Like all the videos here, I editing this one myself, however, I’m mighty proud of it, as I also filmed it myself with the HD camcorder that Panasonic gave me when I went to CES. No lights, No external mics, No real film experience. Just me, my camera, and Tony. (and Macala from 1928 Jewelry who was sitting in the room for moral support) As an aside, Jerry Tidmore – you cheated during our duel, I challenge you to a rematch.

Tony Hsieh is passionate about culture, he believes that in order for his company Zappos.com to be at the top of it’s game, the culture within the company has to be just right.

"If you get the culture right, most other things like building a brand or great customer service will just happen naturally on their own"

And on my visit to the Zappos headquarters in Las Vegas, I’d say that the idea that culture is priority is a tea that has been steeped to the perfection. The people there work hard, but they look like they actually enjoy it… Enjoy cubicles? I know! (Having broke free of my own cubical prison it’s hard for me to believe too)

Along with a few other values, such as being humble, being a little weird is also encouraged at Zappos.  The Zappos office looks a lot like a huge dorm room (minus the dirty cloths and crusty take out containers), Each desk decorated with each employees personal flair… some of them quite over the top. Only it’s not like that creepy weird guy in the corner cubicle that has pictures of his accordion and neighbor’s cats pinned up everywhere, it’s more like a community pride feel, a pre-school bulletin board, that "I’m so proud of us all" kind of atmosphere that fosters creativity. I guess it’s why they look like they are enjoying themselves.. they are.

"I think a lot of people think that either your creative or your not… Part of being creative is being open minded."

I hope, I hope that the creative, open minded atmosphere that I discovered at Zappos permeates out to the rest of the world. I hope our education system takes a good look at Zappos and organizations like it and changes it’s curriculum accordingly so that our children are ready for these creative open minded companies. Imagine the wonder and sparkle of childhood never wearing off. Imagine loving what you do for a living.

This project has been funded by small contributions from people like you. To support the film, get a cool tee shirt, and get invited to exclusive film related events join the tweet team for $30, or email me about how else you’d like to contribute, you may also scroll to the bottom of the page and support the film monetarily with whatever amount you’d like.

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FYI: This interview was shot with a Panasonic HD camcorder, if I can do it, you can do it too.

Melissa is getting pretty great at editing, but for what it’s worth, she’s still learning about it, had Adrienne Brawley the videographer edited this interview, you all would have giver her a high five for best editing job EVAH. Photo credit: http://caringoldberg.com/Ideas/ideas05.html

A big thank you to Liz Danzico who suggested that I interview Carin Goldberg for my project.

(the original written contents of this post were so tangential that I’ve removed them from this site, to read the original post, click here.)

If you’re also riding the whale, subscribe to life in perpetual beta or follow Melissa on twitter.  If you want to contribute to the cause, join the tweet team for $30, email me about how you’d like to help, or scroll to the bottom of the page and support the film monetarily with whatever amount you’d like.

Disclaimer: Melissa is getting really good at editing, however you should not be fooled into thinking that she has past the intermediate level of the editing experience just yet. Please make allowances. Shout out to Adrienne Brawley for shooting this interview, and to Lucy, my canine twin.

Liz Danzico. A month before we interviewed we sat drinking Clover coffee on a bench outside. The bench had been offered to us by a familiar looking famous guy who wasn’t quite famous enough for either or us to actually name – but we knew, and we were grateful that we had been afforded the moment to thank the mysteriously nameless celebrity. 

That knowing, that moment, that epiphonous magical flash when an idea becomes obvious, even if you can’t articulate it quite yet… what is that? What does that feel like?

For Liz Danzico, it feels just a tiny smidge uncomfortable. What? No still small voice? No tingles of sensational electricity? No instantanious calm?

"When I put myself in a situation where I’m actually uncomfortable, it forces me to look at myself a certain way, it reveals things and teaches me where the next path is. That kind of shows me a puzzle piece, and shows me how the pieces fit together for the next thing."

"When I’m looking for or presented with a new opportunity, and that opportunity seems like it’s going to be uncomfortable… I know that it’s going to be the right thing for me because that sense of feeling uncomfortable in any kind of way, it always reveals something new about myself and teaches me something new about myself that I know will lead to a really rewarding experience."

 It’s not a huge leap, it’s not a frightening all or nothing moment. It’s a tiny risk, a pin prick, a new item ordered from the menu. It’s teaching a language you know in a country you don’t, or picking up a camera and interviewing strangers, or asking an actor if the seat next to him is taken. It’s this tiny moment of preference for growth and newness that perhaps we have been socialized to ignore.

"What’s authentic is what’s inside of you, and what’s creative is what you can achieve based on your insticts… and if you can follow your instincts you can follow a creative path…You need to establish a pattern of how to strip away the excessive things, because so many things get in the way."

So then the question is: How do we strip away the excess, and how do we know what our authentic intuition is?

If you also want to find the link between authenticity and creativity, subscribe to life in perpetual beta or follow Melissa on twitter.  If you want to contribute to the cause, join the tweet team for $30, email me about how you’d like to help, or scroll to the bottom of the page and support the film monetarily with whatever amount you’d like.

Disclaimer: Melissa edited this beautifully shot interview. Had the same time an attention been used in editing and uploading it as was taken in filming it the Rapture would be upon us at this very moment.  Thanks to Adrienne Brawley for the San Francisco filming.

Xuanlana Nguyen is an artist, web designer, and the sole proprietor of Loetus Creative, but most of all she’s a story teller.  She is passionate about communicating a story in everything she creates whether it be a web site or an illustration, she is intent on using her creativity to communicate some kind of narrative. She views her one woman design company as a venture in new school storytelling, an interesting mix of collaboration to bring about a meaningful interaction for both her clients and the people that ultimately visiting the websites she creates.  An interesting way to articulate collaborative creativity I think.

She also touches on her work with incarcerated young women and her passion for helping them to tell their stories through their creative process.  You can tell by watching Lana talk that it’s a very important part of what she’s doing.  In fact, I would almost go as far as to say, that these interactions are exactly what she is in business for.  She designs websites that tell a story so that she can afford to teach other young women to design artwork that tells their story.  

I would’ve loved to interview Lana for longer, and had the construction workers next door kept their promise of remaining quiet for 20 minutes I could have. I would have gotten her perspective about what it’s like to be a female entrepreneur following her own path as opposed to the one her mentors set for her.  I would’ve asked her if she thought the expectations were different between men and women in regards to creative thinking and problem solving.  I would have asked her views about why it is that so many women stay in the background of their businesses.

I could have asked her why she thought that when I asked around for examples of women who were good representations of the core themes of Life In Perpetual Beta… men and women alike came up with nothing.  But I didn’t get that chance, so now I’m asking you?  I know they are out there, I know that their stories are amazing,  so why is it we have such a difficult time recognizing them?

 i struck out on my own a year ago this next month after a meandering pinball path from berkeley to art school to ad agency to nonprofit arts to my own solo gig (under the guise of Loetus Creative). My trajectory mirrors the way in which I live my life and how I approach my work both personally and professionally; it suggests a seeming discontinuity that like a snowball picks up momentum and direction that becomes clear closer to the end, but it’s useful to enjoy the ride and not freak out.

My sense of purpose comes from an interest in communication and voice. What I think I share with other women entrepreneurs/professionals is figuring out how to push my interests/aptitudes in a way that also services a community. For me personally, it is about the small and local successes that have nothing to do with recognition, money, or web traffic, but are instead measured by impact, resonance, or personal reward for the work you do. For example, I work in visual communications, which often means redesigning a brand and an online presence for a client, but the same principles apply to the art classes I do with the young women at Juvenile Hall. In either case, I measure my success in how clearly I am able to help my "client" articulate an idea or story, thereby allowing them to connect to a greater audience or community.

This is a very "feminine" approach to working that is integral to what I do both in form and function: it relies on the actual process of communication and collaboration that is sometimes slow and circuitous, but ultimately the most meaningful to everyone involved. The goal is not just tangible deliverables, though these are useful byproducts– but it’s about listening as much as telling. How I see it, that’s the real business of good communication.

I’m not sure if I fit the criteria for your film in terms of convention. I am not much of anybody in the public sense and my ideas aren’t absolutely original. But I remember my friend alex saying to me ‘determine what is important to you and do it on your terms." I think that’s what i’m doing now in arbitrary strokes, and by that litmus test, I am wildly successful. I consider it an overdue subscription to the book of yes (http://loetus.com/exchange/20080601/iplay/) and I am clumsily tearing pages from it with slow, concentrated delight
 

For more slow concentrated delights subscribe to Life In Perpetual Beta.  If you want to get the insider scoop follow me on Twitter or even better join the LIPB twitter production team for updates interaction and cool schwag.

Despite the clever way she edited Loren’s hat to magically jump back when he discusses puppetry, Melissa is not a professional film editor and thus you should not blame her New York camera man Chris Cavs for her shortfalls in editing.

I was a little nervous before this interview, after all, the character Loren Feldman portrays in his satirical parody blog at 1938 Media is more than a little vicious and has been called a bigot a bully and downright evil. I wasn’t sure I was ready for what was coming.

The morning of the interview I had thought up a myriad of arguments Loren and I would have during our interview in New York’s Central Park, if Loren wanted a fight, I was going to be prepared.  I was so prepared for our jousting match that it was a little bit of a let down when I met the man, but I didn’t really notice the let down at first as I was too busy heaving a sigh of relief.  He was nice, he was charming, he was alive with possibility in all the ways good people are.  Don’t get me wrong, he still had a very strong personality, but he wasn’t the character I had come to expect from his blog. Thank God.

Regardless if you think it’s satirical genius or tasteless drivel, 1938 Media’s brand of in your face, envelope pushing parody and satire is a very interesting study of the dynamic shift in expectation we have with regard to authenticity and personal interaction online.  At some point we have stopped expecting that brands would market for and produce content that was true to the brand itself and have little to do with the people who produce it. Instead we have pushed the envelope so much in the direction of transparency and full disclosure that we expect many entrepreneurs online to use their personalities as a commodity, to use themselves as a "personal brand".  It’s one of the many reason’s why what Loren does throws so many of us for a loop. His juxtiposition to the 1938 Media brand has exemplified (for me at least) that it is still possible to be a person without being a "personal brand".

Which brings me to a frustrated phrase I hear quite often from my coaching clients:

"but I am not my day job."

 I wonder, how long that will still ring true for people as we integrate our personal and professional lives online…

For more sighs of relief subscribe to Life In Perpetual Beta.  If you want to get the insider scoop follow me on Twitter or even better join the LIPB twitter production team for updates interaction and cool schwag.

Melissa edited this interview herself.  Had a professional editor touched it with his/her golden hands you would have cried yourself to sleep with joy at the artistry. Mad props go to Matt Kliegman for his camera stylings and his very bright lil’ LED light.

If you’ve been keeping up, you’ll know that I’ve already interviewed Jason Fried of 37signals, you will also know that in that interview I didn’t think that I asked him the "hard" questions. You’ll know that at the last interview I didn’t know squat about Jason Fried and I ask some questions that now just seem obvious.  You will also remember about how disarming his demeanor was for me.  Lucky for all of us, when I asked him to interview again he said yes.  My opportunity came at 8pm a few nights ago on a  park bench near Milwaukee’s river walk right after Jason delivered a talk to students and staff of Milwaukee Technical College. (A shout out to Vicky of Remarkable Parents for setting it up and inviting me to Milwaukee in the first place)

Once again, I think that I did a poor job interviewing, maybe I asked all the good questions on the car ride up – right before I lost my voice. I don’t know. But here is my take away: Jason talks about being real, he talks about this gut feeling about knowing someone is authentic, and I wonder if that’s not a little of my problem? The guy just puts out that "realness" vibe, and I think the intrinsic "knowing of it" is a real downer for the part of me that puts that knowing into questions.  Now, this could be a load of bull, I’m not closed to the possibility that I just don’t know what to ask yet, but I do know whatever the questions turn out to be they need to be asked.  To my credit, I’m a great listener, and not being too quick on the fire back questions portion is a good thing. And, I’m learning, I’m taking little steps towards a bigger goal, and according to Jason that’s a good way to go about doing things.

"For me it’s about the tiny little things because you can course correct along the way… I think there is this myth in entrepreneurship that you have to take the big risk and you have to quit your day job and sink all your life savings into this thing in order to be successful…  I think you’re better off taking small steps along the way.  You can still have a big plan, just take small steps along the way." – Jason Fried

So maybe I’m doing this right after all, and even if I have to ask for a third interview, I’ll be more prepared, I’ll have course corrected, I’ll have the right questions. It wouldn’t hurt if I wrote down the questions since it seems to be in my nature to be so in the moment that I forget the bigger goal.  Guess it’s time I took a little of my suggestions for my own coaching clients to heart and grabbed a pencil and paper – but then again, is it really such a bad thing to be fully present?

For more course corrections in the key of Melissa subscribe to Life in Perpetual Beta and for even more play by play you can follow me on twitter

Disclaimer: Melissa edited this video herself, when the professional editors of the movie get ahold of the tape, you’ll think this interview sprang from the head of Zeus.

Tiffany Tate, I didn’t know her name for months, I knew her as "The Fem Geek"- a woman about town that knew a whole lot about town…. at least, that’s what I gathered from her blog The Unscene Chicago, TV show, and her twitter, I didn’t actually talk to Tiffany until our interview. It’s not that I didn’t try, it’s that Tiffany had pneumonia forever, and then lost her voice, she had to work alot at her job, and then, school started and she was super busy again… so it goes in the life of a Chicago superhero.

You might be wondering what this interview has to do with the heart of my film.  You may be wondering what Tiffany’s goings on about Chicago have to do with finding ones heart and intuition and following that map instead of the the map to the home of the stars in Hollywood.   I’ll tell you a little something about this dinamo maybe she didn’t.  This woman is serious business, she’s always out there, she’s checking out every venue, she’s meeting every artist, she’s contacting Oprah saying that the Big O could be doing more, she’s got her hands IN IT, and she loves it. She is living breathing proof of someone who wants what she wants.  And you heard her, she’s not leaving.

Even better, she isn’t trying to change anything.  She’s just trying to bring attention to what is, and what is possible.

Even better, she recognizes something that many of us forget.  She recognizes that to find the raw, authentic, real stuff, you got to go to the beginning.  You gotta’ look where people are beginning to figure it out, maybe even before they even know that there is a plan available.

So yes, Tiffany Tate has a thing for Chicago, and she sees something here that fosters creativity more so than other cities – That is to say – Chicago doesn’t have a formula yet for creatives, Chicago doesn’t have a grandly planned hierarchy of creativity, it’s got a bubbling up, an unplanned cultural instinct that just does what intuitively comes next – and that’ s what makes it so amazing.  And I think, that bubbling up, that’s exactly what I’m talking about in my film.

Disclaimer: Melissa edited this interview herself – very late at night. Had a professional edited this video, you could have gone blind after seeing it and been perfectly fine with the knowledge that you had indeed seen all there was to see in the world.  The music is by Sans Analog. (available soon…)

 Up until this interview, I had never seen David Armano in person, if fact, all I knew about the internet celebrity I learned on twitter.  I had no plan to interview him, I’m not even sure that I know how I came to decide to interview him, somewhere buried deep in my brain lies the answer, but it doesn’t matter. I’m glad I did.

The above paragraph is a brilliant micro-illustration of the point of my lil’ film project here.

I do minimal planning, and I follow my instinct as I find new information, and I add that to my cache of knowledge, which leads me to ask more questions, and be passionate about new things and people.  And this whole instinct and improvise thing I’ve got going seems to be serving me pretty well. I’m just rolling with it, I’m planning just enough in advance that I can take the next step. I can’t get it wrong, because I’ll never get it done.

An even more brilliant illustration of the point is a ven diagram from Mr. Armano himself. 

And while I’ll admit that the little speck in the middle of planning and improvising that says "we are here." has my mind referencing a piece of dust in Horton Hears a Who, I can just focus enough on the gist of the simple diagram to recognize that it is profound enough to be part of a much larger conversation. So the question is,  where are you?

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Alex Seropian, CEO of Wideload Games  asked us if we could meet him at a little verdant spot near his office in Chicago.  A beautiful little spot of river walk just perfect for filming an interview…. or so we thought.  It turns out that it’s right next to the Boeing building where they make gazillion dollar deals that can either safely fly you over the Atlantic or blow an entire country off the map!  Although the sweet little river walk Alex picked for our interview is technically city property… Boeing had no qualms about intimidating us the hell away from there – and then after requesting that we not film their building ( what????) positioned yet another security guard at the top of the river walk stairs to take our photo – which WE preferred that they not do either.

I in turn took a photo of the security guard taking our photo, and yelled to him that I’d send it to his grandmother (yes, I am 14).

I was very nice and curtious to the Boeing people, but the truth is I was really f@cking angry… twittering furiously about how absolutely stupid the situation was and trying to keep a light heart and roll with it. (How geeky am I to twitter about it?)

Alex – he just took it in a stride, after all, he’s used to confrontations with the MAN – at least in the gaming world he is.  Just look at the game  Halo that made him famous in the gamer community.  It’s all about blowin’ stuff up and justice for the little guy… just like my little film here.

The interesting thing is, Alex sold his very profitable company to Microsoft, and built a new company that was more aligned with his heart and his interests… he wants to make video games that are not violent adolescent fantasies but games that are funny, games that play like Mel Brooks movies.  He wants to make the kind of games that haven’t been made before. Why?

My guess, after meeting him, is a little of what he said in the interview, that he has kids who will eventually play games, but on a deeper level, this guy is just so curious to see if he can make a game based on humor work, he is totally on fire with this idea. And you know what, his idea is infectious, I actually called Mel Brooks’s film company and told them that Mel ought to call Alex and see about partnering on a video game…. I’m a sucker for a curious and passionate mind, what can I say.

For more about blowing shit up and sticking it to the MAN subscribe to Life In Perpetual Beta

Disclaimer: Melissa herself edited this video, had this professionally shot video been edited by another professional you would have no choice but to riot in the streets about being cheated of your dreams…. that’s how good it would be. Instead, you get Melissa’s editing skills – improving, but sketchy.  Videography by Tom of NotMTV.tv, music by TAT

My good friend Kevin Lyman, graciously accepted my self made invitation to stay on his tour bus for a few days and interview him.  What he didn’t know was that I would end up hijacking his bus and absconding his tour videographer,  Tom of notmtv.tv in the process.  Well, OK, I didn’t either… but it happened.  (sorry Kevin) 

What was wonderful about getting to ride along on the Warped Tour is that apart from getting some peace and quiet ( I know it’s hard to believe but I have 3 kids at home – Warped Tour pales in comparison) and getting to see my friend Kevin and his sharp and witty right hand Sarah,  I also had a great revelation. I  mentioned it in detail in a previous post but will sum it up for you here: I didn’t have a camera, I didn’t have a tape, I didn’t have a camera crew, I got a camera, a tape, a camera crew, a whole bunch of new friends, 4 more interviews than the ONE I intended  to get,  and it just kept getting better, culminating that evening with me standing backstage at Rage Against The Machine in front of 80,000 adoring fans that night at Lalapalooza.  How rad is that?

Moral: Sh*t happens, but when you just open yourself up to the fact that there may be more possibilities out there than you can see – they start showing themselves. 

One of the interviews is the one above with Tatiana DeMaria of the band Tat.  When the tour’s pit reporter Erin told her about my project Tat got so excited about the philosophy behind it she just lit up… that’s when I knew I had to interview her.

She says some amazing things, and watching the video one can’t help but to love her, but I do wonder what kind of uproar is going to come of people watching it when she mentions that she chose not to go to college so she could follow her heart, she mentioned that she’s young and has time to make different choices.  Wow, I think, she’s really taking a risk.  Would the people that you know be afraid to take that kind of risk,  afraid to open that door to face the danger AND the possibility in it?  Would you?

To get more fly by the seat of your pants perspective from a life coach who hangs out backstage worldwide, subscribe to Life In Perpetual Beta.