+++ title = “06” date = 2020 +++ When you’re in a yoga class, they give you instructions on the basic pose. And then, they say maybe. Maybe you could walk your hands out more. Maybe you could challenge yourself by shifting your posture so that you’re using more of your core. Maybe do the hard thing. I love this practice. Maybe is a word that contains so many possibilities, an endless amount of paths, an infinite forest.

Unless you want to, of course. But when people begin posting their tapestry of all the books they’ve read in the year to social media, it’s a vanity metric, as Nadal Ravikant says in this clip from Joe Rogan. Naval spent his post-school time as a child in the library, where he read everything he possibly could. He did this to satisfy his intellectual curiosity, and when a book no longer served this value, he moved on.

I tell stories for a living and for my hobbies. The medium through which I tell the story doesn’t matter: it could be a guitar, a microphone, or a coat hanger. The mediums that generate me the most income become my job (technology) and the ones that generate the most satisfaction become my hobbies (songwriting). What draws me to stories, just like everyone else, is their structure; they have a beginning, a middle and an end.

Every day, the sea becomes land and the land becomes sea. Transformation is natural and inevitable. You can’t escape it any more than a caterpillar escapes her eventual form.

One of the arguments that many new media folks will invoke is that there are no longer any gatekeepers. It used to be that we had to create a piece of art that spoke to someone’s taste. That person, an A&R rep or whatever, would be the gatekeeper to the audience or the recording deal that we needed to be a massive success. Now, almost anyone can get famous if they have good enough content.