos that became this painting series. 

Freedom of movement is internal as much as it is external. That’s why Americans don’t just drive for work and adventure. We drive for freedom—although the environmental costs of the habit threaten our security.

We also move around more than people from and in other countries. This reflects an internalization of our freedom of movement. What is legal and infrastructural becomes mental and emotional. We can move. 

Moving is supposed to be a major life stressor, like divorce or loss. But we opt into that stress a lot. Maybe because we intuitively sense that not all stress is bad. Stressing muscles is the best way to strengthen them. Moving into fear is the best way to overcome it. Trying new things before you know how to do them is the best way to learn. 

Roads represent all those things. Faith in oneself at the wheel—and other people at their own. Forward progress that builds. Navigating the new. And discovery of the unknown, or at least the unknown to us. 

 

Doors

Like roads, doors are really rich symbols with lots of journey associations. 

The doors that I couldn’t stop painting this fall and winter similarly celebrate faith, change, and the unknown. 

The first one in this series, “Door of Light,” built on the images of the smiling face of truth I wrote about last week. 

The series also integrates the symbol of the trust dandelion that I had been painting and writing about, building on Cory Doctorow’s writing on information and network phenomena. As i see it, trust is a somewhat unique entity because it sits at the intersection of emotion (we feel trusting or untrusting) and information (we trust based on information, and transmit information about who to trust to others, usually based on personal interaction). Trust moves along social networks like other forms of emotion and information, in a pattern that looks like a dandelion. 

As you can see better in the darkness, the trust dandelion on one side of the door frame and the bullseye of science—that is but one eye on the smiling face of truth—hold up the door. 

Meanwhile the light of the world creeps under the closed and locked door. 

That light is faith. It might be secular—faith in the fragile human goodness of ourselves, others, and the world. It might be religious. 

For me it’s religious, and the religious experience my faith stems from includes the gift of this great joke. I had a dream while I was painting this series about the door of light in the darkness, closed and locked tight. The light of the world creeps in gently underneath. Even though, as it turns out, all the locks are on the wrong side. 

I think that’s what goodness in the world is like when we trust. We unlock goodness in other people they were just waiting to have recognized. 

And anyway believing that makes things more fun. 

Journeys and Fights

On National Armed Forced Day this weekend I thought about the veterans in my family. One of my grandfathers joined the Navy illegally at 17 to fight in World War II after Pearl Harbor. The other joined the Communist International to illegally fight Franco and fascism in Spain before the U.S. joined the fight. 

Some journeys—like my grandfathers’ when they were young—are fights. Every fight is a journey. But is every journey a fight? 

There is conflict in every journey, in every story. But I don’t think every journey is a fight.

A fight is a frame—a particular metaphor we can use to tell a story. You can pick a different metaphor, and it’ll change the way you think. What you believe, and so how you feel, what you perceive, and how you act. You can tell a story of fight, or a story of adventure and learning, about any conflict. “Good Morning Vietnam” isn’t a fight story. It’s story about the power of humor, music, speaking truth to power, and valuing people as people, not as means or ends. 

Sometimes I think I need to have a better mission than traveling and making art—a cause, goal, budget, timetable, and the other components of a grant proposal that I’ve had for my life for as long as I can remember. 

Then I remember the rules of the road. The year-long life experiment on which I’m about to embark is in part about simplifying. I don’t need a grand plan. I don’t need a mission. I just need to show up to life. The poetry and paintings, amazing human connections, and other forms of magic seem to happen on their own when I do that. It’s how I wound up singing my own songs on the streets of Mexico City last month despite having never busked, been to Mexico, or sang all that in front of another human being in real life before. 

I don’t seem to make hardly any money doing any of this yet. And I’m on that like it’s a problem. Come to think of it, that is a problem. 

But it’s also what I’m supposed to be doing. So I’ll do it like I mean it and we’ll see what happens. 

I have an incredible degree of freedom in how I live my life. It’s probably unprecedented in human history. I can move freely about the cabin of the world using planes and trains, sell products and services globally using the Internet and phones, and do it all cheaply enough to still have money (or credit) to buy paint now and then. 

The sacrifices made by people like the grandfathers I didn’t know—and countless other men and women fighting countless wars—gave us this freedom. So I donated to the Wounded Warrior Project this weekend and lit a candle in honor of all our ancestor fighters and travelers who took new roads and opened doors so we could be alive on the face the earth today. As Maya Angelou once asked an angry Tupac Shakur, having no idea who he was: “When was the last time anyone told you how important you are? Did you know our people stood on auction blocks and were sold—bought and sold so you could stay alive today?” 

Three magic animals keep appearing among the 200+ oil paintings I plan to sell within 2 weeks before putting what remains of my stuff in storage and starting my year-long life experiment in traveling and making art. Hounds, butterflies, and foxes appear in art across many cultures and contexts. Accordingly, their meanings are as varied as humanity—hunter and pray, motif and symbol, friend and accessory. 

 

Hounds

Franz Marc has already painted the best dog paintings in the world, and Mary Oliver has written the most beautiful poems about dogs. Yet in Marc’s vision, there’s a loneliness and angularity about the dog in the snow. While in Oliver’s, the dog is togetherness and comfort.

I love how art can make of one thing at once a notion and its opposite, without deception or contradiction. That way of holding the richness of experience, which can be like that too, seems to be a large part of its power. We all have so much meaning and richness inside us that we have to tell stories all the time to make sense of the world within and without. Giving people tools to tell those stories better—more brightly, more gratefully, more critically—is the service art does to the internal life. That’s what people pay for when they pay for art.

That’s probably why a lot of artists, like Keith Haring, had a policy of not interpreting their art. Giving the viewer all the interpretive power instead. Telling people how to interpret even your own art, in that school of thought, takes a little bit of power away from both the viewer and the art. 

Alternately, a lot of story-tellers, like William Blake, have used art to clarify and enrich their own story. There’s no question of whether or not you’re going to offer an interpretation when the whole point of the art in the first place was to illustrate your story. 

As a writer first, I fall in the second camp. I’ll tell you what I think my art means. Most of it illustrates my writing in the first place. 

Hounds to me symbolize linearity. They’re familiar, comforting, seek tasty animals of fact in straight lines. They’re common. They can be sweet and useful. They’re often presented as the only animal in the world—as in Popperian social science methods texts that teach only linear, falsifiable predictions from linear, falsifiable theories are scientific. For this reason, linear theories and plans can seem like the only animal in forest. But there are plenty of other important meaning-making animals. For one thing, there are also butterflies. 

 

Butterflies

In science, butterflies symbolize chaos. For example, the Lorenz system literally looks like a butterfly. Chaotic theories don’t always generate readily falsifiable hypotheses. That doesn’t make them unscientific.

Thankfully, we can understand a lot about chaotic systems like weather without actually being able to model predictions about it all that well. But weathermen still get the timing and amount of snow wrong all the time. And we still debate to what extent global climate change is man-made, and what it will mean in the future. 

A lot of human systems are chaotic, too. Predicting rare events like revolutions and terror attacks is a chaotic systems game. 

In more ordinary terms, we often hear some version of the expression: “a butterfly flaps its wings in China, and there’s an earthquake or Timbuktu.” Meaning that sometimes small acts or events have huge, faraway repercussions. That type of effect is inherently non-linear, chaotic. It’s the so-called butterfly effect. 

Sometimes, for instance, conflict brings about peace. One might hope anyway that the shadow of the butterfly wing of tragedy can bring attention to old wounds that need healing. I mean tragedy in the classical sense that good actors meet terrible fates despite having their hearts in the right place. And I mean old wounds like the racialized problem of inequality in America.

So in the painting below, the shadow of the butterfly also looks like a man with his hands up, on the ground, alluding to Michael Brown and the problem of lack of recognition between police and communities of color in American today. 

Lack of recognition is a prison. We’re not free to develop the goodness in ourselves when we don’t recognize it. We’re not free to help others develop their goodness when we don’t recognize it. And the world isn’t free to flourish when people don’t feel safe enough to risk, economically (in markets) and politically (in democracy). 

But risk is scary, and these chaotic systems—markets and democracies—are hard to predict. So a lot of people and communities remain confined in the cloven pine of stasis. 

There, internal states remain internal. 

There’s no risk of spectacular failure, because there’s no risk—apparently. But the greater risk is arguably from not risking at all. 

You might say the opposite of these caged creatures are people who risk great personal cost for the greater good. That those people have butterflies of grace in their faces. 

Looking at people like I’m going to draw or paint them always brings out the butterfly. Recognizing the goodness in people tends to bring it out like that. 

Butterflies also turn out to be a significant motif in Mexican visual culture (arts, crafts, advertising, fabric) —as I learned after photographing and painting them for months and then feeling called to Mexico City last month. 

As the sidewalk there said, life can be magic when you remember to be free. 

 

 

Foxes

In the same way that hounds and butterflies mean lots of things to lots of people, foxes are rich in associative possibility. To some they mean protection or comfort. To others hunger or wiliness, or their combination—the willingness to steal chickens. 

To me, the fox symbolizes all those things and more. In theoretical terms, a fox theory is the rare synthesis of linear and chaotic—the meta-theory that often eludes us. 

For example, relativity and quantum physics don’t yet square into a unified theory.

This is also a problem in fluid systems modeling. Laminar flow regimes are linear and turbulent flow regimes are chaotic systems, and we don’t yet have a meta-theory fitting them together.

Similarly, we don’t have a unified theory of justice that combines the chaos of internal states and human as opposed to rule-bound interactions with the linearity of procedural justice and justice as fairness. I think the synthesis is something called justice as forgiveness. But I’m more interested in trying to make it with tools like art, faith, and entrepreneurship than writing academic stuff about it. 

 

 

Hounds, Butterflies, and Foxes

So I tried to envision what it looks like for linear hound and chaotic butterfly theories to fit together in integrated fox theories. 

I pictured them on the smiling face of truth I’ve written and painted about before. 

And in the tree where the fox might hide from hounds or the butterfly might be confined. 

But in the end, what felt most whole and right for envisioning Kit Fox, as I call the character of this linear-chaotic synthesis in the story she lives in in my head, was simply darkness. Falling through the night, as from one universe to another. Or maybe she’s only coming down from the tree. 

As I look at the 200+ oil paintings I plan to sell within 2 weeks before putting what remains of my stuff in storage and starting my year-long life experiment in traveling and making art, one of the themes that emerges is that of powerful women.

Some of these images are religious—couched in the context of the paradigmatic story of a holy woman, Mother Mary. Some come out of biographical interest in successful female artists—Frida Kahlo, Nina Simone, Anna Karenina. And some tell stories I have in my head, illustrating poems, characters, book seedlings and such. Here are a few of each type, on sale along with all my art for over 50% off in my new Etsy store. 

 

Holy Women

“When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me.”—Saint Paul

Earlier this week, I wrote about the story of the Lady of Guadalupe that I learned in Mexico City last month. Hers is a powerful example of story and art changing the world. 

Simply by appearing—a Mexican Madonna—and asking for a church, she decreased violence and increased religious tolerance for newly converted Mexicans living under Catholic Spanish rule. 

All it took was a miracle. A painting, to be precise. The Lady of Guadalupe turned a pile of roses into a painting before doubting Spanish eyes. The apparition made the deal: Mexican peasants got religious tolerance, Catholic Spanish got a miracle and a monument, the Lady got her church. 

 

Female Artists 

Frida Kahlo was a creative deal-maker, too. She made a career flipping her liabilities into assets. 

Frida was fond of saying she had been in two bad accidents—the one that put a whole through her belly and left her in chronic pain, and Diego Rivera. 

Out of the first, she made a self. Known for her dress and demeanor as much as her art, she turned the weaknesses of her disfiguration and what might have been disability into strengths. Learning from scratch how to dress to cover up her imperfections, she became a fashion icon. When she put on layers of lacey shawls and all her jewelry to go to events, street children would follow her asking, “Where’s the circus?” And she would smile and walk on. 

Out of the second, she made a life with her husband. 

Nina was always better with birds than men. But she, too, is known in no small part for making for herself “a new dawn, a new day, a new life.” 

Nina also took it upon herself to promote civil rights and racial discourse through her art, popularizing the lynching poem “Strange Fruit” and speaking often from the stage about “our problem in America.” 

Another female artist I like to re-imagine in this re-making light, although she’s not often celebrated in this way, is Anna Karenina. 

Anna was an artist—she fashioned a different life for herself than what was expected, under strict social constraints. And in the end, it wasn’t different enough. She thought—

“Haven’t I striven, striven with all my strength, to find something to give meaning to my life?”

Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl talks about the universality of this striving, “man’s search for meaning.” The quest is often associated with distress when people are isolated or feel betrayed, as in the ancient story of Hecuba, the woman who transmogrified into a dog after losing everyone she trusted to death or betrayal. Tolstoy, Frankl, and Euripides all tell us the social context of the universal search for meaning is what turns existential angst into dehumanization—sometimes. 

This is how I like to reimagine Anna turning that dehumanization around—

“Reverse Hecuba”

The wounded dog 
who is a deer 
limps toward 
the nightlight 
of the approaching train. 
Lies down 
with her head 
in the clanging lap. 

Iron and wind 
tuck her in. 
The train passes
like night
like life
and like death. 
Morning comes. 
A new woman stands.

One of the things art is about is making universal human experiences—like injury or weakness (Frida), or existential crisis (Anna)—generative instead of (purely) destructive. And that’s one of the reasons why powerful women in art are really powerful. To be visible when you’re not supposed to be (Lady of Guadalupe), or appear beautiful when you’re supposed to be sick (Frida),  is shocking. To make a choice, any choice, other than what’s expected (Nina talking race, Anna walking off on her life) is, too. There’s a reclamation of the power to set the terms of the discourse in all these things. That’s art. 

 

Story Women 

This painting is part of a diptych illustrating this poem in my second poetry book—

[  ] ?
 

represents the complete set of all giveable fucks. 
Ask me one more time for a plan, 
and I’ll point to the next available tree. 

When I organized and emceed a local stand-up group back in Virginia, I often found that poems, songs, and political satire could (and should) be boiled down to really tight jokes. It just takes time, and willingness to fail and fail better. 

That’s what my year-long experiment in traveling and making art is about. Showing up to play. Before I’m ready, before anything is perfect, before I even think I know what my plan is. It’s hard, but it’s the fastest way to learn. It’s also more fun than not. 

Part of me wishes I had a more ambitious, community-oriented project laid out on Kickstarter. Being me, I have a list of such projects. But my lease is up in three weeks, and it takes 30 days to plan a good online fundraiser plus 30 days to run one.

So I guess I’m starting the year-long experiment early by showing up to the move before I feel ready. And maybe it doesn’t have to be any harder than that. 

Later: more Story Women paintings. 

 

My lease is up on 05/31 and I’m starting my year-long life experiment in traveling and making art a few days later. So I’m having a moving sale—selling 200+ oil paintings in 2 weeks. 

Here are the two paintings that have sold so far today—along with others still available in the galleries they’re from, and part of the stories that weave them together. I threw in a surprise bonus painting with each painting sold, and shipped them right away. 

 

Outside the Legion of Honor

When I visited the Bay area for the first time for work earlier this year, I was lucky enough to have time also to visit the Legion of Honor fine arts museum in San Francisco. 

Even the trees outside the museum knew they were part of a special place of art. 

The waves crashing nearby knew, too. 

As did the bridge at night. The Golden Gate Bridge WAS part of a big art installation I caught the tail end of—lit up for a limited time by 25,000 LED lights. 

The LED lights have all come off the bridge now. The water underneath at night must look very different. Still lit up by buildings, boats, and passing headlights. But darker. I was lucky to catch it in this window of much light. 

 

Waves in the Intelligent Universe

When I read the Wendell Barry book Digging In this fall, I couldn’t stop painting this idea from it: “The human definition of the natural world is always going to be too small, because the world’s more diverse and complex than we can ever know. We’re not going to comprehend it; it comprehends us.” 

This idea—that social science has it all backwards—was what inspired me to start writing and illustrating a sort of an updated Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. 

Although originally conceived as a sort-of combination comic book and methods text—obviously—I might throw away everything I’ve written as part of starting the big experiment. I want to find the hardest problem in the world and work on that next. 

But in the current story, Science is trying to hit one eye on the smiling face of truth. This riffs on the reliability/validity bullseye diagrams professors often use in first-year methods courses. 

The vultures of prejudice, violence, and hopelessness sometimes blight the smiling face of truth. 

This matters in research methods, because all reasoning is motivated reasoning. People with brain injuries to emotion centers can’t make simple decisions. There’s too much noise even in the simplest decision—forget the whole, wide world—for us to decide anything without feeling. And researchers make decisions all the time about what to look at and how. 

Deciding what to look at shapes the world you live in.

Belief shapes emotion, which shapes perception and action. The perception part of this is sometimes called selective attention in cognitive psychology. Selective attention is about selecting a signal to pay attention to in the noise of the world.

Depression is about negative selective attention—the real-life problems that predict it, like chronic pain and loss, are real. Similarly, sensory hypersensitivity is about lack of selective attention—the stimuli that tend to bother people with hyperacousis or some forms of autism are quite real, too. Synchronicity and serendipity are about positive selective attention. And happy coincidence and good luck, too, are a real part of the world. Humankind being a statistical improbability, they’re a rather important part of the universe we live in. Far from being an error term, improbability is the stuff of life. And paying attention to the good in it helps develop goodness.

It can be hard to see, but the smiling face of truth is there even in the lowest-probability events. In life, a lot of people find after much time and reflection that what might have seemed to be incredibly bad luck turned out to be or yield some bit of important guidance or protection. 

 

Serendipity

Speaking of serendipity, the loveliest, funniest thing made my sales today happen. Yesterday, I sold the mic stand I just bought to sing on the streets in Mexico City to Erica, a wonderful singer in the Boston band Sebio, off Craigslist. I sold it to her below market value, like I’m selling all my art. 

Erica was nice. We got to talking about my plan to learn more, faster, traveling and making art, after selling all my art and putting the rest of my stuff in storage. She thought that was kind-of awesome. And she posted about my art on Facebook. 

One of her friends, Pennsylvania painter Dustin Porta, saw it and did the same. 

One of his clients, from a New Orleans market, saw it and bought two paintings. 

You can say this is just how network phenomena work. Information and emotion spread along social networks like dandelions, in Cory Doctorow’s poetic expression of the way network phenomena look when you mathematically model them. 

Or you can celebrate the magic in the chance meeting that went right. The way I lucked out when I least expected it. The great outcome for everyone that resulted from nobody’s plan. 

Continuing the series of Lunch Money Paintings from Mexico, today I’m featuring a series of paintings about holiness. I’m having a moving sale to unload 200+ paintings in 2 weeks before beginning my year-long experiment traveling and making art. 

Lunch Money Paintings are the price of a nice lunch—22.6€ + shipping—at my new Etsy store. They’re the 9″ x 12″ oils on watercolor paper works I made with a palette knife in Mexico City last month on the roof of the hostel where I volunteered after leaving Harvard to make art. Among other things, the Mexico Study proved I can learn more, faster, make art, and slash rent and other expenses by traveling. 

The first set of Lunch Money Paintings focused on Catedral Metropolitana, the second on Torre Latinamericano. Now things get freaky. 

 

Wings and Flashes of Light

I’m reading Jennifer Skiff’s God Stories: Inspiring Encounters with the Divine. Skiff compiled short, first-person accounts of people’s experiences of divine intervention. 

As a social scientist, I see a lot of possible cognitive errors in how people interpret events to fit the idea of God or something like God—the intelligent, caring, and hilarious universe. But you could say the same errors apply to how people interpret events to fit the idea of a godless world. To be super wonky about it, you can generate evidence against the null hypothesis of no God much more easily than you can generate evidence against the alternate hypothesis of God. Because God is a chaotic theory and those aren’t falsifiable by linear evidence generation. This is just Hayek on the chaotic nature of the social world. 

Anyway, one of the things I learned in Mexico was how much less taboo it can be in other places and cultures to talk about godly experience. In America, and especially in learned circles, talking about experiencing flashes of insight, answered prayers, and other forms of divine intervention is really a no-no. And talking to God—and listening—is considered evidence of insanity.

In Mexico, it’s normal.

Pretend we’re in Mexico. 

This is an illustration of wings and flashes of light I saw in Boston during a religious experience in which I left Harvard because I couldn’t do anything but make art. Then I went to Mexico City for a month because I felt called there. I’d never been to Mexico before. I lived in a hostel when I’d never stayed in one before. All the while discovering resonances between the art I’d been making and the magic of Mexico—the butterfly motif—the brown Madonna (my Tent of Civilization series and Mexico’s Lady of Guadalupe). I’d never heard of this stuff. 

I seem to have gone on an accidental pilgrimage. 

 

Basilica 

The Basilica is a Roman Catholic church in Mexico City. Some sources say it’s the second-most visited church in the world—second only to St. Peter’s in Rome. Others say it’s the most-visited Catholic pilgrimage site in the world. 

The holy site where it stands actually contains eight churches.

The Spanish built the first church because the Lady of Guadalupe—an Aztec Mother Mary—appeared to the peasant Juan Diego there and asked for one. She gave him roses that turned into a painting of her when he opened his cloak to prove his vision to disbelieving officials. 

To be clear: the Lady asked for a church. They gave her eight. One of them leans a little bit, but it’s still standing. 

They really know how to treat a Lady in Mexico. 

 

Lady of Guadalupe

The Lady is everywhere in Mexico City.

Here she is in a prayer candle flame in the church where they hold services these days. 

And in the Basilica. 

One of the reasons Spanish religious officials didn’t believe Juan Diego at first was that the apparition was a native woman. She was a Mexican Madonna. 

Being Spanish, I suppose they had always imagined Mother Mary as Spanish. It’s funny how we often extend what we know into the unknown. 

Reimagining her took a bit of convincing. 

But in the end, it was impossible to argue with the miracle right before their eyes. 

So the Lady got her church. 

And the Mexican peasants got greater tolerance for local religious rites from the Spanish. 

After all. You wouldn’t persecute Mother Mary if you were a Catholic. 

It wasn’t something you could say at the time either. Witness: 

Humble Mexican Peasant: Mother Mary was Mexican, now stop torturing and killing us for practicing our religious rites. We converted, ok? It’s called syncretism, assholes. Be cool. 

Spanish priest: [Snaps fingers and has peasant tortured and killed.] 

But you could show it. And Juan Diego did. 

In the way that kindness often creates kindness in social interactions—and violence, violence—this act of showing mutual recognition created mutual recognition. 

As it happens, another Mexican Mother god was around before the Lady of Guadalupe appeared to Juan Diego. Her name was Tonantzin—Mother of All Gods.