Andy Logic

Wintley Phipps offers a history lesson and a music lesson that will put a smile on your face. What he does next will, if you’re anything like me, send tears streaming down your face. This just might be the most uplifting 9 minutes I’ve experienced in a while.

Watch this. Watch the whole thing. And turn your speaker volume up!

I was pointed toward this essay by Pastor Jaeson Ma this morning (thanks Bethany!) and while reading it found myself nodding in enthusiastic agreement the whole way through. Here’s just a small excerpt:

Sadly, most men are not living. Most men are cowards, fearful and afraid of failure. Imprisoned by their own thinking and what others think about them. Many men are just boys waiting for their mother’s approval, or the approval of others in society. Most men I know are people pleasers, not God pleasers. They are more afraid of how others may reject them or not accept them if they choose to take the road less traveled.

All men die, few men truly live.

Women don’t want nice guys or good boys, women want men on a mission, men on adventure, men who are dangerous. This is why many women are drawn to bad boys because bad boys live with a sense of risk, danger, mystery and unknown. Men were created to live fearless and to live by faith. But if you walk into a church today what you find are a bunch of boys playing with their toys, working at predictable jobs — not their true callings, and living boring lives. It’s sad, but most guys get their sense of adventure from playing video games or watching TV, what happened to our men?

* * *

What this essay offers up are the five pillars of manhood. If you’re a man; read it, take it to heart, and make it your manifesto and make it’s substance manifest in your own life.

Go to the essay by Pastor Jaeson Ma

For a designer with any consequential skill and potential, hell and purgatory are the same place. And heaven is not to be found bouncing around from one good place to another. Find that good place with the right people and grow. Lift others up with you while you do it.

I have found these rules to be pretty darned essential in my life. Perhaps you might as well. Oddly enough, I didn’t come to them through the Dalai Lama’s influence. Instead they were part of what I was taught or what I’ve learned along the way. In any event, the D.L. knows of what he speaks and these “rules” are worth repeating.

1. Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.
2. When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.
3. Follow the three Rs:
   • 1. Respect for self
   • 2. Respect for others
   • 3. Responsibility for all your actions.
4. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.
5. Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
6. Don’t let a little dispute injure a great friendship.
7. When you realize you’ve made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.
8. Spend some time alone every day.
9. Open your arms to change, but don’t let go of your values.
10. Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.
11. Live a good, honourable life. Then when you get older and think back, you’ll be able to enjoy it a second time.
12. A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your life.
13. In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the current situation. Don’t bring up the past.
14. Share your knowledge. It’s a way to achieve immortality.
15. Be gentle with the earth.
16. Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.
17. Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.
18. Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.

My business partner and I run a design and application development agency, but we do so in what is probably an uncommon manner:

We own the place, but we’re not the highest-paid people in the company.

In an industry where owners and principals are typically the only fixtures in an agency and everyone else is transient, and often treated as such, owners make a habit of being at the top of the pay heap. There’s no guarantee how long a design agency will last so owners make a habit of getting theirs now (“get it while the gettn’s good”). Not us. We’re building something.

The approach taken by many agency founders in our industry is quietly (or not so quietly) destructive, often making obsolescence a fait accompli. By contrast we’re making an investment in the future of our enterprise rather than stripping the land at each harvest. This is to say we’re making an investment in what matters: our people.

Our people come first. We’ll never be able to pay such skilled and dedicated folks what they’re actually worth, but we reward them as close to that as we can manage and have an eye toward continual progress. Next, we feed the savings war chest according to plan and pay our bills (and we operate with no debt). Lastly, we pay ourselves. Expedient practices could repair salary issues toward a more typical model, but luckily we recognize the folly in expediency and we learn from lessons.

I hear stories, I read articles, I speak with people who endure idiotic agency expediency, and I have lived it in some measure myself previously. So many of our peers know as much as we may, yet they so often choose to ignore the lessons in these clear examples. And if they are not agency owners or principals, they lack the self respect to object and change things or leave on principle.

I’m left with the impression that the reason so many choose not to invest is that they have no confidence in or hope bound up with their professional endeavors. You’ll have to forgive my observation of the obvious, but these are not working stiffs, but professional cowards. Many, perhaps, have good reason to be.

I don’t choose to work as a coward. I don’t choose to create merely a shallow field and tend it as though I’m waiting to strip it at harvest and leave for greener pastures, and neither does my business partner. We’re building something. One day we’ll realize the goals we’ve set, but right now we have confidence in what we’re building.

In 2002 I lost my job. The owners of the chain of stores for which I was the Corp. General Manager decided to retire. They had a fire sale and closed all of their stores, leaving me without a job. I was 37 years old. That day I made a career change; I just didn’t consciously know it at the time.

It may occur to you that closing a chain of stores is not something that happens in a week, so the fact that I was left without a job when they closed is telling. It means that I hadn’t attempted to find another retail senior management job in the lead-up to the closing. Instead I did nothing about that particular situation. I wouldn’t admit it at the time, but I was done with retail management and that subconscious resolution guided my choices for the next two years.

I had a sort of severance package and I used the ensuing liberty time to indulge my passions and talents. I had a sort of a plan. I enjoyed playing with web development and design, and as an artist I found in web design a practical application for my lifelong avocations. I found that my years of retail experience and martial arts training gave me insight into behavioral psychology, which stood my design efforts in good stead. Based on what I was discovering during these first months out of work, I was sure I had a future in the web professions and I tailored my professional pursuits in that direction. All the while, though, I searched for another retail management position. I pretended to, anyway.

I was good at sales and customer service and at management, but in that career every day was a workday. I worked from 9 – whenever-ish each day and after that I lived what I enjoyed. This is to say that I never once enjoyed my job, I didn’t enjoy my career. I was not enjoying my life. When the opportunity arose for me to escape I leapt at it, and while I pretended to pursue another retail management position I did so with no purpose or vigor. My mind was made up.

It cost me dearly. I spent what ultimately amounted to tens of thousands of dollars on books and magazines, on software and hardware, on travel and expenses to study and train with—even live with—superior artist-teachers. It cost me time away from my family. My design education was expensive; no less-so than what one might find in the best design schools or universities. But far better, in my estimation.

During this time I was earning a decent living for my family, but the difference between this and my previous career was that at long last I was kicking ass every day. There was little “work” involved, mostly…I can only describe it as joyous exercise of purpose! This wasn’t work, it was joy. I was then doing what I knew, and still know, to be my purpose in life. Every day was more kicking ass at what I did. And when I got my own ass kicked, I took it with a huge grin on my face because it was a gift. I know you know what I’m talking about.

Ultimately, two years into my “unemployment” I turned down the perfect, good-paying retail management job from a well-known company because I knew I was completely done with that profession. The very next day I got a job offer from a good local web agency. And that, as they say, was that. Providence, some would say. I call it the perfect resolution to a perfectly-executed, semi-conscious plan. At 39 years old I officially started my new career in the web professions.

This is not a unique story. This is an increasingly-common tale.

Make That Change

This is kickass change: when you compel circumstances to allow you to go from a life of drudgery to a life of kicking ass every day…when you finally pay attention to that nagging voice of dissatisfaction with what you’re doing.

Most of the designers I know make a daily habit of kicking ass. So do a lot of folks I know; folks in bike shops, plant nurseries, into homemade crafts, artists, musicians…all pursuing what others typically regard as frivolous. Seriously, much of what passes for conventional wisdom these days is there to beat into us the idea that joyous pursuits are frivolous! Well screw that.

These are not inconsequential endeavors! These are examples of love and joy and individual purpose translated into a consequential and often lucrative life’s pursuit! Few of us will work a single day of our lives. Instead we spend the day expressing our joy, doing what we love to do and, oh…kicking ass.

I know from the emails I receive, from articles I read, and from tweets I find that many of you are not living lives of joyous exercise of purpose. If so you already know that you’re not enjoying it, but I know that it is more damaging than you might think. I probably have a few years on you in that department.

Ask yourself right now: where is your opportunity for kickass change? When are you going to stop putting up with the soul-crushing, conventional, hourglass-glued-to-the-table that has become your life, and give voice and purpose to what you know you should be doing?

If you’re not doing what you know you love, know this: another day is about to pass with you doing nothing about it. Kickass change is out there. It’s waiting for you to step up and create your path toward it. Your life’s purpose is there and you may have to build a path, dig a path, fight your way toward the path and maybe kick in a few doors along the way. But it’s there. Waiting for you.

The question is: what are you waiting for?