I grew up around jazz. My Grandfather owned a jazz club in Tokyo. I was a jazz piano major at a small arts school in Seattle, and though it ultimately wasn’t for me, my childhood was jazz. By the time I was 12, I playing with professional musicians at the Ballard Bait and Tackle live venue in Seattle. I sometimes ponder what would have happened had I not moved to Tokyo a year later that disrupted all of my lessons. That’s jazz is it not? By the age of 12-13, one might know the basic melody of life and my Tokyo years were playing off the melody. It wasn’t sheet music that was handed to everyone around me. It was a left hand built around scribbled chord progressions and the synergy from the room. Tokyo was “you learned enough about life, now go explore the world solo.” And speaking of solos, there were those too in jazz. Those were prompted by a simple look or nod. Jazz has a lot to do with risks and living in the moment. With music in general, so much is built around the room. If the audience is feeling it, you’re in for a wonderful night. If not, you very well may want to slink off stage to never appear again. There are plenty of articles on UX and startups, but many of them are like sheet music. I’m here to give another angle; that the successful startups are the ones who played off the melody, broke the rules, and were unafraid of experimentation.

Maybe we don’t have to make sense of our stories after all.

I once believed that life was strung together by a long string. Much like the game Unravel, one would get through each level of life as a being of yarn. Every step forward would cost a significant portion of what kept us together. To walk forward was life itself, and the used string would be left on the ground as a map to where we started. I therefore would attempt to think like a storyteller. “If I were writing my own story, what would be the natural progression of events?” I’d ask myself and I’d always look back to the bright red thread that exposed my path to get where I was. There were two problems with this. One, I’d rely on a path that had to therefore make some sort of sense from a time where I was not even making my own decisions. The string attached itself to a childhood where I had to make sense out of circumstances I couldn’t control. Then there was the other glaring problem that I was not the author to my life. We attempt to write our story but the Man with the pen tends to throw in plot lines we did not see coming.

When everything becomes a performance, it’s hard not to be the cruelest judge.

The last five or so years, I have been on a journey of self discovery. I know that sounds lame, or at the very least, cliche. It wasn’t as if the process, like all of us, did not start in my formative years. I’m not so much speaking about the “what’s” as I am the “why’s.” I already understood my interests, (for the most part) and I also understood in many ways what made me click. I knew my habits for the better or worse and I knew my past mistakes. I could identify patterns in my life and one of the largest ones I documented here in my first blog post. I put down The 12 Rules for Life, walked out of a chain linked fence, and never looked back. From that point on, it was no longer simply knowing things about myself but doing something about it. I left the metaphorical tyranny and entered the desert and let me tell you… the desert sucks.

Learning to talk in the age of status updates.

It’s an interesting revelation to me that wherever I go- I seem to know more about the people around me than the other way around. For example, I know more about each barista that serves me each and every day. I don’t know if this is an intentional thing. I may ask them how they are and when they reply, I listen. I turn towards a table and begin my work and then without attempting to, really, I retain that knowledge. Those blocks of information eventually stack up like a tower of Jenga to formulate a person. I’ll have a meeting with someone regularly within a couple years for work and realize only later that I once again only listened. I stacked high little bits of information- childhood, family, hobbies, goals, and the list goes on but it never quite seemed to volley back towards the other side of the net. I have to wonder… was it always this way or has something changed? I’ve always been able to strike up conversations. There were certain rules established- the secret kind of rules like in polite Japanese society. Both parties are meant to abide by the rules in order to not come off as rude or self absorbed but lately I do not understand the game. Perhaps in all of our years now with social media, we have lost the back and forth required to build something meaningful. We observe, not through stories, but through pictures. Maybe it’s no longer rude to not ask. We do not ask others to post, they just do, and we respond often times without words but just a tap to affirm a glimpse into their life. Then within a second of tapping, we are onto a new person, perhaps a person we met in some obscure setting several years ago. Maybe we don’t remember because we don’t need to. Who needs to read a map when GPS is built into a phone? Yet I miss conversations. The kind that stack gently on top of one another and build something for both sides. The kind that remembers. The kind that, at least on the surface, symbolizes a sort of care.

The strange life of a third culture kid that never really leaves you.

I didn’t climb into a closet during a game of hide and seek to discover a new wintery world with odd talking creatures. I might as well have. I was born in another land but I don’t remember that of course. None of us do. I’m half of that land and half of another so I automatically stick out without intention in the first. To keep this illustration going, I was dropped off at a house in London, away from the cottages and castles of where I was born. London was what I knew. I did London things. I spoke London English. I had London friends. It was good for me because children need a sense of belonging and connection to where they are. And then, like a right of passage at 13, I was summoned back to my birth place of Narnia.

The tiny gatekeepers holding the keys to giant doors.

I always see the words “apply” everywhere I go. Apply to a job. Apply to secure funding for a startup. Apply to this class that will help you towards your future. I must admit, I’m a late bloomer. I made all the select teams, the jazz programs, and anything I wanted to be a part of growing up. I applied myself and got in. I auditioned into a jazz program for college and it was no different. And then my 20’s hit and I’m not sure if I really applied to anything in particular. I applied myself in the arts, but arts are subjective and culture was shifting. Gone were the days of record labels and a cost to music. In were the cover bands, the instant clicks, and by that time I was a dying breed of musician. Now, in my mid 30’s I’ve bounced back on the application train and it’s been an interesting ride to say the least. After applying to a great deal of many things I’ve stopped to wonder… who are these people that I’m talking to? What makes them qualified to qualify me? If this was The Voice, the judges would be a distinguished panel of accomplished singers. They wouldn’t be judging a song, for example, because many of them do not write their own music. No, they’d specifically be judging most likely a cover song and honing in on the voice, (thus the aptly named title of the show). But what about jobs? What about start up funds? This now more so resembles The Masked Singer but the roles are reversed. They aren’t auditioning for the judges, they are the judge. But who are they?

How to follow success rather than chase it.

I am no Martha Stewart. I do not pretend to know the slightest thing about gardening, so if you’re looking for authentic tips on how to prune an avocado tree, then perhaps another site will do. What I can tell you is a set of truths learned by an eclectic array of skills collected over the years. I was a jazz piano major briefly before a real push into the music world. I have spent a good part of a decade attempting to get a start up off the ground. I have shifted over into the user experience universe. These might seem like completely different skills but they are all potential seeds in the garden of my own life. I’m going to attempt to combine these experiences to help you think about your own successes. What are the things that you should nurture? And what are the things that you should just let die?