poetry, prose, design thinking & entrepreneurship
I’m writing this from Buffalo New York, on the other end of a 400 mile drive. I traveled through beautiful countryside this morning, took a run in a Buffalo park this evening, and set up a new feature so that I can upload snapshots directly to my blog (see “Photo,” above).
Tomorrow I hit the city with Charlotte of The Buffalo Story Project. Here we go.
by Nabil 2 Comments
I’ve spent the last week at home in Pennsylvania, hanging out with my mom and stepdad; visiting my family and friends; and getting together my gear for the trip.
Memorable moments include giving my family dog Oliver a bath; listening to my mother practice the piano (after having stopped playing 40 years ago) while my stepdad and I lay on the living room floor; and visiting my Aunt Barbara and Uncle Michael in neighboring Princeton, NJ.
by Nabil 2 Comments
I’ve pulled together an itinerary that I feel will take me through a good cross-section of America, while also getting me to my final destination (Los Angeles) relatively efficiently.
Regions visited include: the “Rust Belt” (Buffalo, New York; Detroit, Michigan; Chicago, Illinois); the Midwest (St Louis and Springfield Missouri); the “Bible Belt” (Tulsa, Oklahoma; Amarillo, Texas); and America’s great Southwest (Santa Fe, New Mexico; Phoenix, Arizona).
I set off in four days.
A couple of weeks ago a friend told me, “the most powerful stories are those that you tell to yourself.” Shane Murphy, a tech entrepreneur based in London, has taken this premise and built diarydoo, a microblogging diary platform. This platform combines the publishing facility of Twitter with the privacy of a personal journal.
My conversation with Shane sparked a question: why do some of us write down our embarrassing stories? My guess is that act of writing down a story is cathartic. The more we get them out of our heads and in front of our eyes (a journal), or into the ears of others (a performance), the less they weigh us down. Case in point: yesterday on The Moth Radio Hour a guy recounted an incredibly embarrassing story about the first and only time he served as a prostitute (spoiler: they ended up cuddling). I can only imagine that the mix of fear and embarrassment that he felt from telling the story must have been outstripped by the relief of getting it off his chest. Otherwise, why would he have done it?
Which leads me to the next question: if externalizing a story is necessarily cathartic, is there value to keeping a story secret, for secret’s sake? And, in our current culture, where privacy is increasingly opt-out (e.g. Facebook photos, Blippy, etc), is it natural to assume that the private story is an endangered species?
by Nabil 5 Comments
Last week I had coffee with Cara Solomon, a former journalist for the Seattle Times and founder of thesmallstory.com. Cara’s site is based on a premise that I believe in deeply: that everyone has an interesting story to tell.
Through Cara I uncovered a treasure trove of tips and tricks for my storytelling project. Among them, these were my favorites:
On unraveling a new town:
– Visit community gathering spots: often the town diner, coffeeshop, or park, and sometimes (surprisingly) the town dump.
– Ask strangers: who should I hang out with if I want to get a sense of what this town is about?
– For ideas on what to cover in town, as well as who the players are, read the events and help wanted sections of the local newspaper.
On choosing a topic:
– Be flexible: if I try to fit everything into a mold, I will miss out on a lot of great content.
– Approach interviews with as few preconceived notions as possible. Listen hard. What I thought might be most interesting thing about a person at the start of the interview may not be what I find most interesting at the end. That said, if the story is not holding my interest, it will not hold someone else’s; cut my losses and move on.
On hero stories:
– People like hero stories however they’re not rooted in reality. Everyone has a weakness, and it’s that weakness that makes them even more interesting. Discover it.
– Ask: We already know what you’re good at, so what do you wish you were better at?
On dealing with an interviewee’s anxiety:
– Focus on the person, not my questions. Many reporters don’t take out notebooks until later in the interview.
– Explain to people why it is that I’m interested in speaking with them.
– Don’t introduce the video camera without permission, and don’t use the tape to simply recap the interview. Instead, after the interview I should ask myself: what are the five questions that I now want to answer? Use this as my starting point for the taped segment.
I know that Cara’s advice has saved me from making countless mistakes on my journey, and I feel fortunate to have been introduced to her. I also particularly love Cara’s reflection on her work. Writes Cara: “Through the lens of their lives, I can see more clearly my world.” Here’s to the small stories.
One of the things I cherish most about MIT is its openness and irreverence. Today was no exception, when the MIT Club of Boston hosted a super energetic, diverse poetry slam on campus. Some of the performances were funny, others were musical, and a few — performed by recovering drug addicts and former prisoners — were gripping.
One older gentlemen who performed shared a line that I loved: “In the beginning, my stories belonged to somebody else. And then they belonged to me And now they belong to you.”
by Nabil 2 Comments
One of the trickiest aspects of pulling together my internship has been staying focused on my goal, of extracting stories through interviews and performing them. As I wrap up my first week of summer break, I’ve either performed or gone out to interview folks four times. Not only do I wish that I had done more, but I’m surprised by how hard it was for me to make even these four outings happen. In the moment before each outing, I was deeply entrenched in figuring out logistics for my project (e.g. fixing up my car, amassing video equipment, trying to find a collaborator in Los Angeles, raising funds) and felt really conflicted about dropping it to go out and perform or interview folks. And yet when I’ve gone out, I’ve never regretted the decision.
As I think about this challenge I’m reminded of a story about Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, as recounted in the chapter on “Rapid Prototyping” in Tom Kelley’s “The Art of Innovation.” Writes Kelley, ” Rapid prototyping is about acting before you’ve got the answers, about taking chances, stumbling a little, and then making it right. [When Bezos decided that he would launch Amazon] he quit his job on Wall Street, called a moving van, and packed and had his things taken before he even knew where he was going. Incredibly, Jeff hadn’t yet figured out where to cast his e-commerce seeds. His short list included Portland and Lake Tahoe. Unable to make up his mind, he instructed the moving van to simply head west. Think of it: nothing on paper, no place to land his imagined company yet he was already hurtling toward his destiny.”
With Jeff’s example in mind, my new measure of success for my internship is not the quality of my recording equipment, or the number of sponsors that I’m able to recruit, or how well I’ve packed my car, but rather the amount of time that I’m out in the world interviewing people and performing. The rest I’ll figure out as I go along. With that, come hell or high water, on June 1st I start my drive to LA.