If you haven't figured out your life's purpose, then your life's purpose is to figure out your life's purpose, but if you reach the age of 25 and you're not hot on the trail, then your life's purpose might not be your career. In other words, 25 should be your cut off if you're trying to find your thing, your thing to do for a living and if you reach the age of 25 and you haven't found your thing, find the thing that will pay you the most money for the Skills that you have forget finding your passion forget uh. I i wan na. No, no, no real life is going to hit you.

You cannot waste your 20s because you'll never have that energy again and that's when you you build your career. So i learned this lesson twice once on my way to finding my thing and then the second time was in probably 2019 and the second time i learned. The lesson was when i strayed from learning the lesson the first time - and this is the story of these pieces that i made. I took this book by kurt vonnegut called breakfast of champions and i built a little rig for it and i typed out the entire novel verbatim.

Then i ran those pages through this machine that put adhesive wax on the back of them. Then i sliced out each line of the novel, and then i mounted each line of the novel to this piece of paper, which is a big sheet of seamless paper. I think it's 10 feet wide and then i traced each drawing when i came to the part of the novel that has the drawing in it. So the idea was to have an entire novel on one piece of paper that you could look at and see it all at once in one space it took me maybe three or four months of basically full-time labor to finish the piece.

The reason i did it so with my life with my quest, i knew like growing up. I knew that i wasn't going to be good at a conventional thing. That would pay me the money that i would want to make as an adult. When i was a kid trying to learn things, i was just on the quest.

What is something that i am good enough at and i tried every okay, i'm going to be a spinal surgeon, i'm going to be a lawyer, i'm going to be a an engineer. I'm going to and then it just things i reached these walls like with engineering i reached the the mathematic wall, i'm not good enough at math with you know, medicine like most of us, it's the physics and biology and chemistry walls that we hit and we're not Going to medical school with law, it's like the reading load you hit, and so, and what am i good at? What am i better at most people at at first you're, trying to find? Oh, what am i a genius at and in my mind i was like. Oh the thing that i don't have to try to do, and i'm just better at everyone with with full um natural talent, and i guess, by the time i was in college. I reached the realization that there is no such thing that that doesn't exist and that there's going to be i'm going to have to just work at something.

So my first quest was, i wanted to be a writer because i could write okay, i had a you know. I could write with somewhat of a sense of humor and i could go to college and read lots of books and sort of follow the trail of writers that i had loved like hunter s, thompson or tom, wolf or um susan orlian. So i was hot on the trail of a writing career. I got a writing job at scholastic, publishing, writing for kids, science magazines and while i was while i was on this trail, i knew that this was going to be the hardest part of the journey.

The hardest part of making a living from like your thing from your talent, is finding it for me. That's what i knew. I knew that that was going to be the hardest part. What do you? What do i commit to because, no matter what it is it's going to be hard and it's going to be probably unlikely that i will be successful and again being successful, meant i get to live like a successful dentist with the income i earned from my talent By weird circumstances, i got a job being an a fabricator for an artist before that.

By weird circumstances i bought a video camera and a computer to edit began editing got hooked on it had no intention of it. It was impossible. There was no such thing as a career of making videos with a video camera and making a living from that it. Just it did not.

No one had ever it didn't exist, it wasn't a paradigm. I got the job as the fabricator brought my video camera to work kept working with the video camera. Making more and more movies it was sort of. There was a there was an effortlessness to it or maybe not an effortlessness, but a compulsion to do it, wherein i didn't have to force myself to do it.

The way that i had to force myself to sit down and write - or i would have had to force myself - to sit down and study and become an engineer there was this compulsion to it and by all these weird divine uh interventions. It was clear to me okay well, this is this. Is your thing this is making these little videos is your thing, and so the story of this is me straying from that. Having learned that, because what happened was i was about 17 years in or something i was fed up with, making little videos i was fed up with the cameras i was fed up with the i hate, the computer.

If the computers work, the computers, the cameras, the equipment setting up this set today, i was so stressed out. It took me two and a half hours. I was so stressed out, and i was like oh this. This is why i quit this is why i um this is why i tried to become a gallery artist and that's what this was an attempt so um.

You know i heard the story of hunter thompson typing out uh the entire novel of the great gatsby, and i had seen this work of art in a collector friend of mine's apartment in new york city, a wonderful work of art by this artist named roman opalka. The spirited man is brought to you by spirited man, merch t-shirts, sweatshirts, hats, link in the description and roman oppalka came up in the conceptual artist era in his entire professional body of work, which i think was maybe 40 years four decades every day of his life. He would paint on like about a six foot by six foot canvas he started on the first canvas he ever painted. He painted the number one.

Then the number two, the number three, the number four the number five in about - i don't know 12 point type and then when he filled the canvas he moved on to the second canvas. So if he started, if he's left with 40 338, the second kansas canvas was 40 339 and he painted these numbers with a super fine paintbrush and i believe when he died, he was in the like. He was at like 2.8, something million, and he had. I can't remember the number of canvases, i'm sure i imagine you know when he reached my age and this i was 42 at the time i imagined by the time he was 42.

He was able to live like a dentist and you'd see his house. He had like a beautiful villa and it was probably in some awesome country, like france or switzerland, or something, and he had built this easel that went up and down so that he could just stand there and adjust the easel to the height. And i thought of the life of that the day to day of that, like the day to day of that, though, difficult would not be like incredibly stressful and heart attack inducing the way that i find filmmaking to be and also if you could hook the career. Somehow, if you could somehow stabilize the career so that those there was more of a demand for those pieces than you could produce, you would sort of not have to worry about money.

Do you know what i mean like you? Could you wouldn't have to live this feast or famine, lifestyle that i feel like i've been living my whole life? So i i said i said: okay, i'm just gon na make a piece. I worked for tom sacks for a decade. I know a lot of people in that world. I sort of understand how it operates and the task at hand is to get a gallery.

So i finished this first piece and then i think i immediately began the second piece, which was the autobiography of of dick gregory, which is a word the title of the book. I cannot say, and then i did one called truly tasteless jokes. I did a typed out a book called truly tasteless jokes, which was like this extremely offensive joke book that came out when i was a kid. My strategy was okay, you have, i have to get a gallery, you have to be represented by a gallery and the the sort of the stature of your gallery sort of demands, a certain price for your work, and so i went and looked through all of the La galleries i like went to some website and found all of the la galleries and then read and looked at every single one of them and narrowed it down to five galleries and then for those five galleries.

I made a super eight proposal in one of my cartridges and with my super 8 movie viewer of introducing myself and introducing the work and saying i would like this gallery to represent my work and i had to make the movie five times you can't you can't Duplicate super eight and i had one camera, so i had to shoot it. There's no editing. I had to just shoot this movie five times and it was like the same movie five times but with five different gallery names at the point in the movie, where i mentioned the gallery, click click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click and i thought well, Someone has to at least respond to this with a phone call. Okay, and i sent it in a nice box.

I did get a response. I got a response and it's from because a friend of mine had a relationship with one of the galleries and the gallery was called ibid and the man in charge of the gallery was is named magnus edensvard, he saw the pieces and he was. We had a great rapport and we got and we got along very well. He was the only one who got back to me by the way um and he put me in a group show and i sold the the the small piece.

Uh was called truly tasteless. Jokes and i sold it to a collector who had bought my work previously and brought bought collaborations that casey neistat and i had done previously. The gallery show was called white and i built this beautiful little invitation dispenser that you'd pull out the invitation and tear it off to this gallery show. So.

Every time i ran into someone i could tear off an invitation and they'd have the little paper invitation before that gallery show. I called my friend and mentor and teacher tom sax, and i told him about this thing and he i told him about this gallery show and i'm doing this thing and he said like. Why didn't you call me earlier and then he basically advised me, you know we talked a lot and he has been in that world for 30 years and by the end of it i said. Well, what should i do and he basically told me go back to filmmaking, and so i sold the piece and it you know it was a.

I sold it for a lot of money, but i think if you were to do it by the hour it wasn't it just wasn't worth it and then i started writing a screenplay. 2019. 2020, that started to you know that picked up steam, and then i had to quit that and as a hedge, after the writing of the screenplay and during the sale of the screenplay for production, which never happened. I started this making short videos for a youtube channel, meaning i went back to the thing i spent 25 years.

Discovering was my life's purpose, or maybe my career's purpose or my life's career. It's the thing that i'm meant to be doing, and it's this thing right now, and so i quit these i quit making these i did one more after the art show. I did one more that was um a light in the attic with by shel silverstein, with tons of drawings and coming up is the one year anniversary of the end of the kickstarter campaign for this channel and the kickstarter campaign was the sort of do or die For the channel like, if i didn't reach the money, then i wasn't gon na do i would i don't know that i would have launched the channel and if i did make the money i had to launch the channel and commit to it and that's where i Am right now i've launched the channel i've committed to it. This is my thing.

I have strayed and then, when the kickstarter came out and i nearly doubled my ask and my i thought my ask was way too way too high and the reception, the very quick, successful reception of the channel was just like big signs from god that this is Your thing, this is your gift, respect it and and do the and do the best you can, and this is your blessing and so on my run on friday, i was really thinking about you know: when is the cutoff age? When do you know? When do you give up, when do you give up on like okay, i'm gon na be an actor, i'm gon na be a blah blah, but i'm not really sure i'm not really you know. Maybe i should maybe i don't know, i'm not really passionate about anything, but i really like taking photography and i'm you know. I was really good at theater and blah blah blah it's 25 years old, because you can't waste your 20s and at least by the time, you're 25. You have half of your 20s left because you'll never get that energy again, so we're coming up on the one year anniversary of the end of the kickstarter campaign and the beginning of the channel and as a celebration of the success of the channel.

I just thought i would talk about one of my beautiful failures this week on the patreon, a live stream. Answering your questions. The link is right. There.