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Stephen Pickering

Author: Stephen Pickering

  • Bucket List

    The Faroe Islands — Just saw an article in the New York Times about them. Normally I wouldn’t think much of it especially with the location, but when I clicked on the photos attached to their Google maps presence I was astounded not just by their beauty. Lots of places have beauty in one way or another, but by the mythological nature of it.

  • The Secret of Success: Having Fun

    I’m having a blast. It’s really fun. I don’t know why… But it’s just been a joy.

    Conan O’Brien Jan. 12, 2020, “Nikki Glaser” 1:12

    Why were you trying to find my extension?
    I have a friend who’s opening up a new restaurant in Soho and I was hoping you’d go with me.
    What?
    Do you want to go out with me tonight?
    Why?
    Because it would be fun, and you seem cool.

    30 Rock S1 E11 4:39
    “Did you ever imagine that your podcast would be…like where its at right now is crazy, man.”
    Joe Rogan: “No, there’s no way I could have imagined it. I wouldn’t have believed it.”
    Tom Segura: “It’s so nuts.”
    Joe Rogan: “It’s just…yeah, I just thought it was fun to do.”

    Let me ask you something, why do you do what you do?
    I don’t know. The only time I really feel alive is when I’m singing

    Jennifer Hudson’s character in ‘Sandy Wexler’ [-1:55:54].

    Johnny Cash is not cast in amber, this is the guy before he was canonized, when he was just a musician, when he had runway in front of him and was less worried about getting it right than just doing it. Yup, when done right music is here and then gone, you had to be there, that’s one of the reasons live is such a big deal these days.

    — Bob Lefsetz https://lefsetz.com/wordpress/2019/12/04/matchbox/

    “And one does it not to be good for you, but just because you dig it. Because at last you find yourself in the center, the eternal now, in which past and future drop away, in which divisions created by words drop away.” — [YouTube Link]

    Alan Watts

    Something I do for like no reason besides the fact that it was just like for fun………Mmmm mmmm, I mean because making music is messing around. [Youtube Interview Link]

    Billie Eilish

    You’ve got to find something that you love to do in an of itself that could also become a career. I would even go a step further: the actual doing of it and navigating all of its challenges (like an adventure) actually gives you more pleasure, feeds your soul even more, or if you want to get unromantically scientific about it, releases even more dopamine, than all the other possible accoutrements it could give you (money, fame, sex, adoration).
    That’s a big ask. But I think it’s the key to not only giving yourself the best shot at not only the accoutrements, but producing work that is worthy of them. In another words, work that gives more value to the audience (and keep in mind, especially in today’s world this could literally be anything: arts, business, science, etc.) than the money and attention they are giving to it. This is the key fundamental law of business: B = V + D. Business equals Value plus Distribution. But it’s an equation that can be applied to any career. And thanks to the internet, or more robustly “technology” the definition of what a career can be (“Youtube Star”) has grown at least by an order of magnitude over what it was when I graduated from college in 1989, maybe two.

  • Golf Tips

  • Rumi Quotes and Poems

    This one makes me think of like the bodies’ organs, the intelligence of life itself which is below the pre-frontal cortex consciousness, but which has this ability to do, if you take it all the down to the quantum level, perhaps an infinite number of processes per second and seemingly without effort. This “without-effort” motif really makes me think a lot of the sub-conscious and especially of dreams. Especially in vivid adventurous dreams you are doing and experiencing so much, maybe 10 or 100x or what you have done even in your most amazing real-life adventures, yet your consciousness seems transported there without effort. If you think of fairy-tales and mythology in general this seems a very common and central motif.

  • Individual Brands are the Key Story in Media

    The whole “streaming wars” story is constantly debated. Netflix is my biggest holding and up to about three months ago, I thought it was going to take over the world! I even think there was a Barry Diller quote from that Allen & Co. conference where he said Netflix had already won.

    But then BAM! Overnight everything changes, and I sorely wish I’d sold my $NFLX at 350.

    Now suddenly everyone is producing good content and even the Death Star has seen the light and has a very good product in ATT TV. When I use ATT TV on my iPad it feels just like the Netflix experience (I don’t have to constantly re-login with my cable credentials for instance) and the interface looks and feels exactly like Netflix except with the different channels being like the different movies.

    Then I see something like this on Twitter:

    Look I think Disney and Netflix are going to have great brands and businesses for years to come. Who else could write the check for “The Irishman” and or the rights to College and Professional broadcasts.

    But aren’t individual brands as in the case of Bill Simmons above in sports “broadcasting” the biggest, most exciting thing happening in media? Someone on the other side of the media spectrum is Bob Lefsetz in music. People like this are the top, but right behind them are hundreds of others, and behind that are thousands and so on.

    So, from an investment perspective how does one capitalize on this trend. Well, for one, Bill’s twitter post prompted this blogpost. So Social Media obviously. I have Twitter and Facebook. But should definitely consider Snapchat and if only TikTok weren’t a Chinese company! Even Cramer said a while back when SNAP was re-awakening from the dead that there were “just not enough of them” meaning to me that the different social media channels, Twitter, FB, Insta, Snap, Youtube, Tiktok are simply what cable channels were in 1980.

    Also if this is about the personal brand then it’s hard to go wrong with the web hosting companies like Godaddy, Wix, Weebly, Squarespace. The growth of money flows into these entities over the coming years should be enormous. Etsy as well.

  • Creativity

    Creativity brings the true self to the surface. It evokes the true self. I think that might be the symbology of the Al-addin’s magical genie. Not only is he stuck in a bottle for some thousand years, but then the bottle is in a deep underground cave. I need to go back and read it again, but it would be interesting to see what in Aladdin’s character evoked the adventure itself, and what about his character itself we could learn from to bring at least metaphorically speaking that same kind of magic into our own lives.
    I remember Aladdin being pretty obstreperous but not in a greedy entitled kind of way. He had enough innocence and curiosity in him to let the adventure happen, to let it unfold. One can have too much cunning (and maybe that’s simply called cynicism) where you just don’t trust anyone enough, especially a stranger, to ever let any adventure happen. On the other hand, you can be such a fool that anything you attract out of the ordinary is at best going to be simply more foolishness. “The adventure you get is the one of that you are ready for,” Joseph Campbell. And that readiness has to do with your psychological character, a character made it seems of this perfect balance of “striving for” and “acceptance with.” Every hero seems to have that little magical balance in their character.