What I’ve Learned Lately #5
On traveling, moderating, working, listening, writing, and momentum.
Every now and then, I write a letter about what I’ve learned lately. This was the fifth one, sent on April 2, 2012.
Color floods in when I hold the recent past in mind. Pink blossoms and a gray sky for a Monday birthday; maroon for the bridesmaid’s dress I’ll be buying soon. Turquoise for Texas when the sun came out. But here in my room in Boston, it’s all ivory blankets, beige power outlets, and soft yellow sloped ceilings. Even if I don’t always know how to be still, I look around and can’t help but feel steady. It felt like a good time to write a letter about about what I’ve learned lately: on traveling, moderating, working, listening, writing, and momentum.
Traveling
I find travel thrilling and exhausting in equal parts. That may be universally true, but I think that everyone’s threshhold sits at a slightly different point — it’s up to each of us to discover where that point is, and to try to nudge it or honor it, depending. In my last letter, I wrote that after ten days in India, I’d finally found the limit of my appetite for adventure. What I didn’t mention was that “reaching my limit” expressed itself in furtive orders of “chili cheese toast” from room service late at night. (For the record, it was ordered for its alleged similarity to grilled cheese.) Since January, no trip has been so drastic. But there has also been more motion than ever before — to San Francisco, Las Vegas, New York City a few times, New Haven, Occidental, Austin, and Salt Lake City. And always, Boston, in between.
Partly, all the travel is a quirk of my life right now: school is all-consuming while it’s on, but we have a generous patchwork of days off. There’s something else too, though: having torn myself away from San Francisco, I’ve found a lightness in not living anywhere fully…and a heaviness in nowhere feeling exactly like home. After Erik moved out of our old apartment in San Francisco in January, the feeling only grew stronger. Yet I take comfort in knowing that this is temporary, and also in knowing that it’s a choice. This is a time in my life when I can sometimes live in a yellow room and always on the internet and once in a while on airplanes, and send emoji and exclamation points to loved ones from wherever I am. I think that’s something like a miracle.
Moderating
In early March, I landed in Austin in the middle of a downpour. I had my mental map all planned out: down the escalators to wait at baggage claim, to wait in line for a taxi for a drive to a leafy neighborhood, where I’d be meeting friends at an in-law apartment we found on Airbnb. That all happened, with one crucial plot twist: Erik was standing at the bottom of the escalators, waiting for me. His flight had only arrived a few hours earlier! He’d bought all the best snacks from the vending machine, and offered them to me for dinner, with a smile. Then we took a taxi, together.
I’d been to Austin a few times before — once because I thought I might go there for college, twice to speak on panels at SXSW Interactive. This time was a little different, though: instead of speaking, I was moderating…a new mode for me. Last June, my friend David wrote to me to see if I’d be interested in moderating a panel on community management. I jumped at the chance, thinking that “at their best, panel-moderating and community management have something in common: the element of creating an environment where we can surprise each other and surprise ourselves.”
The experience was just as fun as I hoped it would be. The panel itself went really well, I thought — you can even listen to the audio for yourself! But the best part was just having an excuse to hang out with some of my favorite people, and a chance for them to get to know each other better, too. David, Chrysanthe, Ligaya and I came together from Berlin, New York City, San Francisco and Boston; to all be in the same place at the same time was unreal. Chrysanthe and Ligaya talked about surfing and yoga, we visited the Whole Foods mothership, and David and I walked a few miles in morning rain. The night after the panel, most of us crowded into The Gingerman and laughed and cheered about the day and told stories about the rest of our lives. If the conversation on stage went well, I think it went well because it built on countless other conversations, and the bottomless affection and respect we all had for one another. For all those reasons, I would do it again in a heartbeat.
And my first go at moderating? I think I got the spirit mostly right, but there are some elements of technique that I think just take practice. Before the panel, I was more nervous than I anticipated being, which made me less of a calm center for the group than I’d hoped. (Fortunately, Ligaya is more or lessalways a calm center, so we had that going for us.) And during the panel, I interjected in certain places where everyone was on a roll and probably could have stayed on it for a while, and didn’t interject soon enough in other places where a train of thought was winding down. I feel fairly sure, though, that one and a half semesters of the case method have trained me to listen better. I hope so — I’d like to be doing this for a while. I don’t think the surprise of shared discovery ever gets old.
Working
This is a story in two parts, but first I have to turn it inside out because I’m bursting with the news: I’ll be working at Kickstarter this summer! Can you believe it? Three months in New York, working on something I believe in with all my heart. I feel lucky and dazed and brimming with excitement, but also steady — yellow-room steady — in knowing that all the pieces fit together.
The first piece was this: in September 2009, I wrote a blog post titled “Kickstarter, and Imminence” — about five months after Kickstarter’s April launch. At the time, I called it “a new place to ransom ideas worth believing in.” I’d been thinking for a while about the conundrum of self-publishing; I even wrote apaper about the history of “vanity presses” in my last semester of college. And then along came Kickstarter, and all of a sudden two of my friends weren’t just talking about writing books, they weredoing it. This struck me as a sea change; I wrote that “Kickstarter forces promotion, planning, and urgency to the beginning, right when affirmation is most precious. By creating a public contract, Kickstarter takes the vanity out of self-publishing. It’s not you publishing it, not really; it’s all the people who trusted in your work enough to bet on its success.”
Those were golden days for blogging and they were early days for Kickstarter, too, and between the two of those forces both Yancey Strickler and Andy Baio — Kickstarter’s co-founder and CTO at the time, respectively — reached out to me independently to thank me for my thoughts. That connection felt electric; in an instant, something I’d admired from afar felt much closer. And then, when Perry Chen visited San Francisco in January 2010, through a sequence of cancellations and serendipity we ended up getting dinner together at Orson. Then it felt really real. Somewhere between that September and January, I sat down at Brickhouse with my old roommate and dear friend Pat, and said: what if I worked there someday? But someday still felt far away. Not imminent, yet.
This winter, though, it slowly dawned on me that this would be a good time for Kickstarter to be imminent. Two and a half years in to Kickstarter’s existence, there’s an avalanche of fascinating answers to a series of questions I posed back in 2009:
With talented people like nickd and Robinsetting out to do the brave things they’ve always meant to do, what could go wrong? What could go right? I can’t wait to hear about all their triumphs and missteps — I think they will run into a different assembly of obstacles than usual. Because there’s all this pressure from other people counting on you, but: only alongside the knowledge that they believe in what you intend to create. (In your intention, and so, in you.)
I wrote to Yancey in February and said that now felt like a good time to tell those stories and I wanted to help in telling them. After thinking it over with the team for a while, he came back with the answer I’d hoped for: yes.
The second piece, then, ends simply. This past Wednesday, I packed away my laptop and a pile of energy bars, put on my coat, and boarded a bus from Boston to New York. I spent the early afternoon in Greenpoint with Taylor and Che-Wei, the creators of one of my all-time favorite Kickstarter projects — Pen Type-A. Though production has presented plenty of hurdles, they’ve met those hurdles with fortitude and good cheer. Through their in-depth updates, I almost feel like I’ve experienced the ups and downs along with them; so much so, that when we finally met after half a year of back-and-forth correspondence, it felt like a meeting of old friends. After lunch, I sat in their bright studio for a little while longer, and then got back on the subway to visit Kickstarter’s offices on the Lower East Side, where I met with Yancey and Perry and said hi to the rest of the team and it started to sink in. A few hugs and goodbyes and then a walk down the street, to the subway to the bus back to Boston. Even as tired as I was after a day of travel, I was too excited to sleep.
Listening
I’ve been reading less than usual recently, but listening to more music than ever. Thanks to Rdio, I know that my most-listened-to albums for the past few months are:
- Threads, by Now, Now (and this is my favorite song)
- Hurry Up We’re Dreaming, by M83
- Myth, by Geographer
- Born to Die, by Lana Del Rey (I was on an intense kick for a week or two there)
- Tramp, by Sharon Van Etten
- Torches, by Foster the People
- Within And Without, by Washed Out
- Noir, by Blue Sky Black Death
And no list would be complete without this new track by Burial + Four Tet — mesmerizing.
Writing
This will be short, but here are two recent pieces I wanted to share:
- “Build Your Own Business Education” captures some of the information streams I’ve let into my life since starting at business school. (Also, some meta-commentary on this newsletter and why I love writing it.)
- I uncovered a treasure chest of zany history papers I wrote as an undergrad, and dug them up to share all over again
And two recent, connected pieces by two people whose writing I love:
- Robin Sloan on the flip-flop
- Craig Mod on the digital-physical
If you’re anything like me, you’ll read them, look up, and see the world anew.
Momentum
Momentum — how we find it, how we lose it, how we recover it — is always on my mind. Thinking about motion frames those questions in a different light, though. We can’t forever be in motion, and so some stillness is in order; swings between the two states are inevitable, too. But don’t those swings have momentum of their own? Maybe that’s how we find it again: by giving into the swing.
Giving in to the spring,
Diana
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