There is a bird in a cage. It can reach its head out of the bars far enough to peck away at the wood of the door. After year’s of pecking it has finally broken through the wood and is free to escape. As the bird leaves its cage it realizes that it no longer remembers how to fly and falls to its death.

There is another cage with a mouse in it. One side of the cage has no bars, just a ledge. The mouse can’t see how far below the ground is and is afraid to jump. After year’s of living in fear of making the leap of faith the mouse dies in its cage.

This story came to me in a dream a couple nights ago. I find this story to be one of the most interesting that I have documented at Dream Feedr. I feel sorry for both the bird and the mouse and can relate both situations.

It isn’t that much of a stretch to see our lives as a constant struggle to escape our cages. Sometimes our cages are comfortable, like the mouse’s, and we would rather endure the discomfort than take the risk of jumping into the unknown. Other times we strain our necks and toil for years for something better only to find that things outside our cage are the same or worse than life in the cage.

Do you see yourself as the mouse or the bird in this parable?

Yesterday Rian snuck past me as I worked in the basement with an envelope in his hand. When he reappeared without the envelope he told me that he had a surprise for me, but I had to find it. “Daddy, you are cold. Warmer. Warmer, hot, hot, hot!” I picked up the envelope and opened it. “It’s a picture of you!” Rian said proudly. I opened the envelope and enthusiastically praised his drawing skills.

I have very fond memories of drawing when I was a kid. My parents had me drawing in a sketchbook at a young age, and they were very supportive of the artist in me. I remember dictating to my mother who would patiently write out the stories to accompany my illustrations. When I was in grade school my mom helped me organize an art club and invite my friends over for an afternoon of drawing and learning about art. We only met once or twice, but it helped me establish an identity at an early age of being an artist. My friends knew that was my “thing” and they respected it.

If you ask any successful person to point to people that influenced them when they were young, I bet most of them can quickly identify some key people. We all remember that one teacher who inspired us and encouraged us. When you think about these people you realize how life changing a few words of encouragement can be. A little praise of a kid’s math skills may send them on a lifelong journey into engineering. Praise a person’s singing and they may love music for the rest of their life.

Seeing my son’s drawings brings back great memories and makes me really proud of him. I gave him a sketchbook today and we had a fun time drawing pictures of his R2D2 toy. I hope he enjoys drawing in his sketchbook as much as I enjoyed mine. I don’t know if he will grow up to be an artist or an astronaut, but I know that being supportive of whatever he is interested has the potential to shape his future.

As I finish writing this Rian snuck past me again. He says he has something for me because “You are my best friend, and I love you.” This time he has a stack of about a dozen envelopes. I bet each one contains a drawing of me. I guess that just proves my point that a little positive reinforcement goes a long way!

Hopefully you aren’t in a situation where you have to clean out your desk because you lost your job, but if you are I want to give you a checklist of things that people often forget to do before they leave their computer workstation. I am started a new job this week (more on that in the coming days) and these are some of things I made sure to do before I left my old computer behind. It is important to make sure your computer is free of personal info and ready for whoever works on my computer in the future. I work on a Mac, so these might be a little different for a PC user.

1. Clear out the history and cache from all your browsers. Don’t forget to remove bookmarks, too.

2. Remove personal email accounts delete all personal email

3. Deauthorize iTunes

4. Remove instant message accounts

5. Remove FTP shortcuts to personal sites

6. Clean out Keychain access to make sure all your passwords are gone

7. Backup all personal files and remove them from your computer

8. Copy any work related files that you may want to use in your portfolio

9. Organize files that people will be working on after you leave

10. Copy your address book

Did I forget anything?

Few people know that ping pong was an important part of Bruce Lees training routine. Bruce had the opinion that traditional martial arts techniques were too rigid and formalistic to be practical in scenarios of chaotic street fighting. That’s why the paddle speed, improvisation and timing involved in ping pong appealed to him so much. Lee would eventually formalize his ideas of “Practicality, flexibility, speed, and efficiency” into the martial arts system known as Foo Led Yu. Here is some recently uncovered footage of Bruce playing ping pong with nunchucks:

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Ok, so this is really just an advertisement for a Nokia phone, but isn’t it fun? What a great viral video! By the way, the Foo Led Yu thing, I came up with that myself. TM.

First of all, thanks to everyone who wished me a happy birthday and thought of me this week. I have great friends and family, and I am touched by your kindness. Thank you!

So, I turned 30 this week and I would be lying if I told you that it isn’t a little traumatic. I know it’s not that old, but it is a milestone, and it has caused me to take inventory of my life and measure myself against the goals I have for myself. What am I proud of? What do I regret? Who do I love? How did I get here? What’s next? I suppose this is normal, and I feel good about my life and who I am.

With all the soul searching I didn’t have any big moment of clarity and there wasn’t any big revelation. And maybe that’s the lesson. Life is just one endless search to figure out who you are. The arbitrary importance that we put on certain ages (10, 13, 16, 21, 30, 40, 50, etc) are meaningless points on timeline. The important thing is that you do the best you can and take time every once in a while to reflect on what it means to be you.

I read a story a while back about the death of the author who wrote “100 Things to Do Before You Die.” He died at 47, but he lived his life to the fullest. This and other similar stories have made me want to write a list of things that I want to do in my lifetime. Some are relatively easy and others would be amazing achievements. The important thing is having goals and dreams. I plan on updating it as I go, but here is the first draft:

Write a novel
Learn to play the guitar, write a song, and record an album
Write a check for $1,000,000
Write a screenplay
Direct a motion picture
Build and mass-produce a camera that I design
Jump out of an airplane
Be debt free
Design my house
Save someone’s life
Own a Warhol painting
Shake hands with the President
Have an exhibit of my photography
Publish a book of my photography
Teach a college class
Have my name or work mentioned in Wired
Run a marathon

If you are in a similar reflective mood, I encourage you to make your own list. It feels good to have dreams and ambitions even if you die before they are all checked off. So now that I am 30, it feels pretty good. Life keeps getting better and I can’t wait to see what my 30′s bring me!

I recently watched a documentary about a Chuck Palahniuk conference called Postcards from the Future. For those of you who may not recognize the name, Chuck Plahniuk is the author of the book Fight Club, which was turned into one of my favorite movies. Do yourself a favor and read some of his fiction.

Unless you are a huge Palahniuk fan, I don’t know if I would recommend you rush out and watch it, but there was one section of it that I thought was especially interesting. Chuck is talking about how useless protest is compared to the power of story telling. He talks about our current times and the opportunities that are available to storytellers.

Chuck explains how as consumers of culture we have a larger archive of knowledge than any generation in the history of the world. We have more free time than anyone in history ever has. We have access to cheap and powerful technology that makes it easy to create and deliver our stories. Perhaps most importantly we have a dissatisfaction with the garbage that has flooded pop culture. It is that dissatisfaction that will compel us to create something better.

This all adds up to a time when their is huge potential for story telling to change the world. I found it really inspiring and I hope you do too. Here is the video:

If you have ever read Fahrenheit 451 you probably remember the part at the end where the people are all carrying around parts of great literature in their memories because they have no books. I wonder what copyright lawyers think when they read this part of the book. What do the people in the book plan on doing with all that knowledge? Eventually they will write it down and pass it around to all their friends. Without a licensing agreement! I’m no lawyer, but I think that qualifies as blatant copyright infringement! Wouldn’t it be funny to write an alternate ending to Fahrenheit 451 where Guy Montag and his crew are successful in recovering all the great literature but end up imprisoned for copyright infringement when they start publishing the new books?

The firefighters who set fire to the books in 451 are the copyright enforcers of today. They stifle the growth of culture and intimidate creativity at every turn. Ray Bradbury said,

“There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches… Every dimwit editor … licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.”

Replace “editor” in that quote with “copyright lawyer” and I think you get the same idea.

The quote that I wrote on the bookmark that fell out of my copy of Fahrenheit 451 says, “Those who don’t build must burn.” Today we don’t have firefighters running around burning books, but there is one area where creativity is being stifled. Copyright law makes it hard for people to create new derivative work without fear of being sued. I bring this up because I think that often copyright law makes little sense in the digital times that we live in.

So if lawyers win the copyright war where will the next front be? When you think about it, digital “content” really has no value by itself. It only gains value when it is connected to your brain. Is it that big of a stretch to think that the next battle ground for copyright infringement won’t be in cyberspace, but in our heads? Will you eventually need a license to remember a song? When technology advances to the point where you can download a movie straight to your mind will you have to pay a licensing fee every time you access it?

The irony of Ray Bradbury’s masterpiece is that his dark view of the future was exactly right even though it was completely wrong. We don’t have a shortage of books. We have an overload of information. Books aren’t burned, they are buried in the avalanche of thousands of books published each year. The hard part isn’t finding a single copy of a good book. The challenge is finding a single piece of quality writing in a world flooded by information. And the biggest irony of all is copyright. Copyright is meant to protect the creativity of the author. But the harder copyright law is enforced the more limitations it puts on the creativity of everyone else. You probably would have less people up in arms about burning a copy of Fahrenheit 451 than you would people worried about the copyright infringement of adding a final chapter to the book like I suggested. That is a sad commentary of the times I am afraid.

I have a quote printed on a scrap of paper that I have carried around for years. It says

“Profess no belief without conviction. To conform means often death; to non-conform in this is often life, often life eternal.”

The quote is by Albert Einstein and it has always inspired me. It is something that I strive for. It doesn’t mean I have to always be right or that I can’t change, but it challenges me to pick a side and boldly hold on to what I believe in. Obviously, that is so much easier said than done.

These words came to mind today because I was doubting myself. I am sure you do the same thing from time to time. Am I good enough? What if I am wrong? Should I compromise my beliefs? If you take Einstein’s quote to heart then the self-doubt can become really intense. Just having a belief backed by conviction is something that will get attacked. The stronger your conviction the more pressure you will have to conform. You will be called close-minded. Stubborn. Arrogant. Judgmental. Mean. Insensitive. And those are the nicer words! This is where your convictions get tested and it is critical that you don’t give in. Einstein says it is a matter of life or death!

So how do you maintain the strength of your convictions? One thing that helps me is to try to be aware of insults that carry hidden compliments in them. For example, I take pride in being uncompromising. If someone calls me stubborn I could get defensive, or I could realize that this person just doesn’t appreciate how uncompromising I am. Insults are often just a simple trick that people use to twist your strengths into weaknesses. A prolific person gets accused of “having too much free time.” A creative person is “artsy.” A person with ambition gets labeled a “dreamer.” Are you curious or unfocused? Confidence gets misconstrued as arrogance. These are all insults that I know from experience and I bet you can add to the list with examples from your life. Once you recognize what is really going on beneath the insults then you can be encouraged and know that you are doing something right! I hope you feel encouraged and I wish you luck as you try to live a life of conviction.

Do you ever ask yourself this simple question: Am I happy? I guess it isn’t that simple of a question becuase I sometimes struggle to answer it. For many people happiness is most directly tied to there jobs. When they struggle with happiness they might ask question like:

“Do I like the people I work for?”

“Could I be making more money?”

“Is the work I am doing rewarding/meaningful/fun/important?”

This can’t be an original idea, but it struck me that if a person could be satisfied in all three of those areas (people, money, projects) then they would have reached complete career happiness. I sketched the following diagram to illustrate the Complete Career Happiness Continuum™.

As you can see there are three factors that contribute to career happiness: good co-workers, good projects and good money. If you are short in one area then you fall into one of the three gray areas of misery:

1. You like the people you work with and you enjoy your work, but the pay stinks.
2. You make good money and like the people you work for but the work is terrible.
3. You love your work and the pay is good but your co-workers are losers.

For me I have a hard time complaining about any one of those factors. I like the people I work with. I am getting paid to do something I love. I am making decent money. So why can’t I just say, “Yes, I am happy!?” I think this is where my diagram falls apart. It doesn’t take into account the “grass is greener” part of human nature. You are always going to want to make more money. You are never going to get along with everyone you work with. No matter how great your projects are, there will always be times when it is just work. I guess the challenge of being happy is learning to be content with what you have. Unfortunately, that sounds more like a fortune cookie than words to live by. I wonder if I could be happy writing fortunes for a living. Hmmm.

I went out to rent a movie the other day and as I got in line I heard a voice behind me. “What the F### is this S###? I turned around to see what this guys problem was. Apparently he thought he was in line and I had cut in front of him even though he was no where near the actual line. I said “Sorry, dude. Go ahead.” I let him cut in front of me with his two young daughters. I said “geeeez” to the person there who witnessed the whole thing and Mr. incredible says “Settle the F### down” as if I was the one with the problem. I stood there in awe of what had just happened and then a new register is opened next to us. She says “I can help whoever is next.” I give my new friend a look as if to say, “it’s all your’s buddy!” and he says “Go for it bro.” Unbelievable.

I was playing basketball a couple weeks ago and I unintentionally fouled a guy and knocked him to the ground. Admittedly it was a hard foul, but it was obviously an accident and other than his pride, he wasn’t hurt. I immediately apologized and asked if he was alright as I offered my hand to help him up. He swore at me and rejected my attempt at good sportsmanship.

How do these men come to be so warped? I wonder if it has anything to do with the attitudes of professional athletes. The role models in the sports world are convicts with ugly attitudes that care only about themselves. It is reasonably understandable how fame and fortune can go to a person’s head, but it is almost humorous when those attitudes get copied by middle age losers. For those guys the basketball court at the park becomes an arena where they are the self-appointed MVP. Even the video rental store becomes a place where you need to dominate the competition. As I think about the sports heroes I admired growing up (John Stockton, Orel Hershiser, Ozzie Smith, Barry Sanders, Ken Griffey Jr, Grant Hill) they all had integrity in addition to being amazing athletes. I am hoping that good sportsmanship comes back in style, but that seems doubtful.