How we get to who we are

I spent the weekend doing an inventory on myself.

Not the standard business influencers list of heroes, what they taught me about work and perspicacity. Not the normal stuff that is important to the daily pace of life like heath, nutrition and travel.

But the inputs and outputs, the lenses of my personality that are formative to who I am as an individual.

Not that necessarily define me, but inform my beliefs and more so, my perceptions of how I organize myself in the face of the world. The core perceptual structure of ‘Why me?’ when I approach projects or anything new I want to tackle.

I think most of us agree that we are an amalgam of the diversity of our interests. And that, as much as the depth of any expertise, is the overarching characteristic of our value.

It was a fun process, starting with a long laundry list of likes, boiling it down to a few that while randomly diverse, feel just right.

My baseline perceptual self

I am very much a product of my Black Mountain College inspired, interdisciplinary educational background. I was taught to see the world as a fabric where theatre and films, philosophy and modern poetry, architecture and liberal arts are the fingerprint of a life, the true pulse of our culture and the core meaning of our times.

Where artistic behavior, personal, community and market dynamics in general are intertwined.

These are the glasses that I see through each and every day.

Art as an iconic lens into expressions of beliefs

The walls of my apartment are a living pastiche to my love affair with New York, pop art, cities and urban life, and the world seen through the eyes of master iconographers.

Wherever I am, from Lisbon to Seattle to Venice Beach, I see a world through the patchwork perspectives Keith Haring, Lichtenstein, Jim Dine, Donald Sultan, Margaret Bourke-White, Eisenstaedt, Feininger and others.

I filter the world and my work as a marketer as the capturing and sharing of iconic expression that has one foot in the history of art and ideas, the other in the belief that something new is always ready to be discovered.

Classic Hollywood as the shape of storytelling

I grew up cutting school and retreating to the dark and cool of movie theaters and classic films. The history of Hollywood as my view of an immigrant’s dream. Of the frame by frame exposition of internal self from Capra to Fellini to Bergman to Spielberg and Eastwood to an obsession with today’s small screen episodic innovations.

I’m a writer not a filmmaker but to me, the best of words, the trueness of narrative, the power of a communications strategy is visual, emotional and built on a connected dream that movies at their best, epitomize.

That pop culture adopted by the masses and formalized in art is what the world is truly made of.

Wine as a window into culture, people and place

Almost a decade into learning, blogging, network building and understanding how natural approaches to making these fermented beverages have created an ethos of taste and a counterpoint to everything that is technological, frictionless and scalable in my life.

This is what grounds me. So much ado about something that bucks the trends of the world yet holds it together.

This is what lets me get off a plane anywhere in the world and have a community of pure interest waiting for me from people with a common bond and passion.

My family as the baseline of my ethics and belief

I’ve blogged endlessly on how the core ethics and liberal stance of the lower middle class New York immigrant heritage is more and more the baseline of my beliefs on hard work, civility of discourse and acceptance of diversity.

It is some 115 years since my grandfather got off a boat from Russia at Ellis Island, yet still a formative piece of how I decide what is right and wrong.

So—

I woke up pondering how this all works for me.

Why from my earliest days as an adult, I took these studied interests and focused a career on finding the human part of tech and the entertainment industry, building brands and communities around where the newest technology informed expression of the most core human needs and wants?

How this fingerprint of myself impacts the focus of my work today.

How it lets me learn to love what is happening in the crypto world not for the economics but for the community of people and ideas it is platforming and inspiring.

I think it is the very reason of it.

The very thing that lets me take the crazy advances in tech and science, the amazing tactical platforms we have at our disposal and personalize them to my own use.

We are nothing less than the richness of our own perceptions. It’s what makes us interesting and valuable.

I believe if you take this personality of influences, add the formative experiences of your work world, your continued passions towards learning and embracing change, shake well, you simply get a much better self.

We may all not be fortunate and talented enough to create art that lives beyond ourselves, but we do get to determine what matters to us, how we live and what we do.

That’s a big win.