carl donovan

entrepreneur, contrarian, raised by wolves

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biz lessons from bukowski

It can be a very dangerous thing to really ask yourself what you want in life. I mean, to really ask that question and to sit with the answer over and over again.

You run the risk of letting people down, of demanding change, of shaking up your carefully constructed world view.

I usually wouldn’t describe myself as a huge fan of poetry. But every so often I happen upon something that so perfectly captures exactly what’s in my mind and I feel like I’m 20 again, discovering literature for the first time.

To wit, “Roll the Dice”

if you’re going to try, go all the
way.
otherwise, don’t even start.

if you’re going to try, go all the
way. this could mean losing girlfriends,
wives, relatives, jobs and
maybe your mind.

go all the way.
it could mean not eating for 3 or
4 days.
it could mean freezing on a
park bench.
it could mean jail,
it could mean derision,
mockery,
isolation.
isolation is the gift,
all the others are a test of your
endurance, of
how much you really want to
do it.
and you’ll do it
despite rejection and the
worst odds
and it will be better than
anything else
you can imagine.

if you’re going to try,
go all the way.
there is no other feeling like
that.
you will be alone with the
gods
and the nights will flame with
fire.

do it, do it, do it.
do it.

all the way
all the way.
you will ride life straight to
perfect laughter,
it’s the only good fight
there is.

If you’re going to try, go all the way. There’s the tricky part. That’s where you risk everything you hold dear. If you’re going to try, it could mean losing lovers, relatives, jobs, maybe even your mind.

It might even hurt. A lot.

But pain is where the rubber meets the road. No real change is ever going to happen if we stay within the confines of our comfort zones. Winston Churchill told us, “If you’re going through hell, keep going”. But this particular kind of journey, this trip through hell, is self-imposed. It’s the result of stopping to ask if what we’re holding is burning our fingers.

If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start.

If you honestly commit to this process, and go all the way, greatness awaits. In life, in business, in entrepreneurship.

To quote Zig Ziglar, “You don’t have to be great to start. But you have to start to be great”.

do it.

Make no mistake, I’m not professing my own greatness. I’m in this process myself and know it to cause a great deal of upheaval. If I can stay with the pain of that upheaval, I’ll be alone with the gods. With a lot of effort and a bit of luck, my nights will flame with fire. And I pray that I will ride life straight to perfect laughter.

After all, it’s the only good fight there is.

hammers don’t work

I have a friend who shares a remarkable hammer story.

When he was a youngster, he would often work alongside his grandfather in a well-outfitted wood shop, making bird houses and boxes and such. His grandfather would regularly point out to him that he was “choked up” too far on the hammer’s handle. That is, he was holding the handle in the middle and not at the end.

When my friend showed no interest in properly holding the hammer, an exasperated Gramps finally snatched it from his hand, went over to the big chop saw and cut off half the wooden handle, handing it back while pronouncing, “If you ain’t gonna use it, I guess you don’t need it.”

hammers, metaphorically

I was talking with a prospective business client the other day. She described her business, her needs and her challenges. I proposed several strategies I thought we might be able to utilize to get her business back on its feet and restore her cash flow. Nearly every strategy I mentioned was met with something along the lines of, “Nope. Tried that. Didn’t work.”

It was a bit frustrating, to say the least.

In the interest of getting a better handle on her business, my partner and I drove out to meet her at her property. As it turns out, she’s incredibly passionate and dedicated to her life’s work, just frustrated and at her wit’s end. In the process of that meeting, she softened her stance quite a bit and became more open to ideas. So much so, in fact, that I’m fairly certain we’ll be partnering with her to develop her strategy moving forward.

It was about an hour’s drive to her property and on the drive home it occurred to me that she was “choked up on the handle”, metaphorically speaking. The tools don’t work. She’d tried and they’d failed.

If she’d had a kindly but stern grandfather there next to her when she said that, he’d have whacked off the lower half of her handle, as he’d done for my friend, way back in the day.

we already tried that

Now, look, it’s not as though a kid can deliver the full force of a hammer onto a nail. That’s beside the point. Gramps wasn’t trying to perfect him in that moment, just set him up to understand that, even if your hands are too small to properly use a hammer, you should still hold it the right way. Because, “God willin’ and the creek don’t rise”, there will come a time when your hand is big enough and your muscles have grown strong enough.

If you learned proper form at the tender age of 10-or-so, you’re ready to pound some nails. If not, you’ve been set up with a poor understanding of how to use the tool.

Later, when someone sees you trying to drive nails with a shoe, they might suggest that you try a hammer.

The most likely response?

“Nope. Tried that. Didn’t work.”

the surprising elegance of hammers

It may seem, at first blush, that a hammer is a brute force tool. But it’s really not. The concentration of force that is achieved by properly holding and wielding a hammer concentrates roughly 100 pounds of pressure on the head of a nail. The nail’s point has an area of one-hundredth of a square inch. So, the pressure the nail tip exerts on the wood is 100 pounds divided by 1/100 square inch for an amazing 10,000 pounds per square inch!

heart to hands and back again

Yesterday I lost a personal hero. Robert M Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila died at 88.

Sadly, there aren’t many heroes left.

Like many other fans of Pirsig, Kerouack, Kesey, Sartre, et al, I discovered him when I was in my 20’s and found a crystalline view of the world – the way I’d always seen it – if I’d only had the words to express it so eloquently.

Want to know how much it’s meant to me over the years? This is my one and only tattoo, now 20-years-old, fading and splotchy like the rest of me.

When it was fresh and new, you could better make out that I’d opted for an adjustable wrench over a fixed spanner, and that I’d included tendrils to add dynamism to the original artwork. It also had a lovely glint of chrome, which didn’t last, of course.

But there it is, forever inked…

Zen is, to me at least, a seminal work. And the book has come and gone from my life many times. I still have one precious copy, given to me by Rex Carleton, a dear friend and mentor, before I left Seattle in 1997. In it, Rex scrawled the title of this little epitaph, “From heart to hands and back again”.

I think I’d like to be cremated with that particular book in the pine box, when the time comes (FYI).

not about zen – or motorcycle maintenance for that matter

The story goes that Pirsig was out riding motorcycles with a friend. Said friend was talking about how he was writing a book called Zen and the Art of Archery but Pirsig noticed that his bike was not well maintained and burning oil or some other such mechanical sin. Pirsig joked that his friend needed to write a book called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – and a legend was born.

That musing stayed with him and he set out to write it as a paper. Instead, it grew into a book over a period of four years.

Zen is a book about quality. Quality of experience, quality of insight, quality of intention. Fundamentally, it’s a book about how anything you do in life can be art if you approach it the right way. And that way is the way of no-way.

That is to say, the monk meditating atop a mountain in some far-flung monastery is no more in possession of the potential for enlightenment than you are while making toast. You can practice Zen and the art of whatever, if you’ll just be here now.

when walking, just walk. when sitting, just sit. above all, don’t wobble

If Robert Pirsig can find Zen while adjusting the tappets on his an air-cooled freedom machine, where might you?

To “be here now” means to focus, with intention, on this moment. Not the future, not the past, now. It may seem that multi-tasking, power lunches and catching up on the news while on the treadmill at the gym are requirements in order to achieve the level of success you crave.

What if, instead, you recognized your own perfection in this exact moment and set aside your cravings for something that is other than right here, right now?

You might just find Zen and the Art of Work. Or Zen and the Art of You.

Thank you Robert Maynard Pirsig, for sharing your tortured soul with us.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to buy a motorcycle.

Or maybe I’ll just make toast.

ahhh, the joys of home-based production

shinglesSHINGLES! Oh no!

Pallets and pallets of shingles!

This is not the kind of thing you want to see when you look out the window of your studio in the morning.

Admittedly, I have it pretty good most of the time. But there are times when it can really, really suck. Like now.

I have four projects underway and not one of them involves the constant sound of hammering.

Even worse, due to the weather, they plan to be coming and going for the next six days. I know this because I asked them.

Cripes!

Now, look, I’m not complaining here. Everyone has to work in order to eat. And maybe one day I’ll have myself a fat, swanky recording studio on a mountain top somewhere with only the occasional sound of gunfire to throw off my game.

Update: It’s now Friday and I’ve been stymied all week. With the snow and gale-force winds, I never know when these guys are going to show up but, hey, we’re good friends now.

Adding to the frustration is the fact that I have two big dogs, who are nice and quiet most of the time. But when six guys are climbing all over the house behind theirs, they go absolutely stark raving bonkers, every time they step outside to pee.

La vida es sueńo!