Steve Kamb

Steve Kamb

Goosebumps, Redwall, and the “danger” of books [Nerd Out 8/26/23]

Ever since I could read, my life and worldview have been molded by books.

In first grade, I read my dad’s entire collection of The Happy Hollisters.

When I was 10, I’d count down the days each month for Goosebumps release day.

The routine was always the same. I’d read half of each book that very night, and then finish the book, curled up in a ball under an afghan on the couch, the following morning.

A few years later, I was in my school library and stumbled across a weird sounding book with an armored badger on the cover. It was titled Salamandastron, and I couldn’t help but start reading it right there.

I devoured all 400 pages in a week.

Soon I had read every book Brian Jacques’s Redwall series and eagerly awaited each new release. These children’s book taught me about adventure, bravery, justice, honor, courage, heartbreak, death, legacy, and integrity.

Think “Game-of-Thrones lite,” with animals. They are full of unbelievable highs (shoutout Martin the Warrior) and heart-breaking lows (damn you, Tsarmina).

I’ve learned more from books than anything – or anyone – else.

Whenever I’m struggling with an existential crises (what I like to call “Tuesday”), wisdom and guidance are often only a page away.

Long story short: books rule.

I’ve been revisiting my favorite books lately, and after rereading Lois Lowry’s The Giver, I read the postscript with her acceptance speech for the 1994 Newberry Medal.

Lowry’s closing remarks are fantastic:

“Let me say something to those of you here who do such dangerous work.

The man that I named The Giver passed along to the boy knowledge, history, memories, color, pain, laughter, love, and truth.

Every time you place a book in the hands of a child, you do the same thing.

It is very risky.

But each time a child opens a book, he pushes open the gate that separates him from Elsewhere. It gives him choices. It gives him freedom.

Those are magnificent, wonderfully unsafe things.”

Lowry’s work (and this speech from 1994) is still relevant today. Just recently, a neighboring county in Tennessee voted to not ban a specific list of “controversial” books, an unexpected win for books here in the south.

Here’s to authors writing books that get us to think a bit differently about the life in which we live.

Especially if they’re “wonderfully, unsafe things.”

-Steve

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White Whales And Murder Mysteries [Nerd Out 8/5/23]

Now that I’ve broken free of “must read all the books in my queue”…

I’ve been revisiting a lot of my favorites for a second or third time.

I’m rereading Brandon Sanderson’s entire Mistborn series, and last week I also reread Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic.​

She shares a story about Herman Melville complaining to Nathanial Hawthorne about not finding time to write his book about the whale.

He was “so pulled hither and thither by circumstances:”

He longed for a big, wide-open stretch of time in which to create (he called it “the calm, the coolness, the silent grass-growing mood in which a man ought always to compose”), but that sort of luxuriousness simply did not exist for him.

He was broke, he was stressed, and he could not find the hours to write in peace.

I love comparing Melville’s agony over not having the perfect environment to author Agatha Christie.

In the book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, her story of creative resilience in any environment is delightful:

“I suppose I was enjoying myself so much in ordinary living that writing was a task which I performed in spells and bursts. I never had a definite place which was my room or where I retired specially to write.”

This caused her endless trouble with journalists, who inevitably wanted to photograph the author at her desk.

But there was no such place.

“All I needed was a steady table and a typewriter,” she wrote. “A marble-topped bedroom washstand table made a good place to write; the dining-room table between meals was also suitable.”

“Many friends have said to me, ‘I never know when you write your books, because I’ve never seen you writing, or even seen you go away to write.’ I must behave rather as dogs do when they retire with a bone; they depart in a secretive manner and you do not see them again for an odd half hour.”

No wonder Christie was able to write And Then There Were None, Murder on the Orient Express, 64 other novels, and 14 short story collections!

Rather than requiring the perfect writing environment to create, she instead developed the ability to write and create whenever, wherever.

Bringing it back to Big Magic:

I do not know of any creative soul who does not dream of calm, cool, grass-growing days in which to work without interruption. Somehow, though, nobody ever seems to achieve it….

Even the most successful creative people I know complain that they never seem to get all the hours they need in order to engage in dreamy, pressure-free, creative exploration.

And then Holmes drives the point home: our boy Herman eventually got over his need for a stress-free, focused existence:

Melville never got that kind of environment, for instance.

But he still somehow managed to write Moby-Dick, anyhow.

The Question: Are you waiting for the perfect conditions that don’t exist?

Perfect doesn’t exist.

We can waste months or years hoping for a delusional future in which we get to operate in a perfectly serene environment in which we have no constraints…

Or we can get really good at working in the muck that is reality: finding time to work on our important projects despite the world burning down around us.

We’re not doing ourselves any favors by waiting around.

When I signed my book deal for Level Up Your Life in 2014, I spent six months not writing because “my schedule was too busy.”

I convinced myself I needed large uninterrupted blocks of time and a clear schedule. I just needed to get a few more projects done. I needed to have empty days. Then I could start.

Eventually I realized I was never going to find the time to write.

I had to make the time to write.

3 months of later, I had my first crappy draft done. Eventually, it became a book I’m pretty proud of.

As Hemingway once said, “The first draft of anything is shit,” so the sooner we make something shitty, the sooner we can get to work on making it better.

What’s something you’re waiting for the perfect conditions to work on..when you know deep down those conditions will never happen?

-Steve

PS: Here’s a fun oral history of the famous theme song from maybe the greatest video game series of all time, The Legend of Zelda.

Having just completed The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (170 hours, yikes!), this podcast is a perfect companion.

​Twenty Thousand Hertz: A Beep to the Past​

(hat tip to my friend Ali for sending this my way!)

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A Life Lesson from T-Pain [Nerd Out 7/20/23]

T-Pain, king of autotune, put on an amazing Tiny Desk performance back in 2014, and the internet lost its collective mind because it was so dang good.

This reaction affected T-Pain in way I hadn’t expected, which led to this quote from This is Pop documentary:

“There was a point where I just got more angry.

Like, it was such a surprise to everybody.

Did you think my whole success was based off software? You still gotta write good songs, you still gotta produce good beats.…In one light, it showed how much people respected me more. In another light, it showed how much people didn’t respect before.

So, my philosophy at this point is to make myself happy. I just wanna make music that makes me feel good, and if you don’t like it, I didn’t make it for you.

And if you do like it, welcome to the club.”

What Something You Do Just for You?

Let’s channel T-Pain and do something that we love just for us.

Personally, I’ll be making terrible, terrible music on my violin – I started taking violin lessons again!

Also, this newsletter is for me. I’m glad you happen to like it!

Make something this week, just for you:

  • If people happen to like it, awesome.
  • If other people don’t like it, it’s not for them.

What are you making this week? Hit reply and let me know.

The Nerd Out: Arrival Revisited

Last night, I revisited Arrival, directed by Denis Villeneuve, for the first time since seeing it in theaters many years ago.

I was blown away yet again, even though I knew how the story ended. It’s worth a watch on Amazon Prime, especially if you remember how it ends.

Amazing science fiction, beautifully shot, incredibly well scored, and a story that will sit with you for long after the credits roll.

Arrival is based on a short story in Ted Chang’s Stories of Your Life and Others. Chiang’s ability to combine world-building, heady science fiction, and thought-provoking questions into a few pages is nothing short of brilliant.

This book and Exhalation, are must-reads for any sci-fi fan.

I want to give a quick shout out to Arrival’s hauntingly beautiful soundtrack too – I often listen to this 30-minute looped version of On the Nature of Daylight from Richter to get into a flow state.

Villeneuve also directed Sicario, Blade Runner 2049, Dune (and its upcoming Part 2), and has firmly reached the directorial status of “I will see whatever he movie he’s attached to, no questions asked.”

Big thanks to T-Pain, Denis, Ted, and Max for putting their work out into the world.

I’m gonna go make stuff too.

-Steve

PS: Also yes I have seen the Juvenile Tiny Desk concert too, and it’s delightful.

Great News: We’re Not That Important [Nerd Out 7/13/23]

I was recently reading My Side of the Mountain​, by Jean Craighead George, a 1959 novel about a boy named Sam who escapes the big city to live in the wilderness for a year.

His first day is harrowing. His first night, even worse.

Luckily, he survives and things start to look differently:

“The sun has a wonderfully glorious habit of rising every morning.

When the sky lightened, when the birds awoke, I knew I would never again see anything so splendid as the round red sun coming up over the earth.”

Later in the book, Sam survives an ice storm and emerges from his dwelling to see the devastation:

The mountain was a mess. Broken trees, fallen limbs were everywhere. I felt badly about the ruins until I thought that this had been happening to the mountain for thousands of years and the trees were still there, as were the animals and birds.

Just a good reminder in the grand scheme of things on this planet…we’re not very important. We can take things a bit less seriously, we can have more forgiveness, and we can slow down a bit.

Good or bad, whatever we are facing in our lives, “this too shall pass.”

The sun will rise, the trees will grow, the birds will sing.

The Nerd Out: Marco PM

For the past 15 years, I’ve listened to music from one musician more than any other, and I guarantee you’ve never heard of him.

The man’s name is Marco PM:

The dude has been putting out mixes since 2004 that will put you in a better mood, guaranteed.

These mixes are free, 80-minute vocal trance mixes that Marco has curated based on the best stuff from the past year. They all come with amazingly uplifting names like:

I have no idea if this is Marco’s full time job, where he lives, or who he is. But I’ve listened to these mixes on repeat since 2008. The majority of the articles at Nerd Fitness and SteveKamb.com are all written to this music.

My next project will be created with the help of Marco too.

If you need some tunes to get you through the day, this is the fastest way I’ve found that gets me into a positive flow state.

Thanks Marco!

Today’s Question: Where do you care too much?

What’s one thing you’re doing with your life that is taking an unnecessarily inflated amount of importance?

Let’s remember: we’re not that important, the sun always rises, and this too shall pass…

How can that inform your decision making and attitude today?

-Steve

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Bicycles are Morally Hazardous [Nerd Out 7/5/23]

I recently revisited The Wright Brothers, the biography of Orville and Wilbur trying to become the first humans to crack powered-flight.

Prior to their flight experiments, the Wright brothers opened a bike shop in 1893 to capitalize on the growing trend of cycling in America.

And bikes becoming popular is a good thing, right?

“The bicycle was proclaimed a boon to all mankind, a thing of beauty, good for the spirits, good for health and vitality, indeed one’s whole outlook on life.”

But of course, it doesn’t matter what anybody does, people are going to complain or “concern-troll” whatever happens to be popular:

“Voices were raised in protest. Bicycles were proclaimed morally hazardous. Until now children and youth were unable to stray very far from home on foot. Now, one magazine warned, fifteen minutes could put them miles away.​

Because of bicycles, it was said, young people were not spending the time they should with books, and more seriously that suburban and country tours on bicycles were “not infrequently accompanied by seductions.”

No matter how moral our cause, nor how positive our products or services might be, somebody somewhere will be probably a stick in the mud about it.

Because humans are the worst.

Might as well just do the thing.

Steve Nerds Out: Blatant Product Placement That Actually Inspires.

I’ve recently watched three origin story movies about specific products and consumerism, and they were all surprisingly entertaining:

  1. ​Air (Amazon Prime): The story of the employees at Nike, then a running shoe company (a distant 3rd to Converse and Adidas in the basketball market), and their risky moves to acquire Michael Jordan as a client. Ben Affleck does a great job as the pseudo-sen master Phil Knight. Plus, it’s Affleck and Damon back together.
  2. ​Blackberry (rental): The rise and fall of Blackberry. This serves as both an entertaining and enjoyable origin story (think The Social Network), and also a cautionary tale about corporate hubris. Glen Howerton of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia fame does an amazing job as Blackberry’s unhinged CEO, Jim Balsillie.
  3. ​Flamin’ Hot (Disney+): A fun, lighthearted origin story of Richard Montañez, the janitor at Frito-Lay who created the famous Flamin’ Hot flavor (inspired by his Mexican heritage), which helps save the company during the recession of the early 90s. This is the most light-hearted of the three, and really enjoyable.

Question of the Week:

Is there something you’re not doing because you’re worried about how others will react?

As Seth Godin says, “Be judged, or be ignored.”

Those are the only two options.

-Steve

PS: “The Watch” (a Ringer podcast) just concluded their 4-part discussion/lovefest of season 2 of The Bear. If you watched the show and need to nerd out about it, this is a great listen.