Delicious Humble Pie

There's a scene in the 'departed' which makes a strong case for remaking successful foreign films where Jack Nicholson is talking to Leonardo DiCaprio in a restaurant (in character) talking about Leo's father:

'The man didn't care about money, you can't use a guy like that.'

Less relevantly but relevantly Leo says 'Are you saying my father was nothing?' to which Jack retorts 'The man was a baggage cart driver at Boston Airport.'

The 'don't care about money' thing is what haunts me, and I am beginning to think it is a failing in my personal character. Where previously I might have been inclined to think it a strength. Only today did I realise I should have learned this lesson already, read the words and admired them but didn't see them pointing directly at me. A gross oversight:



Whilst many management books and others talk in various guises about having 6 months salary up your sleeve or earning 'screw you money' in order to be able to walk. Something I advocate myself, what I find I can live off is a lot less money than what most would consider 6 months. Furthermore I don't run up my expenses by having overheads like cars and mortgages to financially maintain.

I'm not afraid of being poor and maybe, just maybe it works against me.

Further to that I'm aware I have other weaknesses. The first I came across was how susceptible I am to 'enough rope' with my disastrous campaign for school captaincy where I single handedly took myself from 'shoe-in' to 'not even mentioned' thanks to the heady dizzy drunkenness of early success. Literally culminating in a 15 minute grandstanding speech about nothing which saw me banned from speaking. I'm glad I learned it over something inconsequential like being school captain, but still if given an inch of encouragement I will take a mile. I haven't quite reigned in this behaviour either.

I also would predict that I'm viewed often as a know-all, though my mother aside can't think of an occassion when I get pulled up for it. But I do open up sentences with 'no your wrong' or 'that's not true' and the only time its amusing is when Bryce and I talk to eachother because we both have this habit. But in most other situations the person I'm talking to shuts up and our conversation becomes a monologue. Which means I learn nothing, and probably neither do they as they will be preoccupied thinking about what a jerk I am.
Worst, speaking authoritatively is just a habit of mine, I know no other way to speak and sometimes I have laughed (on the inside) when I've seen somebody nodding in agreement and admiration to something I have said that is pure speculation. This is probably a fallout from debating something any education in this country encourages its 'winners' into which trains you to be convincing about a whole range of subjects you neither understand nor care about. The 'sport' is just to be convincing.

So here are my belated millenium questions to ask myself:

1. Am I honestly taking risks, or no risks at all?

When I cycled around Europe, I thankfully had the opportunity on 2-3 occassions to sleep on the streets and found it unpleasant. Not masochistically pleasant, nor horrifying. It moved my comfort zone out such that I was willing to spend a night in a park or a trainstation.
I never got comfortable enough to sleep when I was on the streets, but I didn't get to a point where I thought, 'oh god have mercy, I can't live on the streets' I was never afraid it might be anything but temporary, because I was always going to move on or just find a vacancy the next day and catch up on sleep where I could.
But I didn't learn to be afraid of homelessness, of poverty etc. I learned how to cope. I never experienced hunger and I was never afraid my money would simply dissappear for all the times poor planning left me broke for a weekend etc.
My initial assumption was that this made me less risk averse and thus I would be more of a risk taker. Now I think that I may have been wrong all along.
I simply stopped caring, and thus lost my motivation to earn any money, knowing that if I didn't spend any I would always have it to fall back on.
Which really means I am just taking no risks at all, which is a sure path to failure. I must meditate on this.
I have a low paying job currently, but still earn more than I can spend. I didn't even care when in a recent lag of business my shifts got reduced, and still kept on saving money.

2. Can I learn fear of failure?

I told Honda that so long as I was learning I would be happy. And I meant it. And I was learning even when I quit. I just didn't think I could fail at Honda, which meant I couldn't succeed. Furthermore what I was learning didn't seem challenging enough.
I've since taken on jobs and ambitions that seemed almost doomed to fail. And I was fully prepared to fail, to lose everything, to fold up and call it quits. I set myself a deadline, and in preparedness probably simply allowed myself to fail, because I was so prepared for failure yet unprepared for success.
If you read 'Vagabond' from the Tiger Issue through to 'Numb' you see Itto Ittosai teach the fearless Kojiro fear, by stabbing him in the leg and overpowering him so that he gets a sense of vulnerability.
I think just such a sense of vulnerability is just what I lack, at the moment I'd walk into the jaws of defeat from a sense of idle curiosity, not clawing and scrabbling for any purchase I can get. I don't even hope for the best.
What I don't have an answer too is how I could put the fear of failure/desire to succeed into me. Would it involve living on the streets? Getting a mortgage? Risking other peoples money?
I don't know, I don't think the above will help me though. Maybe somebody just needs to stab me in the leg.

3. Am I capable of producing any value?

I have the desire to create works, comics etc. But I find there are few people whose opinion I actually care about. Just like at the Les Claypool concert, I thought that while it is nice financially to have fans, I didn't respect Claypool's fans (even though they are decent folk just come to admire the skills they themselves do not possess) and thus their respect meant for little validation.
But for me it presents an obstacle because if I don't value others opinions, there's no point to me trying to create value for them. Even if the money and respect means nothing to me, it should mean something to them. I'm cut off though from having this dialogue with them, I am in the dark as to how to make something that means something to people I don't respect or understand.
I don't know how to tap into that either in any way I wouldn't deem as 'selling out'.