a friend recently prompted me with some good questions along the lines of what am I looking for? how do I want to be? my journal entry soon felt like something shareable.

what do I want? It’s a good question. Overdue for a think on this.

I want to build things I’m proud of.

To LARP an R&D lab with people who love their craft, with whom working together feels like playing in a band. Getting to share a brain on difficult problems, coming up with solutions, shipping them into the real world; into the hands of the people that described their problems to us. I want to see their faces light up when they feel we responded to them, actually listened to them and implemented what we heard.

Ideally our effort is spent working on things which make the world more beautiful and fun. This shows up as many different things; what lights me up is giving people better tools to express themselves. Tools that let them communicate their ideas and thoughts into the world well. Help us understand ourselves and each other and the environment we find ourselves in.

I want to build things that scale. Not in a hundreds of thousands of dollars tuning the red in a notification to make it addictive way. Rather where the needs, learnings, and discoveries of a whole group of people can be merged together into something that lets the individual user benefit from all those other interactions by people they never met, allowing affordances they almost knew to reach for before knowing about them.

I want to pick the problems that speak to me and the group I’m building with that month, or year. Ideally in a way that allows work for companies/organizations that can pay to create some space to serve those that can’t afford to pay as much: the nonprofits, schools, and self-organizing communities of the world.

I want to feel more confident playing with hardware. The process of prototyping, manufacturing, and shipping things that exist in the real world; the world of atoms and materials and physical feeling and touch and texture. Bridging bits back into reality, balancing out the digital interfaces taking up so much of our attention presently it’s hard to see past them.

what does success look like for me? in a single day.

Starting my day out with making coffee, writing and a walk. Maybe tending the garden for a little bit before diving in to the work of the day.

A good work chunk, maybe 3 or so hours. Probably some heads-down time, the kind where I’m ideally touching into a state of flow, going deep on something, soft edm playing in the background. What I need to do is clear, because we decided on it some number of days ago – perhaps for the week, perhaps for the month.

Ideally enough spaciousness to make lunch for myself, and then go for a midday walk or hike. Something to get a break from the computer screen, a chance to reconnect with nature, with the outside, with sensation and difficulty and exertion. Most likely, I’m recording voice notes on the very project I had open an hour earlier. But from a different perspective: one in the world, traversing, moving.

And then I’d gear up for a second work sesh. If the first one was solo-computer-time, I think I would want this one to be collaborative-together-time. Not a meeting per se. Perhaps Communally* Designing something for a local community. High-fidelity, high-bandwidth coworking where we get to work a problem together if we need to, having the space to talk about things that come up while also just getting to push ahead in our individual lanes.

Sometimes working an evening is warranted, fun even. Almost always better together than solo. But for the most part, I want space from the daytime work stuff - space to noodle on side projects, make and enjoy dinner with friends, tinker with my instruments, go for a bike ride with Savannah. I don’t want so much free time in my life that I don’t know how to fill my day. What I want is balance, the ability to work and push on something, and then the ability to rest and enjoy life.

What I’ve written above I would call a reasonable place to be. I know that because I have slices of it at this very moment, and have had other configurations in the past where these things have been present in wonderful proportions.

If we’re really dreaming, non-linear outcomes from the value I help create open up awesome possibilities. Things like being able to co-buy some land with friends and design the space for the next decade. Fund some of my own research. Offer residencies to people I admire. And be able to take group trips to hack with friends on the other side of the planet.

I know those things may come with time. I think the important part to all of this visioning is to avoid keeping it a far-off, someday-it-will-be vision; but instead to try to emulate the world I want live in a little bit each day.