Showing my work

Eric Johnson11 Comments

I watched Austin Kleon’s “Show Your Work!” Creative Mornings talk last week and was inspired by his suggestion to share not just a finished product, but the work in progress. It is inspiring to me to see how others work and to be reminded that art doesn’t just appear in perfectly polished form.

Creation is a messy, humbling process with dead-ends and u-turns and much floundering and procrastination and self-doubt. Lots of self-doubt. (Is it just me that feels like a fraud constantly on the verge of being found out?*) It can be invigorating and satisfying and joyful, too. I’m working now on preparing a talk I’m giving on June 2 at the Collegiate Information and Visitor Services Association (CIVSA) annual conference in Alexandria, VA. I’m the opening speaker with an hour on the program in a big theater, so I’m feeling some pressure to be awesome.

I came up with a title and short description months ago so it could be promoted in the conference program, and I immediately created a Keynote document that I’ve been dumping ideas into ever since. It’s a “kitchen sink” approach. Any thought or quote or image that seems remotely interesting and relevant gets dropped in over the course of several months. But only in the last couple of weeks have I begun putting it all together. I love Keynote. (For those who don’t know, Keynote is Apple’s version of slide software. It’s a beautiful, smart app that blows Powerpoint away.) I spend most of my time in Keynote in the “Light Table” view. It’s a great perspective for seeing connections between ideas and assessing the flow of your thoughts. Keynote is a powerful tool to plan projects in, even if you don’t need presentation slides. Here’s what my presentation looks like at the moment:

Best.Week.Ever. light table view

Since I’ve been crafting this talk over the last two weeks, I’ve been tweaking slides and adding images and rearranging the order of ideas. I’m no designer, but I care how each slide looks. I often get lost in small details of typography and which shade of yellow I prefer at the expense of the big picture of the key themes I’m supposed to be addressing. And I find myself getting infatuated with a slide or image that may not really belong. When that happens, I open up my writing app and just start writing. I simply write what I imagine I will say during my presentation. This helps sort out the flow and gets to the heart of what I’m trying to accomplish. I keep coming back to “Why?” And “What’s the point?” And “How do I hope my audience is different at the end of my talk?” Writing it out helps point me in the direction I need to go. I use iA Writer on my iPad mini for any long writing. I’m more focused when writing on the iPad than I am on my iMac. And iA Writer is a gorgeously designed, minimal app with very few features. It’s great for just writing, not for fiddling around with settings and formatting and such. It syncs your documents in iCloud or Dropbox, and there’s an equally beautiful Mac version of the app.

iA Writer on iPad mini

(I really like Apple’s wireless bluetooth keyboard, by the way. The feel of the keys is great, and the size is just right. I don’t write enough to need an iPad/keyboard combo case that’s with me all the time, so I just purchased Incase’s Origami keyboard case, which is made especially for the Apple keyboard. It’s perfect for my setup.)

Working on this presentation has reminded me how much I love creating and getting lost in a project I’m excited about. I skipped lunch last Friday because I was immersed in working on this. I never skip lunch. Lunch is my favorite meal of the day. That’s how satisfying I find this process. I find myself reviewing the slides on my iPad each night and tweaking details almost every time I open the presentation. Fortunately, iCloud has been rock solid at keeping everything synced nicely between my iPad and my Mac.

I’m still a long way from a finished presentation. I may scrap half of what I’ve already done before June 2 arrives. And once I begin rehearsing out loud, which is crucial, I will make more changes.

Okay, back to working on my work. Was this post just another bit of procrastination? Maybe. Now it’s time for lunch.

*I just looked at my presentation from last summer’s conference, where I was the closing speaker, and now those slides look ugly and half-done to me. I’m terrible. Why do they keep asking me to speak at this conference…?

A great audiobook: Born Standing Up by Steve Martin

Eric Johnson4 Comments

I recently finished listening to Steve Martin’s memoir of his stand-up comedy career, Born Standing Up. He narrates the audio book, and his reading of his own story gives it a richness and authenticity of tone that can certainly not be matched by the written word. This book has a surprising sweetness about it and is now a new favorite. I was too young to have fully gotten him when he rose to fame in the 1970’s, but the era he describes is familiarly nostalgic for me. I laughed out loud multiple times at his stories. He persevered through 14 years of relatively modest success before finally breaking through. He is a true craftsman who committed to making remarkable, original work. I think I’m going to listen to it all over again.

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Favorite kitchen tools

Eric Johnson2 Comments
I enjoy cooking. Especially after moving to a mostly primal/paleo way of eating more than four years ago, I’ve taken over the family kitchen almost completely. Cooking is yet another outlet for my love of thoughtfully designed tools and gadgets. I have been asked recently, especially by couples putting together wedding gift registries, to share a list of tools I recommend.
Here’s my current list of recommended kitchen tools:

  • Victorinox Fibrox 8-inch Chef’s Knife: You really need just about three good knives, but you can probably do just fine with only a chef’s knife. This Victorinox gets rave reviews and is very affordable. Many restaurant kitchens are stocked with this knife. If you’re willing to spend more money on a chef’s knife, try this Wusthof. And if you want an heirloom, check out Bloodroot Blades, a blacksmith shop in Athens, GA, where they repurpose old metal like saw blades and files for amazing custom made knives. (Their straight razor is a beauty, too.)
  • Always grind pepper as you need it. Unicorn Magnum Pepper Mill: I LOVE this pepper mill. Here’s a smaller, less expensive key-top version. Here’s a new pepper mill contender: this highly rated model from a different company doesn’t have the one disadvantage of the Unicorn – it was too easy to accidentally open the hole where you fill the peppercorns. This model looks like a great choice.
  • Get a knife magnet to store your knives on the wall instead of in a drawer or in a block.
  • Kuhn Rikon Garlic Press: The Porsche of garlic presses. Has a good heft to it and is very efficient and easy to clean.
  • Half sheet pan (get 2): We use these pans often. I bake big batches of bacon in them weekly. (Baking bacon is much neater and more effective than frying it. Bacon comes out flat and crisp.) We use these pans to bake green beans and broccoli and sweet potato fries. Also a good size for prepping food for the grill.
  • Oxo Good Grips locking tongs: These tongs are very useful. I would get all three sizes. I use the small ones daily, and the long ones are perfect for grilling.
  • The Aeropress coffee maker gets raves from coffee nerds. I use it every morning to make my wife’s coffee, and it’s just fun to use and easy to clean. (I’m a tea man, myself.) Nice video tribute to the Aeropress here. My wife has this coffee bean grinder, and it works great.
  • This tea glass is beautiful and comes with a stainless steel infuser for loose leaf tea. Loose leaf is better than tea bags. I’m an Irish Breakfast tea fan.
  • The king of all instant-read thermometers: the Thermapen, one of my favorite gadgets of any kind.

Ebert on prayer

Quote Eric Johnson

I believe prayer that makes requests is pointless. What will be, will be. But I value the kind of prayer when you stand at the edge of the sea, or beneath a tree, or smell a flower, or love someone, or do a good thing. Those prayers validate existence and snatch it away from meaningless […]

Your life is now

Eric Johnson2 Comments

“We are very good at preparing to live, but not very good at living. We know how to sacrifice ten years for a diploma and we are willing to work very hard to get a job, a car, a house, and so on. But we have difficulty remembering that we are alive in the present moment, the only moment there is for us to be alive.” —Thich Nhat Hanh

I came across this quote in an excellent post by Jonathan Mead about preparing to live but never really living. Check out the video embedded in that post. It’s a fascinating interview with Ido Portal who looks like some kind of superhuman gymnast Zen ninja. Very cool.

As far back as my undergraduate days I’ve been talking about and pondering this dilemma of seeing everything in life as a means to an end but nothing as an end in itself. I remember giving a talk to a group during my senior year of college and saying something like, “You want to graduate so you can get a job so you can get a car so you can get a house so you can get a wife or husband… Then what? A bigger car? A bigger house? A bigger wife or husband…?!” I got a good laugh from that line, and still do, but it’s a legitimate quandary (except for the bigger spouse part).

We always seem to be getting ready for something out there in the future but never truly living in the present. But when you get to the future, it’s just the present, right? The peak moments in life are the ones where past and future fall away because you’re so aware of and alive in the present moment. Think back on the moments in your life when you felt most alive and see if that’s not true. That’s why thrill-seeking is a thing. It’s hard to worry about next week or feel regret for last week when you’re on a roller coaster or jumping out of an airplane. Or when you’re truly listening to someone you love or in a tickle fight with your kids or completely engrossed in work you love. Go read Thich Nhat Hanh’s classic little book, Peace Is Every Step. What an awake, aware life he must lead. Yes, the unexamined life is not worth living, but most of us most of the time are actually living a sort of unconscious life, hoping we’ll get there, someday.

So, how do you have more of those moments? This 2-minute video featuring an Alan Watts story beautifully exposes how our culture ingrains this future focus in us and leads to most of us never truly living. And he offers a nice metaphor for how to shift your perspective for a more excellent experience of life:

What human beings want

Quote Eric Johnson

What human beings want, once they have enough food and shelter, is meaning. We want to matter. We want to engage with people who matter. We want to do something worth talking about. That’s our shortage. We don’t have a shortage of stuff; we have a shortage of caring. -Seth Godin True. This is from […]

Don’t pursue a role, LIVE that role.

Eric Johnson6 Comments

I’ve willed almost all of the stuff I’ve done into existence, and if I can do that, ANYBODY can do that. So start your chatter: talk about what you’re going to do. Don’t pursue a role, LIVE that role. Like my sister told me, back when I confessed I wanted to be a filmmaker. “Then BE a filmmaker,” she said. “That’s what I’m saying: I wanna be.” And that’s when she gave me the million dollar advice: “No – BE a filmmaker. You say you wanna be; just BE a filmmaker. Think every thought AS a filmmaker. Don’t pine for it or pursue it; BE it. You ARE a filmmaker; you just haven’t made a film yet.
-Kevin Smith

I love this thought. Act like you are who you want to be, even if there’s nothing to show for it yet. Just start living the life you imagine and being the person you want to be.

It’s your life …

Eric Johnson

It’s your life — but only if you make it so. The standards by which you live must be your own standards, your own values, your own convictions in regard to what is right and wrong, what is true and false, what is important and what is trivial. When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else or a community or a pressure group, you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being.
-Eleanor Roosevelt

via SwissMiss

A family adventure remembered

Eric Johnson
Today is the anniversary of the day in 1975 that my parents opened their photography studio, PhotoVision. Below is the post I published in 2009 after my dad decided to close the studio and retire. It’s a good day to repost this:
 
My dad has decided to close his photography studio after more than 30 years in business. He and my mom started PhotoVision in 1975 and ended up having a remarkably successful small business. But it was more than just a business. My dad once told me that his primary motivation in creating his own business was to inspire me and my sister. Sure, he really loved photography, and he was determined to be his own boss. But he mostly wanted to show his kids that they could set their own course and live the life they imagined, and he knew that the way he actually lived his life would communicate a lot more than just words would. It’s easy to say, “You can do anything you want to do, son.” It’s quite another to live that and to even include the whole family in the adventure. As a parent myself now, I’m particularly aware that my career choices may inform those of my daughters. How many parents feel they must sacrifice their career dreams to provide material comfort to their children, when what their children might most benefit from is being a witness to or even a part of their parents’ pursuit of work that truly makes them come alive?

One day when I was in elementary school my dad came home from his job as a promising young executive in the northwest Georgia carpet business and announced, to my mother’s surprise, that he had quit. My mom probably was not thrilled at his initial, spontaneous strategy, but she kept smiling and pitched in and worked while he tried to get started by doing photos in a makeshift studio he set up in our living room. (Our one bathroom also served as a darkroom.) When dad found out a shopping mall was being built in our hometown, his dream started coming together, and PhotoVision was one of the first stores to open in the new mall when it opened in 1975. Five years later he moved the studio out of the mall and into its current location where it has been ostensibly the most respected photography studio in northwest Georgia for many years. 

It was certainly my dad’s vision that gave life to the business, but my mom was an equal partner. Her resourcefulness and business savvy were crucial in hard times, and her shining spirit and big-hearted kindness connected with everyone she encountered. People just enjoyed being around her. After my mom passed in 2005, the business just wasn’t the same. My folks always had great young employees working with them, but the dynamic that my parents had as a couple was one of the great draws of their business. Not only did they make great portraits, but their amazing love for each other and their joyful life spilled over into their employees’ and clients’ lives as well. It’s been hard for my dad to put the same heart into his work (or anything else really) without her by his side, and he actually seems relieved to be closing the business down now. He might come back to photography in the near future in some capacity, but for now he just wants to take a break. He deserves it. He and my mom had a great run with PhotoVision. It was a terrific studio and a great little business success. 

But for me, PhotoVision represents a dream fulfilled. The decisions my parents made and the way they lived their lives and loved each other continues to inspire me and all who know them. And by that measure, my parents’ adventure was a success beyond even their dreams. 

Mom & Dad

 

Moon walk

Eric Johnson

It was on this date in 1969 that Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon. I was five. I remember watching it on TV. I remain inspired. And I remain disappointed that we haven’t done more. This video from the exquisite Sagan Series is a profound reminder of what it was like to dream such dreams:

“The greater danger for most of us is not that our aim it too high and we miss it, but that it’s too low and we reach it.”

-Michelangelo

Second circle: To be or not to be… fully present

Eric Johnson

Nick Morgan’s recent post introduced me to Patsy Rodenburg. She is one of the world’s most prominent voice teachers and a renowned expert on Shakespeare. Actors come to her for coaching on how best to use their voice in performance. And she has a great take on what it means to have “it“. Charisma. Presence.

This 10-minute video shows her explaining “second circle”:

This clip inspired me to purchase and begin reading her book, The Second Circle. I’ve only gotten a third of the way into it, but I’m hooked and know that she’s on target.

We all know people who seem to shine with presence, and it’s easy to think it’s some gift they have, that they won the charisma lottery. But I’m confident that everyone can flip a switch and become present, even charismatic, at will. I’m no master of this. I spend too much time in my head and not in the present moment. But, when I am intentional about connecting with the present moment, whether in conversation or giving a presentation or creating something, I feel so much more alive and dynamic. When you make that connection with an audience as a public speaker, you feel like a rock star. When you have that moment of genuine presence in a relationship, or even with a stranger, you feel like a real human being.

Think of those you consider to have a strong sense of presence. Don’t they seem to care more than the average person? They actually listen intently in conversation rather than simply waiting their turn to talk. In front of an audience they glow with expressiveness and confidence and energy. Charisma is caring deeply and having the courage to fully express yourself and genuinely connect in the present moment. It’s talking with someone rather than at them. It’s paying attention. It’s using the physical senses to connect with the here and now. It’s this paradox of being more powerful by being vulnerable.

Kids have this naturally. Watch young children engrossed in play. They are free and fearless and full of life. Somewhere along the way this gets stifled, and fear throttles our natural impulse.

I’ll report back after I finish reading Rodenburg’s book to see what she recommends for consistently getting into second circle. In the meantime, I’m going to be intentional about being present in conversations especially. I want to make a genuine attempt to understand before seeking to be understood. I will ask more questions. Make more eye contact. I will religiously put my phone away when I’m with humans, especially when I’m with my wife and kids. (What if your level of coolness is inversely proportional to how often your phone is visible in public? A staggering thought for most of us.) When standing in front of an audience, I will attempt to think through their point of view and make my remarks audience-centered. When asking “How are you?”, I’ll mean it and wait for a response. This is my aim, at least. An excellent journey of a life would be spent mostly in second circle, in the here and now.

Neil Tyson: “We stopped dreaming.”

Eric Johnson1 Comment

I’m old enough to remember watching the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing. I turned 5 that summer, but I have a clear memory of the black and white, static strewn footage of Armstrong and Aldrin bouncing around the moon’s surface. I remained fascinated and inspired by NASA throughout my childhood. I was going to be an astronaut. I did plenty of school reports about the space program. I knew it was important and cool. The best prizes in cereal boxes were related to NASA. I drank Tang and ate snacks in tubes just like the astronauts. My ambition, however, faded along with my interest in science and math in high school. Our nation’s romance with NASA started waning once we stopped going to the moon. The space shuttle brought some excitement back, but not for long.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is the cool college professor you wish you had as a teacher. He’s the Carl Sagan of our time, poetically proclaiming the beauty of science and the wonders of the universe while passionately calling on us to do better in supporting exploration and research. Check out this powerful video calling for more funding for NASA:

And then watch this “Most astounding fact” montage:

Tyson is a compelling and effective communicator. You can tell just by the power and emotion in his voice that he genuinely cares. Anyone interested in presentation dynamics could learn a lot watching Tyson in action in front of an audience. He speaks engagingly with authenticity and a powerful sense of presence. His passion is contagious. He has inspired me. I have come back only recently to a renewed appreciation of scientific discovery. I wish I had taken science more seriously as a college student, and I’m trying to fill in the gaps in my education now.

One of our primary jobs as humans is to reclaim a little more land in this sea of “infinite inexplicability” that surrounds us. Pushing the boundaries of knowledge and better understanding our place in the universe is a noble calling. However, there is a disconcertingly high level of antipathy towards science today, even among nations with well educated populations. What if the story of our generation was that we tipped the balance for our species? That we were the ultimate explorers, leading humanity finally and unequivocally on the never-ending quest for understanding and reason? What if our nation once again set audacious goals for space exploration and scientific discovery in general, goals that got kids interested enough to dream big and point themselves toward the stars once more?

Excellent Journey

Eric Johnson

How amazing to be alive and aware in this universe. And how perplexing it all is I want to be intentional about living a good life. Not “good” in the sense that I want to follow the rules or some doctrine meticulously. Rather, I don’t want to get to the end of my life and […]