I want to tell stories...

I want to tell stories.

At the all-hands 2019 Jeffrey Barton FutureX Summit that was the revelation.

In the late summer heat in a European apartment within a country that refuses to acknowledge the invention of air conditioning, after days and days of brainstorming, soul-searching, head-scratching and little ball-scratching...ok, realistically it was probably 50/50 split on the head-to-ball scratches, but anyway, between scratches I decided that I would dust off this dream. And I would tell stories.

That’s it. It’s as simple as that.

Funny how the simplest thing can have the grandest of effects on our lives. Saying “I want to tell stories, because I am a storyteller” was enough. Enough for me to quit my job. Enough for me to upend my life in Amsterdam. Enough to chase away my contentment in the world I’d created. But realistically it is the simplicity of it that gives it that clarity and power. The power of a few words that serve as launch codes for an idea.

And now it is time to begin.

So where do we start? Well first I am going to layout my aspirations within this blog. And then we take a step, and then another, and another and see where we end up. And fair warning, although I favor comedy, I cannot promise laughs the whole way. Which leads me to the first and only rule:

AS SEEN IN REAL LIFE: This is going to be some straight-up memoir shit. I am an optimistic dude, truly, and I hope I can maintain that spirit in my work, but what I write here will be dictated by the moment and experience I am in and all the baggage that comes with it. So get ready for some wandering, lunch will be served along the way and I hope you’re hungry because you’ll be getting the whole-enchilada.

Within the sandbox I will focus my writing on two topics

What is it like to wake-up a writer?

- What does the journey look like from square-one from a practical stand-point?

- What goes on in my head as I walk this path?

Look, my grandparents applaud my writing skills, my mother does as well and I think if I left her out she might feel like her unwavering emotional support has gone unnoticed. It hasn’t. (See how I threw “emotional” in there to subtly suggest she’s not underwriting this early-life crisis? Well not yet at least…)

Aside from a couple pats on the back for some neat word-play here-and-there I have no credentials that say I can call myself a writer. So either this will be an inspiring and enlightening tale of how some corporate schmuck threw off the shackles of monkey-suits and middle management to build lifestyle around storytelling… OR it won't be that, like at all. And it might be more like notes on how this dude just wanted a break from typical life and Trojan-horsed that shit inside the guise of “chasing a writing dream.”

Honestly that is for us to discover together.

Where does this adventure take me?

- No “sub-topics” here… let’s just keep it vague and let it rip.

I’ve molded my post-college life around a corporate career in entertainment and I am now seven days away from closing out eight years slingin’ that business… eight years, damn time flies. I enjoyed the work, the life that came with it, and that’s not a unique story so I won’t harp on my work experience, but I am very interested to see how my life adapts to the absence of structure. A structure that most of us have counted on as the walls and roof that safeguard our lives.

I will also talk about the cool shit that I will be doing along the way! Including but not limited to how cool and stress-free it is to be living off of your dwindling savings account. The culprit responsible for swiss-cheesing my bank-account will mostly be travel. So I will write about that too. I plan to live in several places around the world for various amounts of time… so long as corona-virus allows it. Timing can really be a bitch sometimes.

So there you have it! I am excited and nervous as hell to open this up to the world, but I am glad to have you along for the ride. I hope you enjoy it, and if you don’t, well tough shit, there ain’t no back-seat driving on this road-trip.

Until next time.

- a writeous dude