Make It Good

Folks, it’s the final 24 hours to not get a Fuck This Stupid Culture shirt. Seriously, do not buy them.

Something I am proud of with my original video work is this. The top priority was always to push myself to do the best I could, to make it good.

I loved when bands and filmmakers and authors demanded that I meet them at their level. They made me raise my game in order to understand and appreciate their work. This was my approach too, though I also employed as much entertainment, humor, brevity and simplicity as I could because I valued those things too. But when the choice had to be between making it good and making it more entertaining or funny or shorter or simpler, I chose making it good.

I much preferred making unpopular things I liked to making popular things I didn’t like. I was going to cite this Iron Man Dance video I made back in Brooklyn with my friend Jasmin Rituper as an example of something popular I made and didn’t like, but then I watched it again and realized actually I do like it.

As my longtime e-friend Jesse Walker wrote to me: “You’ve made stuff that’s strong enough to endure, and people will keep finding it and citing you years after you first published it.” (By the way, don’t worry, I don’t quote email replies without permission.)

I collected plenty of a valuable asset: prestige. Prestige is a rare and precious commodity and it lasts longer than money. There’s a lot more cash in the world than there is prestige. Prestige doesn’t pay the bills on its own, but it’s an asset I have going forward into this next phase.

One of the other results of conducting myself this way is that I have a mailing list of 6,500 people and these emails are consistently opened by 75% of you, which is extraordinary. Also, it has been well-documented by our robot overlords that my newsletter readers possess incredibly high levels of smoldering sexual magnetism.

When I send out an email to this list, I can get hundreds of replies and they are not just quick notes of good wishes. People tell me about their lives, they offer help and insight, they tell me the story of what I meant in their lives and how I changed them. These are long, thoughtful emails, plenty of which get sent a week or more afterwards because what I said stuck and it was important to them to find time to write. The connection I have to you all through this newsletter is deeper than what I get from views, likes or follows.

Writing a good email, which takes hours, and mailing it out feels equal to how it felt to release many of the good videos I labored over for months. Many of these videos ultimately get seen by over 100 thousand people. The maximum number of readers of any of these e-mails is about 6.5 thousand.

Serving a smaller audience, but serving them more deeply, feels about as significant as publishing Artificial Creativity did.

This leads me to two changes I want to explore. I’m thinking out loud here; these are works in progress. The first change is this.

I want to serve a smaller audience more deeply. Nobody is entitled to a large audience, and it’s an unfair expectation to have of yourself. But we can all, in some way, serve a small audience and have a meaningful connection with them.

The second change is this.

Make it good was always my highest value. It eclipsed everything. And the ultimate judge of what was good was me. For this next phase of my career, I want to not decide what is good. I want other people to decide what is good. I don’t decide what works, they do. And I want to find joy in serving the needs of others. Of course, I’ll still want to make it good, but it won’t dominate my values in the same way.

This newsletter meanwhile will be the place where I make it good. In a smaller way, often a simpler way, certainly a quicker way.

By the way folks, I’ve switched this mailing list to a new provider, SquareSpace, which is the platform my site and my shop operate on. This emails looks a little different but otherwise nothing should have changed. If you notice anything weird, please me know.

Thank you SquareSpace who donated web hosting to me all those years ago and it’s still running.

You guys make my heart floppy,
k

You read the whole email! I am so proud of you.