“Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work your judgment will be surer. Go some distance away because then the work appears smaller and more of it can be taken in at a glance and a lack of harmony and proportion is more readily seen.”
-Leonardo Da Vinci
Off to the airport to escape for the weekend. Assuming I can find internet access, blogging to continue apace.
After two years of excellent parties and disastrous house-cleaning, my Sugar Shack roommates and I are headed our separate ways, leaving me, once again, on the apartment hunt. Having fallen increasingly in love with the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, I’m not likely to move far. And, fortunately, there seem to be endless no-fee one-bedrooms recently vacated within just a few blocks of my current 51st and 9th corner.
Less fortunately, it’s clear why most of the former tenants moved out – for one reason or another, each apartment leaves more than a bit to be desired. But, if I learned anything from my two prior moves, it’s that apartment hunting, like so many other things in life, is a numbers game. As I saw literally dozens of places before signing either of my last two leases, I’ve disallowed even fleeting moments of refrigerator-box-in-Central-Park despair until I’ve scoured at least thirty potential apartments this time through.
So, over the next few weeks, during all the spare spaces in my day, I’ll be dropping by pre-war walk-ups and modern elevator buildings, buzzing supers and phoning in management companies. And, in the end, I’m fairly certain the pavement pounding will pay off. I don’t mind the time spent at all, so long as it garners me the sort of apartment every New Yorker’s looking for: one that inspires at least a little bit of hatred in anyone who finds out how little I’m paying for so very much.
Due to a recent conversation with visiting out-of-town friends, I sat down to make a list of all the girls I’d kissed in my life. And, while I was moderately disturbed by the vagueness of a fair number of listings (‘UCLA volleyball player at Devin’s beach barbecue – possibly named Sarah’), I was even more disturbed to discover the high percentage of bloggers on the list. With a bit of reflection, however, that made good sense – as long as I can recall, I’ve always instantly developed a crush on any girl who writes unusually well.
The real secret to Thai kickboxing success is possessing an unusually high pain tolerance. Beyond a certain level, both opponents’ skills are similar enough that, essentially, it comes down to a test of who can stand the pounding longer before crumpling.
Which, in short, is why I do it well. It’s not that I’m a masochist – I don’t like pain. I just don’t register it much. In large part, that’s due to the games my younger brother David and I played when growing up. Bloody knuckles until we’d both be literally bleeding. Or simply taking turns giving each other Indian burns until one of us threw in the towel.
Over the years of such needlessly rough play, I usually bested my brother – though just barely – giving me license to call him a wimp, a pansy, a sissy, and a whiny little girl on more occasions than I can count. Today, however, I officially retract all such charges. David called to say that, after two weeks of a minor sprained wrist still not healing up, he had gone in to see a doctor, who, after a handful of MRI’s, deduced that David hadn’t actually sprained his wrist after all, but shattered four different bones in his hand.
He’s bound for reconstructive surgery early next week, replete with bionic-cool insertion of metal pins. So, sorry Dave; walking around for two weeks with a shattered hand, even toughing through it to hit the winning homerun in an cancer cure benefit softball game, makes it pretty clear you’re not a wimp, a pansy, a sissy or a whiny little girl. It makes it clear you’re actually an idiot instead.
Just kidding. Still, if any readers have healing psychic power to spare, please channel them Denver-ward, as my brother gets his hand put back together. Until it is, we can’t play the game where we take turns punching each other in the shoulder as hard as we can until one of us gives up.
1. Though rooting for the Yankees would make me a fourth generation fan, this past week I couldn’t help but secretly pull for the BoSox, in the hopes that their come-from-behind win would presage a similar Kerry performance.
2. Also, as nearly every excellent Miramax employee I know has recently been laid off, I’ve been mentally comparing the company’s antics to those of the Cleveland Indians in the so-bad-it’s-almost-good film classic Major League. For those who’ve (luckily) forgotten the plot of the film, it essentially revolves around the evil owner’s attempt to make the team abominable enough that it falls below its minimum attendance obligation, and can therefore move to a new, warmer and more profitable Florida location. I’m entirely convinced Harvey’s similarly running his company into the ground, either out of spite, or to push the value down far enough that he can buy it back from Disney, and start running things again on his own terms.
In other words, fan or not, it’s pretty clear that baseball explains the entire world.
Drinking homemade vodka with my high school friend, Lis, at home-away-from-home Russian Samovar.
Me: Actually, this bar is part-owned by Mikhail Baryshnikov.
Her: No it isn’t.
Me: No, seriously.
Her: [Very skeptical look]
Baryshnikov walks through the door, nods as he passes, then sits down at the piano and begins to play Debussy’s “RÍverie”, flawlessly.
Her: Okay. So maybe it is.
Over the summer, I ended up on a panel of entrepreneurs, speaking to a group of high school students about the startup world. It’s something I do fairly regularly, and, by now, I’m ready with standard answers to most of the questions flung in my direction. If the questions don’t catch me off guard, however, the other panelists’ answers often do.
At the last event, for example, the moderator asked for our thoughts on the hardest part of starting a company.
And, after a requisite moment of brow-furrowed faux-thought, the first panelist replied: coming up with good ideas for potential products and businesses.
I almost jumped out of my chair. Coming up with ideas? The hard part? No, no, no.
Ideas are a dime a dozen. Give me five minutes, and I can come up with a laundry list of products that would sell millions (try: biodegradable tattoo ink, for tattoos that disappear after five years; or, disposable six-pack coolers made using the same chemical mix found in instant-cold break-and-shake medical ice packs). Even ideas for whole businesses take only a bit longer – just enough time to sketch out the model on the back of a napkin.
But, actually making those products and businesses happen? Now that’s hard.
No matter how simple an idea seems, the execution is always an absolute mess. Which is why, like a newborn baby, a startup eats all your time and money, and leaves you completely sleep-deprived for months or years on end.
In the case of children, we’re biologically geared to love our offspring more than life itself – that’s what (usually, at least) keeps people from ditching screaming brats in a dumpster somewhere. But, when it comes to starting companies, there’s no similar inherent drive.
Sure, most people assume that money’s a good driver. But, in reality, entrepreneurs chasing cash rarely bring in the bank. The specter of IPO riches, of post-acquisition tropical trips, is simply too distant and too uncertain to motivate a team through eighty hour week after eighty hour week. To make it through the long slow slog of actually putting a company together, you have to like the operational specifics of the company. In other words, you have to like what you’re doing each and every day enough to want to come into work.
It’s a lesson I sometimes forget. Over the last few years, I’ve put together full business plans for additional companies I was considering starting. And, with each, as I began to lay out timelines for execution, I realized that, after several years of actually carrying out the plan, I’d mainly be likely to execute myself.
That’s why, despite any of its problems, I’ve loved starting Cyan. At the end of the day, even at its worst, making movies is vastly more fun than having a real job. And that’s also why, at the top of the column to the right, there’s a new company name, in italics, just below Cyan: Long Tail Releasing. It’s the first company idea I’ve had outside of Cyan in the past three years that I’m actually excited to work on, day in and day out, over the next decade of my life.
While I’ll let further details emerge over the next few months, suffice it to say Long Tail is an alternative distribution company that dovetails well with Cyan. Production and distribution companies? Harvey Weinstein, look out.
Over my pre-film years of running companies, I managed to accumulate thousands of dollars of dress clothing, most of which now hangs full-time in the back reaches of my closet. Every so often, however, I have occasion to whip some of it back out, to don suit, tie and cufflinks for a serious meeting or three.
Usually, it’s for meetings with corporate lawyers or investment bankers – people who don’t trust a CEO without a power tie. But, while I suit up intending to have the world view me differently, I find it leaves me viewing the rest of the world slightly differently as well. In pinstripes, I can spout legalese, discuss exit strategies and negotiate sticky deal points. But I can’t, for the life of me, brainstorm new, exciting, outside-the-box ideas. The tie around my neck, it seems, strangles blood-flow to the right half of my brain, letting the left take over completely.
Judging by the attire at companies I admire most, I don’t think my be-suited experiences are unusual. All the world-changing, gee-why-didn’t-I-think-of-that? ideas of the last decade or two have all sprung from a jeans-wearing crowd. Even at stodgier companies with standing dress-to-the-nines policies, the real thinking happens once people toss of their jackets, roll up their sleeves, loosen their ties, and get down to work.
I know that runs counter to today’s trend, where companies that once went ‘business casual’ during the go-go nineties are ramping back up to stricter dress codes. But I can’t help think those companies are making a mistake. Sure, take the foosball table out of the conference room. Confiscate the Nerf toys. And, for god’s sake, repaint the pipes to normal, non-primary colors. But don’t make people get dressed up. Or, maybe, do. It leaves all the more room for those corduroys-clad innovators to start taking over the world once again.
Balancing that previous wide-eyedly optimistic post:
“Anyone committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation. He has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable… Because this is war, baby. And war is hell.”
– Successful novelist and screenwriter Steven Pressfield
During my month in Israel, I had the odd impression that someone had hit the pause button in my life. Aside from the documentary, nothing else seemed to exist; everything appeared frozen, in stand-still. Yet, not surprisingly, during that month the parts of my life were still rolling ahead, piling up in surprisingly exciting ways. I came back to a flurry of breakfasts, lunches, coffees, dinners and drinks, to a calendar filled past breaking with friends and family, colleagues and competitors. I’m booked near solid for weeks to come, and with each passing day, I’m rediscovering how much I like the people I haven’t seen for far too long, shocking myself with the ready-to-move-ahead-at-the-push-of-a-button potential stored up in the various business projects I’ve kept brewing in my head.
When it rains, it pours. And, during the slower patches of my life, I constantly wonder what I can do to speed it all back up, to get the drizzle started. Apparently, all I have to do is simply fall off the face of the earth for a while. Because, now, the first showers have started, the rainclouds keep rolling in, and I’m ready to get drenched.