For the past 3 weeks, I’ve had weekly meetings after work to plan the 3rd Annual FlashFWD awards.  I’ve been proud of my ability to set a timeline to work off of, formalize weekly agendas, sticking to them during the meetings, and creating actionable items/next steps between meetings.  This has made our small team more constructively creative (ie not having wacky ideas that can’t be executed or won’t add value to the show itself), more focused in a fluid manner (ie attacking tasks one by one), more able to make informed concrete decisions, and more accountable for tasks that need to be accomplished, so that we stay on track.

I have left each meeting like we’ve chopped away at the planning versus in the past where ideas are batted around the room with more questions asked than answers decided.  Personally, I feel great about the progress and I partially attribute this to my ability to be more organized.

Last week, my girlfriend and I finalized separate investments in Kings County Distillery. Nothing crazy to make us financially ruined if the company goes bankrupt, but enough to notice the decrease in our respective balances (I’ll leave it at that).

Having never invested in anything besides stocks and bonds, I thought it would be both fun, a great learning experience, and great networking to meet the other investors. In addition, it’s not like a tech startup where there’s no clear monetization of their goods and/or services. They make booze that people buy and then drink. It’s fairly cut and dry. The best part: it’s actually pretty damn tasty, priced fairly, and marketed well.

I bought a flask size bottle of bourbon for $20 at BQE Discount Liquor in Williamsburg and gave my whiskey friends tastes before considering further. Their responses pretty much fit into 5 categories:

1. This is pretty good bourbon. Great for you.
2. This is pretty good bourbon. If you invest, can I get free bottles?
3. This is pretty good bourbon. I wish I had the balls to invest with you.
4. This is pretty good bourbon. I wish I had some money set aside to invest with you.
5. This is pretty good bourbon. I’d like an introduction to them because I’m interested.

Most people fit into the 3rd and 4th categories and my assumption is that a large portion of them are comfortable or afraid. I didn’t invest a lot of money and I could have used the money towards vacations, expensive dinners, classes, or some shit that I don’t need, but decided to take a chance and sacrifice the limited resources that I have towards something to help me grow my life experiences and hopefully bank account. The prior is more important for me as this isn’t a huge money making opportunity. I’ll be content if I get my money back in full and make a full extra bucks if they sell in 2-5 years.

But these sorts of risks aren’t limited to financial investments because simply put, not every actually has the ability to invest. Try making a calculated risk small or large. Spend your free time doing some constructive like taking an interesting class online for free or investing time into an idea you’ve put in the back burner for this or that reason.

If not now, when?

Then it hit me that I too suffer from the same flaw.  It’s funny how some things we discover in others, we find in ourselves (for better and worse).  Simply put, the more comfortable we get, the more extreme measures we’ll take to maintain that false sense of reality.  In a lot of case, comfort is an illusion.

Beyond the obvious comfort of money, it’s a lack of taking chances, trying new things, meeting new people, and more importantly, failing.  There’s this common thought process in our society that links risk to failure and failure to shame when the exact opposite is the case.  Granted, you shouldn’t spend all your money on lottery tickets.  That’d be preeeeeeetty preeeeetty moronic.  However, to my initial point, growth can only happen when you step away from what you know and from what you are accustomed.

As I was opening up to friend about all of this a few days ago,  he pointed me to a quote from Fred Wilson’s keynote last week at 99% Conference:

The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.

It gets you thinking, doesn’t it.

I’ve been fairly extreme throughout my life in regards to how/when I open and close the door to experience. Recently, I’ve gotten conformable and had a tight grasp on an understanding of who I think I am and am fairly blunt as whether or not something new would fit into that perception of myself. The fact remains, when you say NO to something, the world gets smaller until all you have left is a box to fit something into, which is why I’ve been trying make more efforts towards saying YES to something and taking more of a chance.

After the movie, I explored the Upper West Side. I was hungry and frustrated, yet I refused to “settle” on a brunch place. Settle meaning go to someplace outside of my usual preference of amazing, cheapish, and without a wait. While I was walking around, I envisioned a place that I’d go to for a brunch in Brooklyn on a typical weekend, which is the wrong way to go about it. I said YES to a new area, but was saying NO to accepting it for what it was.

I realized that part of traveling (for me the UWS is a distant far off land) is absorbing the culture, so I snapped out of it and settled on a bakery called Cafe Lalo(which I mistakenly thought was pronounced lay-lo instead of lah-lo). Had I not pushed myself to adapt to the area, I probably would have gotten fed up and gone to some place that would have been awful or gone back to Williamsburg for a bagel.

In life, you’re always going to be out of your comfort zone, so you always have to find ways to adapt and say YES to something new. Saying YES opens the world up more to new possibilities you might not have known existed.

Levon posses this unique quality of positivity with an understanding how the real world works. “Nothing’s a guarantee. It’s the old one day at a time.”

Yesterday in a cab to the lower east with my girlfriend, I was addressing my first world problems. For a second, I had to step back and have a laugh. I find the humor the ups and the downs that I face each day. Only now can I laugh even harder realizing my ridiculousness (as in the “absurd” definition of the word).

Having more clarity, I can acknowledge that my life ain’t that bad. I’ve never had cancer and I’m damn sure that I was never close to being stripped of doing what makes me happy or what makes me a living (which were one in the same for Levon). Only if could be as happy and appreciative of life as Levon.

With the New Year and my birthday practically overlapping, it’s hard to ignore existential questions from clouding my thoughts and dreams surrounding the first few weeks of the year.

Seeing this video in particular, I must ask myself where I want to go physically (travel), professionally (career-wise), and mentally (insight into myself and life itself).

I need to decide which direction I will steer then get on my way. It might just be Burning Man…

I find a lot of people give up on their ideas, goals, and dreams very easily.  This isn’t necessarily pessimistic.  It’s harder than one would think to lose weight (to continue on the analogy I started the post with), save enough money to take a much needed vacation, find a significant other, get a new job, quit smoking, read a book a week, habitually write a blog, or make your hobby your occupation (not implying I need any of these).  Planning and executing on these things takes a certain caliber of person.  This person is dedicated as well as must make sacrifices and make time (sleep, personal relationships, and work are usually the first to slip).

By nature, people try to maintain habits, so when you try to introduce something new, you need to try even harder to break your current habits and create a whole new pattern.  One of my oldest and bests friends was a drug addict.  Every couple times I saw him, I would ask him, “do you abstain from drugs because you think you shouldn’t take them or because you actually don’t need them?”  It took him about 10 months for him to answer with the latter response (after relapsing once early on).  I’m not trying to say that executing on your “New Years Resolutions” are on the same par as staying sober, but rather than breaking your old daily habits to make time for the new takes more than telling yourself once on January 1 that you wish you could ________.

The other thing is that NYR are often completely unrealistic.  There is a HUGE difference between long and short term (and even defining long and short can be a debate in and of itself).  Expecting to lose 20 pounds, get a movie deal, be featured in an art gallery, own a restaurant, or sell out Bowery Ballroom without proper understanding of what that means is naive, ignorant, and irrational.  People need to learn to be their own Project Manager, so they can plan better.  There will always be a certain level of doubt along the way, but the risk is always the scariest or can be the most exciting if you trust yourself.  All this is easier said than done, but that goes without saying.  This isn’t easy, which goes towards my main point to begin with.

So it’s 2012.  What do you want to do different?  What are you going to do to make constructive steps towards making sure that begins to come to reality at a realistic pace…and making sure you stick with it.

• Bon Iver – Bon Iver
• Wilco -The Whole Love
• White Denim – D
• Washed Out – Within and Without
• SBTRKT – SBTRKT
• Wye Oak – Civilian
• James Blake – James Blake
• The Antlers – Burst Apart
• Tedeschi Trucks band – Revelator
• Dawes – Nothing is Wrong

Honorable Mention:

• Amon Tobin – ISAM
• Other Lives – Tamer Animals
• Ryan Adams – Ashes & Fire

See how this list stacks up to my lists from 2008, 2009, and 2010.

Dawes’ music makes you feel like they’re old friends.  It’s inviting, insightful, and grounded, which is the exact opposite of how some art can be.  Certain “artists” pride themselves for pushing boundaries and distancing themselves from fans.  Not Dawes.  They wear their love of rustic rock n roll on their sleeves.  They just wanna make good music that people can relate to.

They may not play soul music, but that doesn’t mean they’re not soulful.  Soulfulness is a part of talent, but just because someone is talented doesn’t mean they have soul (square-rectangle scenario).  Dawes has both. You can hear is in Taylor’s work and all of their music.

I look forward to seeing where 2012 takes them.

When I was cleaning out my grandmother’s apartment in Philly with my mom and sister, my sister found this old picture with musicians performing.  It was very “me” to say the least, so I brought it back to Brooklyn with me.

Flash forward a couple weeks.  I went on an overnight trip to Philly with my roommate Paul to see Ryan Adams.  We stayed at my parent’s house and when my mom asked what he thought of the picture, it dawned on me that he hadn’t seen it yet since we have conflicting schedules.  When we got back to the apartment I showed him the picture and he asked if I knew anything about it.

It reignited my desire to find out more details, so I googled “Sam Ashkynase Conductor” because they were the only words that we easily legible on the band sign in the picture.  The first thing that came up was Sam Ash’s wiki page.  For those who don’t know, Sam Ash Music is one of the most successful music instrument retail chains in the country.  This led me to 3 theories on why my grandparents had this picture:

1. I had a family member in the band.
2. I’m related to Sam Ash somehow.
3. Sam Ash’s family were friends with my grandfather’s family (both of Austria-Hungarian descent)

Paul, interested in helping me out, tracked down one of the current top execs at Sam Ash Music (via Linked In).  He then figured out the email address formats for Sam Ash employees (ie first.last@company.com), so I contacted what I thought to be the email address for that exec (it thankfully didn’t bounce back). Concurrently, I emailed my parents, sister, uncle, and cousins to let them know about this, to which my mom replied that either of them could be theoretically possible since my great grandfather moved from Austria to New York City.

As of now, I’m still waiting on a response from Sam Ash, but it boggles me what one picture, pushing myself to look for the details, and investigating further can do.  It’s about the picture, but it’s not at the same time because there’s a pleasure in finding things out…Richard Feyman would agree.

UPDATE:  I got a response from Sam Ash Music and should be meeting with them soon