WNA #2: Disappointment, silver linings, and what I'm reading
In case you missed the previous episode, here you go: WNA #1
The festival
Look. Namur is a pretty city. It’s an old city. It’s marbled with crooked cobblestone roads and dark Belgian cafés tucked away between century-old churches and chapels. But the festival sucked.
I don’t speak French. I estimate that over 90% of the festival’s attendees were either French-speaking Belgians or actual French. Whatever they were, they were hard to talk to. I ended up giving out zero — yes, zero — of my fancy book-quote cards. Zero stickers, too.
There was a designated “networking area” labelled KIKK Pro, and an app that promised a speed-dating style of meeting people. Sounded promising. In reality, nobody was on the app, and the “area” was a big tent filled with booths operated by people who wanted to sell stuff to creative folk.
I guess I wanted to sell stuff to creative folk, too. Back of the line, Rey.
And then there was the clumsy scheduling. The festival had three venues for talks. They were all within, say, a 5-minute walk. Beautiful venues, too, by the way — check out the Theatre de Namur below.
Anyway — talks across venues ran in sync. This meant that, if I wanted to see a talk in Venue A, and then the next talk in Venue B, well, I couldn’t, because I had no time to get there. So I ended up wandering around for 55 minutes between talks, trying to talk to ze French.
The silver lining
Weird light stuff
But it wasn’t all bad. A couple of talks were great. In particular, a talk by a chap called Kyle McDonald who dedicated the past few years of his life to investigating an unexplained and scientifically unproven light phenomenon underneath, or on the surface of, the ocean: Te Lapa. He posts some of that, and other work, on his Instagram page.
A valuable collab
Another great talk was by the lovely people of OMSE. Many speakers at creative conferences spend their entire talk celebrating their own work and achievements. What stood out with OMSE’s talk was that they were brave enough to share lows and struggles, as well as highs.
This resonates with my book. After all, there’s much more to learn from the struggles we share, than just gloat at each other’s work. So, I reached out to OMSE after their talk and asked them if they wanted to talk about, and contribute to, the book.
They said yes 💍. More to come.
What I’m reading
Writing and reading go hand in hand. An upside to reading (non-fiction) books while writing one myself, is that I constantly discover ways to improve my writing. A downside is that I must fight the feeling that my writing will never be “up there” with the other authors.
I always read multiple books at the same time. Not because I’m a genius, but because I get bored incredibly fast. Here’s what I’m reading now — everything on this list is good, because if it’s not, I stop reading it.
The Business of Expertise, by David C. Baker
Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, by Alex Hutchinson
Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets, by Nassim Taleb (I’ve long wanted to read Incerto in its entirety, so I’ve finally begun)
A Little History of the World, by E.H Gombrich
Pricing Creativity: A Guide to Profit Beyond the Billable Hour, by Blair Enns
Thoughts and notes
It’s been a quiet week on my mind. So I dug up some old ones:
A to-do list is a form of debt.
Shallow attempts at being interesting will only impress shallow people.
Expertise is a prison.