Start Somewhere

But I would say that the commonality between any purpose-person that has, you know, found their purpose, would be that they just started. That you just start. Like, there’s—so many of the projects that I’ve worked on here are not the project I started.
And so I learned how the project needed to look or feel or translate based off of the process of starting. Creating an iteration. Looking at that iteration and being like, oh, that gives me this idea I never had before—let’s work with that.
And then pretty soon—six iterations later—you just build. I mean, you’re not scrapping and starting over. You might be tearing out one part of it and putting in a new one. Or maybe you did three iterations in your head.
There’s nothing wrong with sitting and thinking about something. And I’m sure I’ve had multiple people in my life that think that I think too long about something. I’m that horrible, indecisive Libra type, you know, that I—
I will sit, and I will—but I build things in my head. And lots of, like, any of my wood projects or anything like that—I’m doing it in my head. And then, once you get to a certain point where you’re building something in your head, it’s like: now I need to start it in the real world to really understand the mechanisms—if it’s going to work, or what’s going to make it work better.
Because you can only picture the engineering of something in your head for so long before you have to actually put pencil to paper, put screw to wood, put your hands on the clay. Get your damn hands dirty, you know? That’s how you do dishes—get your hands wet.
Yeah, I mean, I think it affects the people around me through just living by example—and vice versa. I don’t think that every day I am the person that I would hope to be in terms of, like, the energy for a project or whatever else. And then someone comes in, and they’ve just got, like, a bunch of spitfire behind some idea that they’ve got—and I’m like, okay, yep, I’m going to get my hands dirty now.
I don’t know if it’s a… I wouldn’t say it’s—some days it’s not inspiration so much as, like, leverage. You’re like—you feel leveraged into action. And in any case, maybe that’s potentially what I do for other people: leverage them into action.
I feel like, you know, the psychotic nature with which I have continued to grow this studio at a speed that is not at all what one might call business savvy—you would say that I’ve expanded way too quickly, and you’d be right. But also—it’s working.
And so there’s something about that cavalier behavior that I think emboldens other people. Seeing people living fearlessly and just approaching their day without the fear getting in the way of their action.