Everyone is more than meets the eye.

This past weekend I was back in Chicago to check out TFCON which is the largest fan run Transformers conference. Normally it is housed in Toronto but this was the first year it had landed in the Windy City. While I am not the biggest Transformers fan I have a friend name Ryan who runs Sibertron.com which is a website dedicated to the toys and culture around the Transformers. He worked with me at Clear Channel a number of years ago and now does this for a living, which I think is awesome. The Internet does a number of amazing things, this is one of them. The ability to create a living doing what you love for a tribe of people who love what you do.

While there I stumbled into a room where some of the voice actors from the cartoons were signing autographs and at the time, Alan Oppenheimer was hosting his own table. Alan is a legend in that part of the universe doing voices for He-Man, Duck Tales, The Smurfs, as well as, many of the Transformers you loved as a kid. In the voice acting world his work as Skeletor from He-Man is the one that seems to get him the most adoration and for as much fun as it was to see my friend doing this amazing thing he loves and making a go at it - as someone who worked in radio seeing this was just as cool:

While we are talking about a DYI universe the other thing that came in the mail this week was the Mike Doughty record "Stellar Motel"

The album was created on Pledge Music which is the musical version of Kickstarter, again where you collect a tribe and crowdsource your ability to, as Seth Godin would say, do your ART. Both Mike and Ryan are doing something profound, they are going against everything culture and your brain are designed to tell you to do. Get a regular job, work from 8-5, take an hour lunch, have a 401K, 2.5 kids. etc. Mind you, there is nothing wrong with this if that is all you want to contribute to the universe.

But for most people they want more, but don't how - or are too afraid to start, but here is the trick...don't eat the moon whole, take it on one piece at a time. Ryan had a "real" job and did his site on the side until his tribe told him they wanted more and that he could do it and provide for his family. Mike was on a record label when he was in Soul Coughing and even when he first went out on his own, until he was ready to trust the tribe of fans to go along with him and create an ecosystem where we contribute to the process of making his art.

Everyone has something that is considered their art, this weekend showed me that. Not that I needed much convincing but when you see a friend so happy in the place they are doing what they love you know that this is a thing EVERYONE should do, not all at once, and not to a destructive level but at some point we must take a chance and do what we were designed to do. Is that sell and curate information on cars + trucks that become robots? Making movies about making a record and then releasing that record, getting into voiceover work, buying a food truck, becoming a photographer? Everyone has something. The trick is to let it out for the world to enjoy.