Caleb's Apartment

Succeed Until You Succeed

2009-04-14T08:52:00.000-07:00

It never occurred to me that I was failing in my musical endeavors.
When I first started playing bass, I played in a band with two of my friends in high school. We wrote a few songs, played them a bunch, and even recorded them onto tape with my father's old sound system. We never played a show, but we had some good stuff going and we had fun. The drummer went on to start another band and things fell apart for us.
A few years down the road, and many band attempts later, I decided to surf Craigslist for fun. After a while I noticed an ad for someone to play in a band covering songs from old Nintendo games. I responded and went to a house nearby to show off my prowess on the bass guitar. We started picking up members and eventually had gigs we went to. We still play a bunch, and I have a lot of fun, but how much success can you find playing covers of other peoples music?
I met Greg Fusillo in one of my writing courses, and eventually talked to him a bit. He displayed a small interest in the drums, and during one extended talk I offered to show him some of my songs and he could see what he could do with them. He quickly took to them and we started playing together. From there things kind of picked up, and we are starting to play gigs.
I never thought that the bands that happened before then were failures. They certainly didn't succeed in the measure of magnitude that we normally call "success," but I didn't consider that they were miscalculations of my time. I just thought they were things I did, and eventually the things I did lead to the places I wanted them to.

I've always had a little bit of a problem with the "Fail Until You Succeed" model of philosophy. For starters, it seems to me that the object of the model is that you qualify Success as one state of being, and Failure as another. It seems reasonable at first, that you would fail, try again, fail, and try again, and eventually succeed. But it ignores several important details.
1) Success is different for everyone. It's an important distinction to make that the measure of success you may be seeking could potentially be impossible. If you want to be the captain of the basketball team, and eventually you get it, that's a measure of success. But what if your idea of success isn't as clearly defined? What do you call success then? In the fail until you succeed model, success isn't clear. You just keep failing until... what, you get what you want? What if you don't know what you want?
2) Failure is abject. Whenever one fails, they retain a certain negativity to their failure, and tend to think of these past experiences as such. Failure connotes a lack of learning, a pessimism. Failure is the opposite of success, and in the fail until you succeed model, is treated as such. Failure is failure, and nobody enjoys failure.

I prefer to live by the succeed until you succeed model of philosophy. Here's what it looks like to me, using an experience most people go through:
Say you like a person, and so you smile at them. They frown back at you, displaying an obvious disinterest. In the fail until you succeed model, this is called a failure. In the succeed until you succeed model, this is a success. You have succeeded in showing your interest in someone by smiling at them.
A new person comes along in your life that you think would be a good mate. You smile at them, they smile back. Things seem good, so you make an approach and ask them out on a date. They turn you down. This is success. You have made a move, and despite being turned down, you now have the experience of asking someone on a date. Even better, you may also have gained a good friend.
Maybe further down the road you meet someone new, and they giggle at the right jokes. You smile and they smile back, and when you ask them out on a date they say yes. You have a good date and start a relationship, but after a week you start to feel like things are going sour. Neither of you are really enjoying the company of the other, and you think maybe it's best to cut things off before it gets too difficult to. Now you have experience with a relationship, you have a better idea of who you are compatible with, and you know more what to look for in a person who is interested in you as a mate.
Eventually you meet someone who is enjoyable, attractive, and who seems to like you quite a bit. You go on a few dates, start a relationship, and things work like any well-oiled machine. You make great friends, get along, and have all the usual inside jokes.
In the failure model, you have failed until you have succeeded. All those past attempts failed for the right reasons, and lead you to your success, but there is one crucial difference when you look at it from the succeed until you succeed model. All those past attempts were also successes. You learned something about yourself and about other people. You had experiences, and you were able to move past them to have more success in your later attempts at love. Success is much more positive.

Indeed, both models look very similar. Both have the same events, but one is a more enjoyable experience. Can we agree that success feels better than failure? If this new relationship doesn't blossom like it should and you both move on a year, maybe five years, later, would you consider it a waste of your time?
For your sake, I hope not. If it were a failure, you may think it is a waste of time. If it's a success, you may come away feeling dejected, but you will also have learned something about long relationships. You succeeded in having something special with someone. Your later relationships will have this built-in growth that the previous attempts did not.

The succeed until you succeed model works better for the main reason that success is quantifiable. If you start with mild success, eventually your success will grow, and you will have MORE success. Success is always happening. The fail until you succeed model requires you to fail until you achieve that one specified state of success. Failure is always happening.
If what you want most in this world is to succeed, then succeed. There is nothing stopping you except failure.

Pre-Cog Pizza

2009-02-04T16:13:00.000-08:00

Imagine it's the usual Thursday night at Caleb's Apartment. Dan and Dylan are over and there's some rumblings of hunger running through our guts. Weighing our options, and the fact that Papa John's had stopped offering their buy one get one free online coupon on pizza; we made the executive decision and moved to Dominoes with their 555 deal on Medium pizzas. At their website, we placed our order and proceeded to the checkout. ONLY TO DISCOVER THE FOOD WAS ALREADY PREPPED AND GOING INTO THE OVENS!

Were we living in the past or was the pizza from the future?

And that's where the idea for Demonos came about.

Demonos would be the leader in pizza delivery services. Before you even decide you are going to order pizza, Demonos would have your order in their computer and be building your pizza for the oven. The whole event would be so precisely timed that the minute you were about to make the call or enter in your credit card information to the online website, the delivery expert would be knocking at your door holding your fresh warm doughy tomato pie.

How does it work? Pre-cognizance. Demonos would employ hairless people who sit in large vats of warm water that have the psychic ability to know beforehand what anyone in the near vicinity would order. Unable to communicate the orders vocally, special engraving equipment will be used to allow the pre-cogs to convey the toppings to us on special wooden balls that would roll through a complex system of tubes before arriving at the kitchen. Crewmembers would make the pie and put it in the oven. When the pizzas are finished cooking, they'd be put in special Demonos boxes and placed in heat-trapping bags and put in the vehicle of a delivery expert. The delivery expert would drive to his destination and have the pizza in your stomachs just as you decided you wanted it.

Demonos would become the leader in pizza delivery services. The unmatched speed and quality would make them champions of the pizza delivery olympics.

About which there is more to come...

The Denny's Charity Project

2009-02-04T11:56:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, Denny's Restaurant offered free Grand Slam meals to anyone who saw their advertisements during the Super Bowl. The goal was to raise interest in their offering of breakfast combinations. As we are all big fans of free food; Dan, Dylan, Mike, Sean, and I decided to head down there to get our stomachs filled. We found the place packed, and lines reaching out the door. To our excitement, Denny's was also offering Rain Checks to anyone who wanted to participate in the promotion, but could not wait in line for the free Grand Slam. We gladly accepted the rain checks and departed, with intentions of returning.

While at Denny's today over our free Grand Slams; Dan, Dylan and I were conversing about the possibility of a charity promotion to support children in need and our love for Denny's food.

Our project, tentatively titled "Slam It Up With Kids" will have us living at a Dennys while donations pour in for a children's charity of our choice. Because Denny's is a twenty-four hour establishment with free Wi-Fi, we would be able to plug in a laptop and be able to track our progress as well as track the donations. We would set up a special blog account, a webcam, and a Twitter account to keep constant track of us while we perform our charity drive and "experiment."

Donations would be recieved and entered into the system and would extend the length of time we would be spending in the Denny's restaurant (a simple computer program could automatically increase the length of time we would be spending depending on how much people donated to the cause). A seperate plan for donations would consist of goals we would set for ourselves (e.g. Sampling every item on the menu; Not leaving the table for a specified period of time; How many shots of syrup Dylan can do in a row). These goals would be attributed with modifiers, so say someone wanted to donate $1 to the Menu Sampler goal with a modifier of x10, then if we were to reach the goal of sampling every item on the menu they would donate $10. This is almost like betting against us, that we won't be able to accomplish a goal, but will also push us to reach these goals so that we can see more money go to the charity.

The first obstacle in our endeavour would be to convince Denny's to allow us to perform the drive at one of their restaurants across the country. We would prefer to do it at a restaurant near where we live, perhaps at the Portland - Congress St. location or the Westbrook - Main St. location. The Congress St. Denny's has more space to afford us and has a more central location between the three of us. Not only that, but it was the Denny's where this idea was originally concieved. As well as being the place of employment for Dylan's "Pancake Princess," Kasandra. We believe that this idea would be a great and inexpensive way for Denny's to support a good family-based charity, as well as promote themselves across the nation. And we wouldn't say no to being fed Grand Slams during this time to help push their delicious breakfast combination.

After we convince Denny's to allow us to stay an indefinite period of time at one of their restaurants, we would have to start finding means to advertise the drive to find donations. Local and national radio stations could provide that service, as well as many popular websites also looking to help out a charity. Our own website, blog, and cam would help promote the drive, and we ourselves would work full-time to help get the word out using networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Craigslist, etc. that we need to help children across the country.

The last step of this all would be to take our equipment and selves in matching colored tracksuits over to the agreed destination and set up for a long meal. We would sleep in shifts, two staying awake and conversing or keeping Twitter and the Blog with updated and accurate information, while the other slept. During the day we would all eat Grand Slams and drink way too much coffee. We would keep up this pattern, occasionally taking a moment to use the restroom or converse with other patrons of the restaurant about the experiment. Donations will most likely also be accepted right inside the store as cash. Interested parties could sit and eat a meal with us for a donation to the cause as well as help update information and be seen on the live video feed.

Will this work? Could we pull it off? Only time and energy will see our plan into fruition. But we'll probably forget about it tomorrow.

- Caleb