Tomorrow, I move to Hollywood. Today, I turn twenty. I’m excited and nervous. I got up early and ran. In the best shape of my life, approaching a sub 7 body fat percentage. As I paced the track in dead silence, it took me a second to realize: I’m happy again. It took a while, and it took me longer to accept it, but here it is.

The cards are starting to fall in place, some sooner than others. But I’m not going to sit here and try and take credit for where I am. There have been a select group of people over the last year, who in seeing my future clearer than I, set me back on the right path. When Newton said that it was only by standing on the shoulders of giants that he found success, I’d have to add that I was hoisted there in the first place. For those of you in the same place, the only feeble thanks you can provide is working yourself to the bone–to make yourself worthy of that honor now and hope it applies retroactively. When I was at my absolute dredges and I thought I’d lost everything, I pushed forward anyways because they asked it of me. And then I figured out it was all bullshit anyway and purged that pettiness from my system.

Last year I set one big goal: to never work a wage job again. Here are I am, so far so good. Tomorrow I start an internship at a major talent management company (I’ll post details later if I decide it’s appropriate) Tomorrow, I move in with Tucker Max. Everyday I wake up employed by a company that is poised to revolutionize an archaic industry. I’ve met my heroes and made new ones. Could I have even imagined this a year ago? Let alone pursued it? No, and that’s the lesson. It was all just a vague pipe dream that I consummated with a single email. The rest, well that’s for another post. I read an article recently and the message was that missing opportunities is worse than making mistakes. We heard some guy from The Onion talking about how that since he couldn’t think of any catastrophic failures it meant they hadn’t been taking enough risks. I see now that I’ve been following that mindset for a while now, and I’ve got to continue to let it ride. You don’t reward gain by slowing down and hedging every bet. You don’t become a weaker version of your enemy by imitating everyone around you.

A year from now I’ll be done with school, but never with learning. I’ll ditch the albatross of the classroom for the true freedom of education. It’s that theme I’d like to make an effort to follow this year. Trim the fat, cut the dead weight. To all the people who’ve helped me, I plan on, like Cyrus, treating you as well as you all deserve. To the rest, well I won’t be making time for you anymore. I’m tired of wasting energy and effort. I’d like to wake each morning without bemoaning a single person on my life and I just won’t wait for you to change. Like Aurelius said, I must winnow my thoughts, focus my focus. To ask the impossible is the definition of insanity.

And as always, the goal is the same. Why be the one who makes the gratuitous mistakes for others to learn from when you could be the one doing the learning? I’ve read a lot of memoirs and I’d like mine to be different. I can do without ever understanding Fight Club from the perspective of the disgruntled, castrated American male. I can run the race like Sammy, but actually know what it’s for. Epictetus said that knowledge is meaningless without understanding just as strength has no value if it isn’t used for lifting. What good are these lessons if they don’t actually become lessons? Why all this reading if I’m not comprehending the pages? Those are the rhetorical questions I must ask myself each day of my twentieth year or I will waste it like so many others. Results too, are the understanding I must strive for.

For now, that’s all I have. This year will be pivotal sure, but no more than the year after or the year before. It’s the same for the rest of you who email me. Quit putting shit off or deluding yourself into thinking that college is some bubble that excuses meaninglessness and distraction. Hold yourself to the highest standard that you can and watch the improvement pour in as you struggle to reach it. It’s not too late to start now nor too early.

I’ll keep one quote in mind as I live in LA this summer:

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I’ve been fooling around with StumbleUpon a lot lately and I have a feeling that it is the next “big” social network. Of course this is a fairly safe prediction seeing as how Ebay just bought it for like $75 million. Digg and Netscape are fantastic for finding one-off content like news stories or videos or funny graphics but that only takes you so far. StumbleUpon is poised to be the aggregator for the next phase of the web: consistent content creation. That is, finding sites you’ll visit again and again. You can’t digg CollegeHumor but StumbleUpon, based on your interests, can recommend it to you. And in most cases you’re sent to the site for the whole package, not a small part. Most of the content isn’t time sensitive, which again separates it the others. Which of course is absolutely perfect for Rudius. It’s hard to get the word out about a site like DevilMonkey or Philalawyer, it’s hard to get the ball rolling. StumbleUpon makes that really easy–so easy that the readers will do it for you.

If you’re not sure what SU is exactly, it’s vote based content aggregator that sends you to new sites based on tags and popularity. If you put that you’re interested in sci-fi and cats, every time you click the Stumble button it sends you to the most popular sci-fi and cat pages. Then you have the ability to vote them up or down (and post a short review or add new tags). The more you use the service, the more accurate it gets. You just install the toolbar and you’re on your way.

But I’ve found a really great reason to use it: browsing Wikipedia. The random article features on the Wikipedia homepage is ridiculous, what are the chances of it sending you to an article your actually interested in? SU allows you to block off large chunks of stuff you’d never want to see, leaving you only with the subject you want. Because SU only serves content based on the tags you’ve selected, it has a better understanding of what you’re looking for. Once you feel it has been dialed in to represent you, go to http://www.stumbleupon.com/tag/wikipedia/ and click the “Stumble pages about this” button on the right side. This sends you down the rabbit hole of Wikipedia pages based on your interests and previous votes. Then you just keep going and going, hitting the stumble button to further travel into the depths of obscurity. As you vote them up or down the articles become more and more relevant to what you’re into. I’ve found a ton of awesome stuff, some of it funny, some of it really helpful. And I’m sure you can do this for all sorts of portals. Hopefully it will work on Mahalo.com.

Some StumbleUpon Tips:

– Go through your Del.icio.us account and vote for a bunch of your bookmarks and it will dial in your account. It bases your future stumbles on your past stumbles, so this is a good place to start.

– Find the Web 2.0 guys, Darren Rowe from ProBlogger, MSaleem from Digg, etc and add them to your friends. Then you can get your finger on the pulse of tomorrow’s news

-You can go to “Toolbar Options?Position Options” and place it anywhere you want (I keep mine at the bottom in my status bar). And if you uncheck all the little buttons in the same window and select “icons only”, it takes up almost no space.

-If you’re adding a new page to SU make sure you select that it is NOT pornography and don’t put links on it to porn websites like Nu Bay or anything else related to porn or it gives the site a scarlet letter that never goes away.

–Stumble the Rudius pages, I’d appreciate it.

From the NYT: Press Boxes Become an Afterthought, After the Thought of Luxury Seats

The original press box at the 16-year-old U.S. Cellular Field was a fine place to cover a White Sox game. From their nest behind home plate, reporters could easily discern the spin of a curveball or hear the thwack of bat on ball.

But this year, the White Sox gutted it and remade it into the Jim Beam Club, with 200 theater seats and barstools that cost $260 to $315 each; when sold out, the club could generate $4 million or more in revenue. When asked why he moved the press to a much worse vista two levels up and along the first-base and right-field line, Reinsdorf unhesitatingly said, “Financial.”

This article had me shaking my head for multiple reasons. Firstly, you have to love the audacity of the New York Times. Only America’s most pretentious newspaper could “objectively” report on fellow journalists having their pressbox moved. Let’s put aside the huge issue of journalistic ethics here–that they clearly made no effort to understand the other point of view, they never checked to see what the fans or the consumer thought, that perhaps it’s a little unreliable for a reporter to interview another reporter on an issue directly relating to the comforts of reports–and just marvel at the self-indulgence. Do they really think that anyone cares? Are they breaking a story concerning to the public or to themselves? And again, how elitist and absurd is it for reporters to judge the actions of people who have to give them free tickets to every event?

But that’s not the really stupid move. In the end, this could have all been predicted and subsequently avoided. How did the White Sox not see this coming? You NEVER piss off your vocal minority–unless of course, as I discussed early, it is for the benefit of your silent majority. In this case it’s not, so why on earth would you insult the people who write about you?

Mark Cuban clearly understood this. And that’s why, when he saw cuts at the local newspapers, made an effort to make the lives of the reporters on the Mavericks beat a little easier. The Sox needed to ask themselves, is $4 million over the entire season really worth a year of bad press coverage? If it’s worth it this year by a hair, will it be the year after? Yes the NYT did a horrible job reporting this story and that’s exactly the problem. They HAD to do a horrible job. They HAD to stand up for their brethren.

Look what the chairman of the Sox said:

Why do you think they had the best real estate in the building? So every morning The Chicago Tribune would promptly give the White Sox the best real estate in the newspaper. That’s how public relations works. That’s how life works. Of course they don’t “need” it they could watch it on TV or, fuck, make it all up like Mitch Albom. The point is they get it because their influence makes them dangerous. You placate the people who can hurt you or crush them totally. The last thing you ever, ever do is make them angry.

When I read stuff like this, I always like to try and figure out why either side would as as they did. In my opinion the NYT and the rest of the reporters who will surely weigh in, are merely reacting as they ought to be expected to, just as any biased human would. From the stadium owner’s perspective I see short-term greed and utter stupidity, rational irrationality. And then, when I see the logic that brought about such a decision I try to make a conclusion or an aphorism to stop it from happening to me.

“Never induce indignation or disrespect in the people who serve as a liaison between you and your audience. So if that means coddling the middleman, respecting an absurd tradition or treating some loser better than they deserve, so be it. Either get rid of them entirely or maintain their precious status quo.”