This post will make more sense if you’ve read T = Week 1.
Until this week, I hadn’t grasped the glaring evidence for extraterrestrial alien life. Luckily, I was led to the Truth when our Honda CR-V began emitting wafts of burning rubber.
On Monday morning, I drove to the nearest Midas auto shop. “Eh, probably misaligned calipers,” said the mechanic as I handed him the keys.
I sat down to work through emails on my phone, and wait for those calipers to be set straight.
But in the closet-sized waiting room, The History Channel was turned up to max volume. And wow has that channel changed since I was a kid!
The show blaring from the screen was “Ancient Aliens,” an 18 season tirade that argues that aliens have been frequent visitors to our planet for the last several thousand years.
From what I gathered, the basic idea is (a) everything scientific appears magical if you don’t know its science (b) we are starting to build technology that mimics proclaimed magic from ancient civilizations (ex. personal flights suits), and so (c) therefore, ancient human civilizations must have been visited by extraterrestrial aliens who gave them “magical” technology.
If that logic doesn’t make sense to you, that’s a good thing. “Ancient Aliens” is listed under 3 genres on Wikipedia: pseudoscience, pseudohistory, and pseudoarcheology. If it hadn’t been -4F outside, I would have spared my braincells. There really was no escape.
Calipers aligned, I drove back to the Build Cabin only to learn that our civilization had been visited by a different sort of alien: a 2ft tall, pink, classic anniversary bear.
Bear arrived to us through Gary, our Airbnb property manager. Gary clearly thought we weren’t the types to overprepare for Valentine’s Day, so why not help us out? An adjacent tenant had left the bear when she moved out on Friday. (I’m no Ester Perel, but this does not seem like a good sign.)
To understand the full humor of this bear, you have to understand who Gary is. Imagine a gray-bearded man clad almost exclusively in camouflage, with a gun range in his backyard. Yesterday, as I jaunted out for a run, Gary just nodded from the garage: “bears gotta eat too” — referring to the black bears that roam the area, not the Valentine’s day gift.
Despite his gruff exterior, Gary has completely taken us under his wing. He affectionately refers to us as “knuckleheads” when we leave the garage door open or fail to visit the nearby Bald Eagle sanctuary. Before a snowstorm, we can count on a weather advisory from Gary — the exclusive caller of our cabin’s landline telephone — and after the storm, Gary is out there snowblowing our driveway. In short, Gary is a part of what has made this time wonderful and surprising.
But we are in our last week at the Build Cabin.
And so, the gift bear from Gary brought about some real bittersweetness for Tom, Jackson, and me (Aaron is already back in Brooklyn). This sanctuary has done everything we asked it to: deepened friendship, reinforced accountability, reconnected us with nature, and — of course — allowed us to focus on our respective projects.
Before I leave, I want to share 2 typical days. My goal is not to give you a template but merely to stimulate your own creative juices with one version of one month in one intentional community. Just remember: living “in community” can mean anything. You write the social contract.
So here are 2 days from this past week:
And here is how they broke down by category:
Here are some thoughts for those of you who might be interested in building something like Build Cabin for yourselves:
An explicit common purpose drives decision-making: You should be able to define your community’s purpose in a single sentence. That purpose should guide every decision of the community. Our purpose was: “spend 5 weeks focused on accomplishing milestones on personal creative projects without the distractions of urban life.” Whether we were debating the merits of a no-TV policy or deciding quiet hours, this guiding purpose allowed for efficient decision-making.
Residents should be deeply aligned with the common purpose, not compromising “good sports”: Tom, Jackson, and Aaron have been incredible companions — thoughtful, earnest, hard-working. But most importantly, they were universally motivated by our common purpose. We never fought to defend the common purpose from a watered-down version.
Architecture makes a difference: We could not have guessed how great the Airbnb we selected would be, nor how important. It was perfect in layout (wide, for sonic isolation), location (nature accessibility), and wifi power (well over 200 mbps). The kitchen table was large enough for Jackson and me to work there by day, and the bedrooms each had desks for phone calls. Being ultra-selective about the cabin itself is a good idea: it will have a big impact on what you produce.
Isolation can be helpful: For Build Cabin, being (a) away from a major city, (b) in the middle of winter, and (c) away from TV and screen-based entertainment allowed us to focus in a different way than we ever could have in Brooklyn. But isolation comes in many forms. Think about the most tempting, time-consumptive, decision-heavy elements of your life when designing your isolation.
Isolation can be unhelpful: All that said, you don’t want to be isolated from feedback. As a solo founder, I am hyper-aware of the danger of digging a hole of cozy delusion for myself. Bouncing prototypes and pitch decks off as many humans as possible helps me get around that. If you’re working on a startup, think about this with your intentional community: you want to be around insightful people who have some ability to look over your shoulder and say, “ah I would change this.” But you also want to be in a situation conducive to radio-ing in feedback from potential customers and old colleagues. For this reason, I think Build Cabin wouldn’t have worked in far away timezones.
That’s it for now! Stay safe out there everyone; and if you need a Valentines gift bear, I know a guy :)