Are you like me, do you put a metric ton of pressure on yourself? In the light of our Social Networking World, my hunch is that young Americans are finding it harder and harder to live up to expectations and the achievements of the "best" of us. It's no longer surprising to see someone discovered on YouTube launch into super-stardom before their voice changes. Millionaires are getting younger and younger. Or if you have just a bit of talent and a clean face, you can audition for a sleuth of instant reality shows. Our new, radical world leaves the door open for possibilities, and you're doing what? It's a rough reality to handle.

If you allow it.

Freezing perfection is not possible. If not today, there will always be someone superior to you and it shouldn't be a hard thought to swallow. As a matter of fact, and it is a fact, it is just as universal a truth as the inevitability of death. And when we look at the most successful among us, hard bodies, mountains of cash, shining résumés, brilliant minds, and gorgeous significant others, we often tend to see the framed photo. Like rapper B.O.B. says in the track Where Are You:

"People only see it the way it appears, but they never see the ropes and the pulleys and the gears."

Whether you're an "artist" or not, the best of us is defined by time and effort, trial and error. Some of us may have been born with some bit of luck, but no one is born successful. We make decisions and we take risks. And to inspire and help everyone around us, we show our work.

read, reading, will read.

Austin Kleon, author of Newspaper Blackout and Steal Like an Artist, is working on a new book with that very idea in mind, Show Your Work. Analyzing the advice he gave in his old work, the process and success of his writing endeavors, and brand-new fatherhood, Kleon opened a Creative Mornings event in Austin, Texas with proof that art is not always romantic and glittery and clean. In Steal Like An Artist, Kleon's original advice was Do Good Work and Share It With Others. After questions continued to roll in, Kleon realized there was a need for more definition. "Good Work" is the foot that's out to trip you. Looking up to idols of creative masterpieces, we naturally measure our work against them. (Ira Glass caught this too.) The irony here is Kleon's success began with a writing exercise he thought was stupid (his words), blacking out newspaper articles' words to make poems of the few remaining visible on the page. He was discovered by another blog and then myself and now the rest is history.

Doing anything in this lifetime, we want to give our best. No one sets out to be half-assed or stupid or disappointing. We handcuff ourselves to perfection and fail to let go enough to share our work - the whole dirty, ugly, tough progress - with the world.

I'm no stranger to the artistic ideal. Aside from Explode into Space, I have notebooks filled with half-realized ideas and unpublished blog entries. And while they don't see the light of day for, what I call, their imperfections, they become failed chances to connect. I often toy with this vision of dying young, and having those closest to me cherish everything I've left behind in my journals, blogs, and scratch pads. There is no skeleton in my closet, mind you, it's way more ridiculous. I'm feeling sorry for myself. It is a grandiose and moronic idea to think you need a prescription of death for someone to take you seriously, when there would no longer be a "you" around to enjoy it.

notes and notebooks (yes, that's Black Sabbath)

My former boss for Rutgers Television and, since then, an even better friend, Brent, sent me a quote from the Mason Gross School of the Arts Tumblr page that has captured my driving force as of late:

"No one is ever going to ask you to do the thing you really want to do. This will never happen. So just think about what you’d like to do, and then just start doing it." — Laurie Anderson

Hoping for Death or American Idol to knock on your door and discover you will never get you as far as sharing your true self with the world. When you're able to start seeing it this way, every day is another chance. If it means you have to reveal the weakest spots of your armor, so be it. Perfection is for no one, strive for process.

Until next time...
I explode into space.

-dan

Dear Readers,

I did a bad thing. I went to Starbucks to write nothing specific. And I went too deep.

Usually there is meditation in writing for me (says the fella who writes you every week). There was finally time to breathe when I sat down with my coffee. Work had been so chaotic the last week I'd been handling customer complaints in my dreams. Counter that with training the majority of the week, earning my keep as a freshly-awarded Blue Belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. To sit and breathe and think was a treasure. So, naturally, I took it too far.

Somehow the aroma of coffee beans and banana walnut bread turned my therapeutic writing into a case study in futility. What I wanted to nail down, and always want to nail down, was an overarching theme to the activities of my life. Before this, I'd found Truth in The Butterfly Effect, or the fact that our actions cause ripples around us. You can kill a fruit fly and have an effect on the world, albeit a very small, inconceivable one. Better yet would be to make a difference in the lives of people, build better relationships, encourage progress, and be happy. What could be bad about that?

It just didn't feel true and complete. It could be my youth. Without responsibility to children or a spouse, it's easy to fall deeply. You wonder what's the point and the point becomes multi-dimensional. You see all the angles and none make sense to choose.

The next day I visited my therapist, Mr. T. No, not the A-Team, pity the fool Mr. T., but Peter Tuccino, the Mr. T who built Dragon Spirit Martial Arts from the ground up. We talked, as we do, for hours and he returned all of my serves with equal force. More than those my age, Mr. T can put me at ease to say everything is fine thinking the way I do because I'm young. I'm doing this with my whole life in front of me. Take a breathe and slow down because worrying about finding meaning will never lead to discovery.

Slowly but surely, I exhaled and found Truth bleeding from our talk. Bouncing my attempts at meaning-making off him, Mr. T. helped me fly closer to it all with the following ideas:

There is no Life without Death. Considering the Day of Your Funeral can be a great exercise. Morbidity aside, we can't see death coming but we can live knowing it. We like to think that within the grasp of Death, we'd be reckless and live without abandon. I doubt we'd really enjoy that. Sorry to say it, life goes on when you don't. Whatever you do with that life, legacy becomes the stuff of meaning without you.

Giving starts the receiving process. Jim Rohn said it and Darren Hardy, publisher of Success magazine, echoes the sentiment. (See his breakdown here.) The wording is important. Giving only starts the receiving process, it is not the only part. I had this thought, examining my current goals the other day. If I want to be a better grappler, my goal should be to help others become better grapplers and in so I'd learn. If I want to be a better writer, I better be a better reader. And find a new word to replace "better".

If you want the Meaning of Life don't be so shallow to think it is only going to come from within you. It is one of the most biting of Joe Rogan's comedy bits in Shiny Happy Jihad when he says, "If I leave you in the woods with a hatchet, how long before you can send me an email?" We can't figure things out on our own. It is not genius, it is remix.

And as if Fate was the mailman, Kirby Ferguson was delivered to my life. Following the Rabbit Hole from PBS's digital series Idea Channel to Everything is a Remix, Ferguson made it crystal-clear for me that it is other people that make life worth living, doing whatever you're doing. In the four-part video series, Ferguson presents Everything is a Remix as a way to understand the fertile progress of working together to create and influence works of art and works of invention. We are One and it's sometimes hard to work like that. Ferguson summed it up saying, "We have a strong predisposition towards protecting what we feel is ours; we have no such aversion towards copying what other people have.”

Even better, like Henry Ford said, "I invented nothing new." Explode into Space is full of sources and reference material, the juice that fuels my days, on purpose. I have no qualms admitting this is only an original work for the tweak I put on the words outside the quotation marks. It's even more essential to remember this when the world tells us to drop-kick our goals and be exactly the person we are meant to be that we remember we'd be no one without everyone else.

Without Death, there is no life. Without giving, there is no receiving. Without others, there is no us.

Until next time...
I explode into space.

-dan