He was 56.

That was the first thing that stood out.
  
My friend Belinda called me, and I said I was sad. Sad without real reason, because ultimately, this is not a man I knew. She replied “Well. He’s your whole life!”
  
I’m surrounded by iPhones and Macbooks and iMacs.  I touch these tools every day for every single thing I do.

..but it’s not that.

It’s that there’s this person who was brave enough to go after what he cared about, who was ballsy enough to do it, to chase it, and literally change the world. In a million intimate ways.

There are so few people who name their dreams, and fewer still who, having named them, bend their entire life to realizing them.

Of those people?  A fraction do it more than once.

More than twice.

This is a man with a legacy that has reached into the way culture is disseminated in my own country, in many countries, with tendrils spreading through the world for years to come.

He is part of the democracy of media– of why it has become ever easier to be a person with an idea, and to make a film, or to make a song.

He built a product and changed the music industry.

But the constituent parts of his legacy are not, so much, what capture me.

This is one man who has built a bigger life for himself than most of us have ever dreamed. 

That tenacity, perseverance, and vision– having that light go from the world– that is where I feel the sting of sadness, for a man that I’ve never met.

Parting words from the man himself, advice on creating a life well lived:

“Remembering that you are going to die, is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking that you have something to lose.   You are already naked.  There is no reason not to follow your heart.” 

– Steve Jobs.

The next day, after a night of endless running around, Allan, Jason and I went back to the studio to build and decorate a set for the LAMP album cover.

This is the set, in a little corner of Allan’s studio, built from abandoned wood planks and random ephemera.  I was super proud of it:

We’re all living in a storybook.

It’s a storybook of our own making, generally.  The stories we tell ourselves about who we are.  The shades of paint we color ourselves in with: we are the ones that make brave choices, the ones who honor the truth above all else, the ones who maybe know a little more what’s going on than the people around us.

Or: we’re the ones who could never learn to do ballet. We’re not the sort of people who move to France and write novels.  We would never know what to do with ourselves hitchhiking across Europe.

The stories serve to give us roadmaps to who we think we are.  When the next important decision comes up, we can refer to the map and say: “Yes, I can see that I’m meant to turn left just here, because I’m the sort of person who Makes Responsible Decisions.”

Stories.

It gets even more interesting when you account for all the people whose lives are intertwined with your own: the story of you and your mother, the story of you and your lover, the story of you and your rival.  When these people surface, you can pull the volume down from the shelf marked with your names and know what your story looks like. I love him very much. I could never forgive her for that. He will always let me down.

When I started taking a look at these narratives, they began to pop up more and more frequently around me.  I’d be listening to Radiolab, and they’d make some stray comment about how the story you tell yourself about an injury can decrease pain, or how some people think the soul is just the story of yourself told back to you.  

A friend sent me a story from NPR about a man who had literally lost the plot of his life.  His story had gone off the rails.

And it kept hitting me, this idea that we’re all stories. 

Which is kind of powerful.  Because you can change your story at any time. 

I stumbled on an article tonight with words that landed heavy:

People become so desperately attached to the shape of their story that it becomes terrifying to change.  I relate to that, I think– not always consciously.  But I’ve had more than one conversation in the last few months making light of the fact that I believe, on a deep level, that things can and will never change in my life.

It’s not a defeatist thought.  It’s not even a sad one.  It’s just this notion that that, maybe, somewhere along the way, a person decided what kind of story they were going to be, and never thought they’d be anything different.  Not good, nor bad. It just is what it is.

A friend of mine sent me an email on New Year’s Day, on my birthday. She’d pretended to write a letter as her eighty-year old self, back in time to her present self.  That list was full of advice, and full of things she knew her future self would tell her to do.

Can you imagine standing at the very end of your story, and looking back?  What would you say, from that precipice, to yourself now? To chase, to change, to give up or to give in to?

For myself… I’m not sure how to answer that.  

But here’s what I hope.  They say that every seven years, all the cells in your body die and are replaced by entirely new cells.  It doesn’t happen all at once, of course. But if you take a snapshot of yourself and one seven years later, every cell that occupies your body is completely different.

It’s madness to think of.  Because, then, what is the “self” we speak of– the soul, for the spiritual.  If every physical fiber of ourselves is different, what is the connective tissue that we identify as the “I”?

I like to think it’s the story holding us together.

I just launched the LAMP website, the house that will hold LAMP now that the Kickstarter campaign is over. (You can see it here.) Winter and the holidays are falling off the gears and things are starting to turn in earnest now.

But! While it’s fresh in my mind, I’ve been meaning to do a post on Kickstarter itself. What’s Kickstarter, you ask? Well, it’s the really fantastic site that lets you crowd-source fundraising for projects, and is how I funded my upcoming album. During the campaign, lots of friends and strangers wrote asking how it worked and if it was good fit for them, or how to make their current project better. I mainlined Kickstarter projects & related blog entries for four months before launching my own project, with lots of friendly help from the folks at Kickstarter itself (I’m looking at you, Cindy Au!) so I have a small country’s worth of thoughts on the subject.

For the friends who asked and the strangers who might be wondering, here’s a tiny map that might help you get started funding your own forays into awesomeness.

1.

FOCUS ON THE PROJECT

Kickstarter is excellent for launching your play, book, product, album, or whimsical Nintendo-scarf knitting project. What it’s less excellent for is subsidizing general, non-specific ideas.  

Bad example: “Help me pursue more art in my life!”

Good example: “Help foot the costs to build an eight-foot tall lego replica of Diagon Alley!”

Think concrete, and finite– something with a beginning and an end goal, that you can define easily.

Take these two examples by Polly Law. In this one, Polly focuses on how she doesn’t have enough time and energy to be an artist, and how she wants to be able to cover her bills for four months while she pursues her career. And in THIS one, Polly focuses instead on what she’s trying to accomplish with her actual art, The Word Project. Project A = Unsuccessful. Project B = Successful, with Polly reaching 147% of her goal.

It is much easier to be able to say: “Yes, THIS project, I want to help make it exist!” as opposed to “support you as an artist, wha…? What does that mean?” The latter is amorphous, while the former gives people something concrete to attach to.

2.

REWARDS, REWARDS, REWARDS

If you’re thinking about putting up a project, you also have to consider what you’re giving people for their money. Each project has backer tiers from a dollar to a squillion dollars, and each should come with a reward appropriate to that level.

Kickstarter has a lot to say about this in terms of how to make your rewards fun, but personally, I think Kickstarter works best as a pre-order model– take, for example, TikTok, a campaign to produce iPod Nano/watch conversion kits. Of the 13,512 people who chose to back the TikTok campaign, nearly all of those humans were pre-ordering a TikTok. Which is to say, they while they were funding a dream, they were also buying something they wanted.

So think about what that looks like. If you’re making an album, that’s easy– you offer pre-orders for the album. If you’re choreographing an interactive dance event in the middle of a zoo, maybe you make dvds of the event, or photo-books, and offer those as rewards. There should be a concrete something that people can take away that is a piece of your project. Be creative, but more importantly, find rewards that get people to feel involved in your project. 

3.

GIVE PROOF OF WHAT YOU’VE DONE BEFORE

You have a project idea! Awesome! But before you put up your project about building a giant bee-powered flying machine to the moon, a few things… whatever your project is, it’s best if you give proof that you’ve done this sort of thing before– or something like it. (In this example, perhaps, you have a long resume of building medium-sized bee-powered flying machines.)

I’ve seen lots of negative feedback against Kickstarter projects that ask for money without demonstrating some background in their field. It’s not always needed, but it’s hard to get people to back you without seeing some of the effort you’ve put towards your particular expertise, especially since backers get no guarantee their money will be used towards the project itself. Kickstarter is pretty good about remaining scot-free by telling backers: any money you donate is effectively forfeited. And for that reason, backers need to be sufficiently inspired and have faith in your demonstrated abilities before they’ll financially support you.

4.

GIVE PROOF OF WHAT YOU’RE DOING NOW

So you’re planning a theme park in Venezuela built entirely around the adventures of sea monkeys? First of all, ridiculously awesome. Second of all, it might be a good idea to show off some of the legwork you’ve spent on getting this idea off the ground. Theme park blueprints. Miniature models of El SeaMonkeyLandia. Building permits, prototypes for working rides, that sort of thing.

It’s best to already have some of your ducks in a row when you hit Kickstarter so people know you’re serious, and so you know what you’re getting into.

5.

USE VIDEO

 Have a video on your actual Kickstarter page. It seems in lots of cases, videos on the project page make or break a project getting funded. People want to see who you are, and very specifically they want to know in a short amount of time why they should be excited about your project. Specifics about the project are really good. Specifics about rewards that people receive from funding you are also good. Demonstrate your passion for what you’re working on, and let people get excited with you.

6.

LOOK AT OTHER PROJECTS 

 Look at successful projects on Kickstarter– those that have made 100% of funding to those that have made 1000% of funding. Also look at the projects that have failed. Figure out what’s different in the presentation from one to another that makes the successful ones successes, and the failures fail. (Some things are different from project to project, but may give you an idea as how to present your project in such a way that it’ll garner more attention.)

7.

KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE 

Generally, Kickstarter doesn’t have a built-in audience. Which is to say, if you hit the launch button on your project (in which you attempt to make toy unicorn versions of all the American presidents) it is unlikely that with no further work you’ll get a ton of backers. It’s POSSIBLE (I mean, toy unicorns! of presidents!) but chances are slim.

The way to look at it is this: Kickstarter operates off of your existing friend, family, and fan-base. Once you launch your project, your job is to tell everyone you know. It’s those existing connections you lean on, as well as their belief in your project to share your work via word-of-mouth with their own friends.  

8.

EXPERIMENT 

 Kickstarter is still a new platform, and people are coming with new and interesting ways of using it all the time. Take risks, both in how you present the project and what you use it for. A few random things I’ve found helpful: it helps to aim lower than what’s needed for your funding goal. You’ll be more likely to get the money that is donated since it’s all-or-nothing funding, and people will be more excited for you for making funding so quickly, leading them to support you even more. Also? Try to start with no more than 5 or 6 backer tiers– the more tiers you have the more potential you have to overwhelm and confuse people.

9.

DON’T GET DEJECTED 

Kickstarter isn’t a guarantee; it’s a rallying point. It is for better or worse, a testing ground for ideas. Which means some things catch people’s attention and some things don’t, and since it’s all-or-nothing funding it’s possible you won’t hit your goal. That’s okay. This is a way for you to flesh out your ideas and a way to determine interest. If the first try doesn’t work, like they say, try, try again.