Surprisebox Folks, Some things seem so obvious in hindsight, but they require killing off a sacred cow or two. Apple does this constantly. They killed the floppy disk from the iMac which people confidently declared was a mistake. Same with the Macbook Air and CD-Rom. Same with iPod shuffle that had no screen. On and on. They continue to find fertile new ground creativity because they frankly don't care what came before it. With iPhone, someone said to Steve "aren't you afraid you're cannibalizing iPod?" and he said "we'd rather cannibalize ourselves than let a competitor do it". It makes so much sense when you put it that way, but almost no companies think that way. They're scared. Everyone's scared. And I think what you do when you're scared, unsure, lacking confidence, whatever, is to go by the book. And when you go by the book, you get something generic. And when you get something generic, leave out all sorts of ideas and improvements. You close your mind down to what's possible. When I shut down fuckjetpacks, my dear friend said "don't you want to change the world?" It's a simple equation - change the world means touch a lot of people, touch a lot of people means don't shut down your site. I realized, nope. That's the standard way of thinking, and there's validity there. But nope. Not for me. My goal isn't to change the world. My goal is to build and publish. I'd rather touch 100 people who care than a million that don't. And like the Jobs quote, it makes sense once you say it out loud, but first you have to shake off the old assumption that of course everyone wants to be large, famous, everywhere. So let's shake off something else. "Personal branding". The conventional wisdom (I really hate conventional wisdom; at best it's a shallow understanding of something, but it feels like most of the time it's just flat out misleading) is that brand is great. You see an Apple logo, you'll pay more than a generic logo, so Apple does their best to make sure their logo means something. And bully for them. They're a business making money. So now people talk about personal branding, and I get it. You need a portfolio, yeah? You do one thing, then you tie it in with this other thing, and all of the sudden you have fans. "Oh, the guy behind Filepile did a new site? I AM THERE." (this exact thought process happened to me) And it's not just about fans, it's about selling yourself. You need to be able to say "yes I am good and here is the proof of 12 things I did that are good". Which leads to "hire me". But no one ever talks about the downside to personal branding, and there is one: fear. Being pigeonholed. You think it's easy being Johnny Depp? No, that guy turned down scripts constantly. He finally, over many years, was able to claim a body of work he was truly proud of. But he's pretty unique in that, most actors take basically whatever. And the most famous ones got there by picking enough summer blockbusters. Not Depp, for a long time he was more indie than not. An artist, not just a guy going for a paycheck. I've followed Depp since the 80s. Love his approach. So the upside to brand is that people know what to expect so you get more fans. The downside is people expect a certain thing, and it's hard to do what you really want. So let's talk about Madonna and Bowie. Madonna, Bowie, and other artists that reinvent themselves a lot are doing it with a wink. They're like "look it's still me, but I'm going to pretend for an album to be another person". It's brilliant, because they get a chameleon brand but also get to explore. They're halfway there. Now take Banksy. I'm reading a book on him now. (side note: street artists hate Banksy because he broke the rules. Which just leads to me, yet again, hating the art community. Movements are straight-jackets powered by stale conventional wisdom. I can't get far enough away from them.) He has this great quote, again, Steve Jobs obvious. He says something like "I didn't get into vandalism to be told what to do". Duh. And yet most street art follows this stupid code that holds the whole thing back. Fuck that. Banksy is quasi-anonymous. I mean, it's not hard to discover who he is, but he's basically anonymous. And that's part of the fun. But like Bowie and Madonna everyone can trace it back to him. You do a gallery showing, it has 40 Banksy pieces, and there you go. Banksy's personally branded and stands to profit from each one. Bully for him. He's a business, there to make money. But my favorite part of street art is the idea that it disappears. You see it, then it's gone. Or you don't see it at all, and people have to show you a blurry picture of what it was like. Or even better, the most delicious scenario … no one ever sees it except the person painting over it and some random passersby that don't even know what they saw. No proof, no evidence, just touching (for example) 100 people. But then it stops there. How cool. I want work that's impermanent. I love to finish sketch books and send them to friends. I write stories that span 5 sketchbooks, given to 5 different people who will never meet. I purposely refuse to tie up my work in a tidy bow, I'd rather scatter ideas all over the place like a mess. I want my work to feel like a stolen kiss in the last minutes of a dance before you have to get back on a bus to get back to your side of the sleepaway camp. Things are so much sweeter when it's fleeting. And as the guy building this stuff, it means no fear. It's best when I can do whatever I want. Write a play, do standup (I recently did spoken word at the Moth, that was awesome), re-start my comic, do a mystery novel, whatever. JK Rowling was recently discovered writing under a pen name. I know exactly where she's coming from. And then it occurred to me: I want every project to be under a different pseudonym. That's perfect. I get to start completely fresh each time. No one can love my a design essays and then expresses frustration that I'm writing, I dunno, a children's book. Because the children's book is a debut by Samuel Whifflebottom. It's not me. That's the epiphany I came to. Everyone assumes everything should tie back to one person, because personal brand blah blah blah. Fuck personal brand. I just want to create. I don't want to be told what I can or cannot do. I don't just want a pen name, I want throwaway names for everything I do. And I've already been doing it for years. ///// Dear Jon, all this is really touching and is very important for me. I'm happy that I was lucky enough to jump into this "100 friends" train. I think this is all about freedom. When you are making things for general public, there's always a moment then you start feeling this physical pressure of your followers' anticipations. Suddenly you find yourself not developing your blog/portfolio/whatever, but working FOR this thing, as if you had a job. You become a slave of your own image, although this type of slavery can be relatively pleasant. This may be not bad, but it misses the point. Misses something crucial, may be even the very essence of human being. Strolls a person away from the most important search in life, from the path to self. Most precious discoveries lie far away from public places. Like the rays of the setting sun, like these disappearing street drawings, most beautiful inspirations are elusive and subtle. To share them, one has to keep this subtlety, breathe freely, ignore constraints and expectations. And for sure, you can share this only with those who listen. ///// I have a design essay that I've been trying to write for a year, tentatively called "Meaning Is The New Black". Writing this little thing in the morning and getting a response is definitely more meaningful than "SO AND SO HAS FAVORITED YOUR TWEET". ///// You are my arch-nemesis. Wait, that didn't come out right. What I meant to say, is… I hang on to everything. If I were a 60-year-old-inventor, my workbench would play host to a fascinating array of gadgets and half-deconstructed-widgets (and junk. Lots of junk). Since I'm not that 60-year-old-inventor, but rather an 'aspiring' UI designer, I hang on to any kind of screenshot that can serve as inspiration, as well as just any other file that can fit into some kind of bin (be it nostalgia, or "I Like This Experiment!", what have you). Letting go of anything is hard for me. Be it digital or physical (digital is much hard to part with, because it has such a low consequence for hording). I begrudgingly acknowledge that letting go of past designs, past files, past * helps tremendously in becoming a better designer. Maybe one of the best things to help other designers (hell, even other netizens) would be learning how to let go of anything that once had value. You seem to have learned that lesson up and down — How do you do it? [insert Cherry Tree lesson part 2] // It didn't come naturally to me, it was like growing a muscle, where the more I did it the better it was. Take a trash bag and promise yourself to fill it this weekend. Not normal trash, but things that could conceivably stick around for years. Fill the bag and throw it away. That's exercise one. Then, next weekend, do it again. In my experience it's extremely hard but it feels good enough that you keep it up. // I am lurking. Carry on // Same here. // This is extremely inspirational. And pseudonyms frustrate me. I want to read everything from a person I admire, but I understand the pressure/high-expectancy downside. Still lurking. // Getting rid of things is great. I'm making room for whatevers next. I'm having trouble with psuedonyms. I feel like putting work out under psuedonyms is because of fear. The fear of missing (or even having to deal with) expectations. When I look at someone like David Byrne (or even going back to the Bowie and Madonna example), people with an eclectic body of work, I end up respecting them more. I like seeing their hits just as much as the misses, especially when its outside of music. I'm thinking about it differently now. Big bands play shows under fake names to relive the small show scene. Where it's more intimate. They have the freedom to try new things, to mess around, to have fun. Is that an arc of a career then? Spend the first half trying to get so that people know your name. Spend the second half trying to make people forget. Not forget per say. What changes? Confidence? There's an aspect of honesty too that I'm just starting to figure out. Maybe that's why I don't totally understand. I can use a psuedonym out of fear and a lack of fear. Why can't my personal brand be that I create various things? It's late. I need to go to bed. // This seems right. But pseudonym can be just a tool that helps to set yourself free. When you learn to ignore constraints, you may not need it anymore. But it's hard. I think it's easier for an artist, because when you work on stage, you learn to transform all the time. Just think of it: an average actor had fitted on tens or hundreds of different personalities; he can feel comfortable as a prince and also as a beggar. Using pseudonyms can be such a play, chance to be the other person. It's a great way to exercise flexibility and move away things that stop you from creating freely. I think so. // Maybe I'm generalizing but it's like the people who choose to use pseudonyms (or even think about using them) are usually smart enough already to ignore constraints and others' opinions. //These constraints are a psychological issue, so it's not related to how smart you are. Usually you can't deal with such issues directly (because they define your behavior, out of reach of your consciousness). You can either ask for help from other people, or use some sort of trick. Pseudonym is the trick that definitely helps. And it can be fun too :) // Agree. Smarts and caring what people think have nothing to do with each other. People somewhere on the autistic spectrum (not to mention sociopaths) show a higher than average traditional intelligence and a lower than average emotional intelligence. Genuinely not caring what people think lines up with a lack of empathy more than smarts, though the two do coexist in some people. // I want to bring the discussion way back to something I really liked in the original post, the talk of Banksy and street art. I have to say that I have felt a bit of that in Surprisebox and it is quite liberating. Anything you create is temporary and can and will be removed or overwritten. // Sure. That's also like talking to friends at a party. You can hold a great speech just for them, knowing it will vanish the same second you'll stop talking. // I feel guilty about how much I enjoy throwing things away. I am trying to get better about donating and finding new homes for things I don't need, rather than putting them in a landfill. // Same. The extra effort it takes to dispose of it correctly has, for my entire life, been the reason for crap to just sit around in my basement, or desk, or whatever. So while I've been extremely wasteful over the last few years, it's just balancing the scales a bit. And I still do donate, but in the case of a tie, into the trash it goes.