An Oshinsky Family Lesson: Do Big Things With Crazy Amounts of Love.

“Of all the things to be picky about, people is the most important.” — Nick Seguin

 
Two years ago, I wrote a happy birthday message to my mother on this blog. It read:

“A very happy birthday to you, mom, without whom this blog would not be possible, and without whom I would be rendered hopelessly, painfully normal.”

Normal.

Normal.

Normal.

I shudder just thinking about it.

Normal isn’t something we Oshinskys do, and it gets us some weird looks. I’ve done a lot of things that I keep being told I’m not supposed to have done. For me, lots of stuff has come out of order. I covered my first NFL game before I went on my first real date. My first paid job in newspapers wasn’t a full-time gig, but it did involve covering the Olympics in Beijing.

This thing I hear from others — that there is some sort of order to this life — has never really applied to me, and I don’t mind that at all.

Mine is my path, and I’m rather fond of where it’s been taking me, potholes and steep climbs and all.

I learned the ways of the unmarked path from my family. The Oshinsky family does not do ordinary.

My father, at 55, decided he wanted to get into the best shape of his life, and he spent a year doing just that.

My mother, at 52, decided she wanted to run a marathon, and she finished at a 14:30-per-mile pace.

My sister decided she wanted to spend a semester of high school studying abroad — and then pulled off five months on the beaches of the Bahamas.

My brother decided he wanted to use his bar mitzvah for good, and raised $15,000 to build a playground in post-Katrina New Orleans.

I do not believe that we are an extraordinary family. We are not the smartest people you will ever meet, and we are certainly not the most athletic.

But in the Oshinsky family, we take pride in our work. We do big things with great amounts of love. We hustle.

When we go for something, we go all in.

I cannot imagine life any other way.

That photo at top is of my little sister, Ellen. She does crazy beach workouts.

How I Fell In Love. For the First Time. For Forever, I Hope.

Love is in the air ! Literally !!

Something changed in me this year. I know, because I was on the phone with a friend a few weeks ago. I was telling her about all the work I’m putting in with Stry and Very Quotatious and the fellowship, and she didn’t say anything.

And then I saw her a few days later, and I told her that I was speaking at TEDxMU, and I mentioned that I’d started working out with a trainer for the Belly Challenge, and she just stared at me. It looked like she was trying to X-ray me, to look straight through me, to figure out whether or not she was talking to the Dan she used to know.

She knew something had changed. She knew that I’d started to find a new center.

I started to realize it, too. And I started to think about what had changed. And then it hit me. It feels like just a moment ago that I figured it out:

I fell in love.

And here I am writing it, and not caring how cheesy it sounds:

I fell in love.

And again, and again, because it is too wonderful not to say:

I fell in love.

I fell in love with the waking up in the morning absolutely full of awesome. With the feeling that I have when I’m absolutely exhausted after a workout. With the smile I have on my face when I cross something else off my TeuxDeux.

I fell in love with doing. I fell in love with building things. I fell in love with the work.

And then I started to notice a whole world full of fellow builders. Turns out I’d lived in this world the whole time, and I’d barely noticed.

I know now: We live in a world where amazing things happen. We live in a world where there are so many people putting the tiniest dents in the universe. We live in a world overstretched with awesome.

I used to be stressed, and I still am. But now, stress is good stress. Excited stress! The “We’ve got a deadline to make because we’ve got shit to do!” kind of stress.

I find myself smiling a lot. I find myself in front of journalism classes, running around and jumping on chairs and yelling about building things and being awesome, and the students look at me wondering how much Starbucks it takes to make me this loud at NINE FUCKING O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING ON A TUESDAY, and then I tell them that I don’t drink coffee, and they look at me like I am absolutely mad.

And I am. You have to as mad as I am to do the things that I want to do.

There is so much to do, and there is not enough time, but that’s okay. The truth is, there is enough time for now.

And the truth is: When you are as in love as I am, it feels like I have all the time I will ever need.

And the truth is: When you are as in love as I am, time hardly matters at all.

What we build is what matters, and time is only there to show how long it can last.

The Time MLK Day Changed My Life.


So this is the story about how back in 2004, something happened on Martin Luther King Day that changed my life.

Actually, it wasn’t exactly MLK Day. It was the Friday before. Every year, my synagogue in D.C. holds a big interfaith service. Religious leaders from across the city come, and choirs sing, and there’s always an amazing speaker, someone from the community who reaches back and speaks about Dr. King.

In 2004, the speaker was Herman Boone. You remember him as the coach of T.C. Williams High School’s football team, the team immortalized in the movie “Remember The Titans.” Denzel Washington played Boone.

I was writing for my high school newspaper at the time, and my parents got it into their heads that I should go to the interfaith service and approach Boone and ask for an interview. People who know me now don’t believe me when I say this, but it’s true: Back then, I was almost cripplingly shy around strangers. Calling up a source for a phone interview was an ordeal. I remember having to give myself a pep talk before dialing even a single number.

So approaching a guy who just had a fairly epic Disney movie made about his life and asking for an interview wasn’t exactly what I wanted to do on a Friday night.

But my parents didn’t budge on this one, so I went. There was a dinner before the service, and my mother prodded me along — think momma deer nudging her child forward — and over to Boone. I introduced myself, told him what high school I went to, and asked if he might have 20 minutes to talk to me over the phone.

Boone waited for me to finish, and then he asked a question I didn’t expect: What was the name of your high school, again?

Walt Whitman, I said.

In Bethesda?

Yes, I said.

I think we played you guys back in 1971.

1971 — As in, the year the Titans won the title.

Whoa.

I got his number and we set up a time. A few other Titans were there that night — I got their numbers, too. And when I went home, I dug up the name of the Whitman coach from 1971. His name’s Bob Milloy, and he’s still coaching in Maryland, at Good Counsel. He’s the winningest active coach in the state. Whitman was his first head coaching job.

I sent him an email and asked him if he remembered anything about playing T.C. Williams.

He shot me back an email. I wish I’d saved it, but I didn’t. I remember the opening line, though. It said, simply: “Yeah, we played ’em.”

And so that’s how that story was born. I interviewed Milloy, and then talked with some of the Titans, and then Boone. The Boone interview I remember best of all. He told me stories about hurt and pain and hate that I can’t even imagine.

I wrote the story, and it turned out well. My journalism teacher suggested I send it in for an award. The Kansas City Star had this award for high school journalists, the Hemingway Award. I’d submitted two stories the year before and had been named a finalist for sports writing. I submitted again.

I won.

And so I went out to Kansas City to receive the award. There were a bunch of Mizzou grads on the Star’s sports staff. They all told me the same thing: Go to Missouri for journalism. They insisted and insisted — it could only be Missouri, they said.

So I went.

Things fall into place like that, sometimes. Looking back, it’s easy to see the path now. Mizzou opened up worlds for me, friendships for me. The fellowship I’m on now doesn’t happen if I had gone elsewhere for college, I don’t think. So much of my adult life has been shaped by this university.

And yet — I don’t get here without those conversations at the Star. And I don’t get those without winning the award. And I don’t get that if I don’t write the story.

And I don’t get the story if I don’t show up, that MLK weekend in 2004, and ask a coach if he’d like to talk, and if he doesn’t remember that 32 years earlier, his school and my school decided to play a football game.

I don’t know if it’s coincidence, or luck, or fate. But it is one hell of a story, and I’m honored to have told it.

Telling it changed my life.

My List of Things for 2012. (Not a Bucket List, FWIW.)

This is the time of the year when people start making bucket lists. You know what they are; I won’t ramble on here about mine.

But what I would like to discuss is a sort of corollary to the bucket list. See: We have the bucket list, which looks long term. We have the to-do list, which covers the immediate.

What we don’t have is that list for the in-betweens in our lives.

I had a conversation with a friend last week, and I brought up this mantra that I’ve been carrying around for a few years now: “In this life, you find things you love and people you love, and you make time for both.”

And she said the most wonderful thing: Well, I suppose I should start making a list of things.

I couldn’t agree more. Because, I suppose, that’s really what I did at about this time last year. It wasn’t a bucket list that I started thinking about; I wasn’t looking to compile things that I hadn’t yet done in my life. Really, I was looking at things that I just wasn’t making enough time for in my day-to-day life, and seeing which of them I’d like to find time for in the coming months.

I didn’t write that list down, sadly, but if I had, my 2011 List of Things I Love would’ve looked like:

See more live music
Join a sports team
Find more opportunities for spontaneity
Read more often
Launch a side project
Do more yoga
Write and code

I’m proud to say that I checked almost all of those off the list this year. I’ve seen 35 concerts this year, from local bands releasing their first album to U2. I joined a kickball team in DC. I made a few spur-of-the-moment decisions. (What? There’s a Groupon for skydiving? Yeah, I’m in!) I’ve read 12 books, and I’ll be through 13 by year’s end. I didn’t quite launch BooksAround, my social literacy experiment, but I can get that done in the next two weeks. I took weekly hot yoga classes. I’m blogging more than ever, and I worked my way through a CSS tutorial. All in all, I made a lot of time for a lot of things that had gotten lost since college.

And yes, being active with that list meant that I also got to cross stuff off the bucket list. (Skydiving? Check. Visiting Israel? Check. Going to a show at Red Rocks? Check.)

Now I’m thinking about next year’s List of Things. I’d like to keep all of the above in play, but I’d also like to add three things:

Travel more
Speak publicly
Ship things

The first is self-explanatory. I love to travel, and I’d love to make more time for it next year. I don’t have any specific places in mind; I’d just like to get up and go.

The second is something I’ve come around on this year. In 2011, I’ve twice gotten a chance to give speeches to 150+ person rooms, and I’ve learned that it’s a hell of a rush. I used to fear public speaking. Not anymore. I’m never going to be a stand-up comic, so getting 150 people to keel over in laughter during a PowerPoint is about as close as I’m going to get to that sensation. I really love getting up in front of a big room, and I want to find more opportunities to speak in public next year.

And as for the third thing, that’s a business term I’d never even heard until this year. But it means: Create a product and bring it to market. Make stuff and put it out in the world for people to use.

I’ve spent a hell of a long time with Stry — from concept to now, I’m well over 18 months into this company — and what I’ve got to show for it is some blogging from Biloxi, my current fellowship and a few public appearances. What I need to do in 2012 is get this thing out in the world. I need to ship, and ship more often. I love the feeling of satisfaction that comes from getting little items done on a project. I want to experience what it’s like to bring something big to market.

So that’s my 2012 List of Things. What’s yours?

I Am 24 Years Old. This Is What I Believe.

I am 24 years old, and I’m going through a period of transition in my life. It’s that time of the year when I start getting all thoughtful about where I am and where I’m going, and at this very moment, I’m stuck in Kansas City Int’l, waiting for a flight home. So I wanted to write this down.

At age 24, there are certain things I’ve come to believe hold true. I know that my beliefs will change. I know that I will change.

But here, at 24, is what I believe:

Try not to regret bad decisions. Just make the best decisions you can with the best information you have.

When you find that you’ve done wrong, and you have a chance to make it right, don’t idle.

Uncertainty breeds opportunity.

Be spontaneous.

Listening is an active process.

So is life. Don’t be passive.

Only the people who show up get to make change. So show up.

Don’t be afraid to fail.

It’s alright to get rejected. Getting rejected means you’re trying.

At 18, you don’t know that you don’t know what you want.

At 24, you know that you don’t know what you want.

Sometimes, you’ve got to do it for the story.

Do something. Be something.

Define your greatness, and then go out and do something about it.

And most of all, this: In this life, you find things you love and people you love, and you make time for both.

I’m just trying to live up to that every day.

———

Those lovely people in the photo at top: My mom and dad.

Why I’m Doing What I’m Doing.

This was originally published over at the RJI blog. But I really liked what I’d written. So I’m republishing it here:

❡❡❡

This is not a motivational blog post. I am not writing this to inspire you. I do not want you to read this and quit your job.

Is that clear?

Are you sure?

Positive?

Because I go to Mach 1 pretty quickly on these things. I get wound up and start running like Lombardi before the Ice Bowl, like a guy who’s got an Espresso drip running in one arm and the soundtrack to ‘The Natural’ blasting in the earbuds. I get wound up, and sometimes, the fortune cookie quotes start leaking out.

It’s all this one girl’s fault. I was having a beer with an MU student on Wednesday. J-school senior here on campus. Ambitious, talented, overworked. She wanted to know about me and my startup. And like any student worth her journalism degree, she had a good question for me:

Why are you doing what you’re doing?

And I didn’t answer it well enough. Lately, all the questions have been forward leaning: What are you doing now? What are you doing next?

But it’s been a while since someone asked me, straight up: Why are you doing what you’re doing?

I didn’t give her the full answer yesterday. So right now, I’d like to tell her, for starters:

I’m doing this because I can. Because there’s opportunity for something like Stry. Because it’s risky. Because I want to learn. Because I don’t have 2.5 kids and a wife and a job and a mortgage. Because I had the money to get it started, and maybe I’ll find the money to keep it going. Because I hated life in a cubicle. Because I’m too naive to know that failure is all but certain for a startup like this. Because I made it this far, and yeah, Red, maybe I can go a little farther. Because I think the phrase “You can be whatever you want to be” needs another case study. Because I want to do the work. Because I like doing the work. Because I like being busy, and not TPS Report busy or Conference Call With the Head of Whatchamacallit busy. Because this is the time I have, and this is what I have to work with, and because I’ve got people behind me who seem to think I can pull this off, and because so do I, and mostly:

Because I can.

There are not a lot of things I believe in completely — I’m not Crash Davis, alright? — but I believe this: In this life, you find things you love and people you love, and make room for both.

Right now, with Stry, I’ve got something I love. I wake up in the morning excited to get up. I know that sounds like some “Jerry Maguire” BS, but it’s true. I love coming to work. This company sinks or swims based on what I do. It’s on me. This thing goes as far as I can take it.

That’s terrifying and empowering and thrilling, and it’s my day-to-day existence. I love that.

And, yeah, the fortune cookie quotes start leaking out sometimes. But I don’t mind that. I had a yoga teacher in San Antonio who told me once, “Trying is doing.”

So why am I doing what I’m doing?

Maybe it’s because I just had to try.

A Question From Me, The Professional Question Asker.


I went to see NBC News’ David Gregory speak tonight in a little auditorium on Nantucket Island. He spoke for an hour, mostly about the failures of our political system and our economy and our media, and then he closed by reminding everyone that we were on a little island 30 miles off the coast of Cape Cod, and that everything probably isn’t as bad as it seems.

When that was over, Gregory opened up the floor to questions.

This is the part of the lecture I hate.

Not the idea of Q&A. That I love. We need more Q&A in our lives, and not just at big fancy lectures involving salt-and-pepper-haired reporters in nice blazers. We need lots of thoughtful questions and lots of thoughtful answers in our day-to-day lives. And we need everyone to be asking and thinking and listening in order to be part of this nice little experiment in domestic living that we’ve got going on here in America.

Participation is a very, very good thing, and I encourage it highly.

What I dislike is that I ever since I got my degree from the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism, something’s changed for me. I’ll be at a lecture like I was tonight. I’ll be there with someone else. Let’s call this man, for the sake of accuracy, my father. The moderator will open up the floor to questions. And I will sit back in my chair and listen to questions being asked.

Dad does not like this.

See, my father does not see me as a reporter. Or a journalist. Or a writer. He sees me as a Professional Question Asker. That’s what he believes I earned a degree in out in ol’ Columbia, Mo. And when an opportunity to use my Professional Question Asking skills passes without me asking a question… well, he sees it as an invalidation of my college degree.

And I find this funny. Because I am most definitely not a Professional Question Asker. If there’s anything my Mizzou degree certifies, it’s that I’m a Professional Listener. My job is, if at all possible, to shut up and listen. And then report what I’ve learned. That’s why I’m usually in the back of the room scribbling notes on the lecture program.

At these Q&As, I do this quite well.

Dad does not like this.

Sorry, pops.

But here’s what I’m thinking: Pilots don’t get asked to fly planes on their day off. Bobby Flay doesn’t get thrown behind the grill every time he goes out to eat. Librarians don’t just show up at random libraries and start implementing the Dewey Decimal System.

So I suppose it’s with several years of Professional Question Asking behind me that I ask this: Why do I keep getting picked on?

Why I Do Not Have a Smartphone.

I am finding that lately, I have had to defend my choice of telephone. I find this strange, as my telephone does exactly what I want it to do: It places and receives phone calls anywhere in America.

The fact that it does this, and that I pay about $35 per month for such services, seems like a good deal to me.

And here’s what I really like. My telephone does more than just handle phone calls. It can also send and receive text messages, which are growing on me as a legitimate tool for communication. It features voicemail, which is quite a bit more affordable than hiring a secretary to handle similar message-taking duties, and it has a few spiffy additional features, such as a tip calculator and alarm clock. The calendar function is especially useful, and can be used for such purposes as finding out what day it is.

Again, I thought this was a lot for a cell phone to offer.

The good folks at CNET had this to say about my phone:

“In any case, the SGH-A137 isn’t too much to get excited about. The simple flip phone is so basic that it doesn’t even offer an external display.”

Oh.

What I am discovering is that my colleagues agree with the editors at CNET. They tell me that more than my clothes, or my choice of automobile, or my chosen profession, my phone indicates what kind of human I am.

I thought my phone indicated that I was both sensible and uncomplicated.

Not even close.

Not even in a million, billion years. Just NO, Dan.

What my phone apparently signals to others is that I am, at best, uncool, and at worst, a lost cause. There is only one remedy for someone like me:

A smartphone.

A smartphone like the iPhone, or the Blackberry, or something that runs on Android. A phone capable of listening to a song on the radio, determining what song I’m listening to and then automatically downloading said song to the phone’s very hard drive. A phone capable of taking a photo and then rendering it in sepia. A phone capable of booking reservations at a nearby restaurant, testing my food for any toxins, chewing my food, paying my bill, getting me a taxi home, tucking me into bed and telling me a bedtime story.

A phone like that, or something.

I do not like that sound of that. Not at all.

See, I have a very simple mind. I actually like dividing up my devices into specific silos. I like reading on my Kindle. I like typing on my laptop. I like rocking out on my iPod. I like calling on my phone. This system works nicely for me.

And I suppose that, yes, I could get a singular device that could allow me to do all of those things. But I type slowly on a phone. I don’t like reading something on a three-inch screen. I like going for a jog and not having my music device start vibrating from an incoming text.

More than anything, I love disappearing. When I am at my computer, I respond to email. I write. I’m busy.

But away from that screen? I shut down. Work ends. I go out, and I enjoy life in this rather nice world of ours. If you need me, call me. I’ll pick up. But that email of yours will have to wait.

Give me a smartphone and I’d be in a state of perpetual Google. I’d be walking down the street and see a Curly W hat and ask myself, Who was it who hit 3rd for the Nationals in 2006?, and then I’d lose myself in the lifetime statistics of Jose Vidro, and then I’d pour over numbers on Baseball Reference, and then I’d find myself wondering what just happened to the previous 35 minutes. I know, because this is what happens at work. I take a thought, and connect it to another, and another, and then the time just disappears. I am good at wasting time, and on a smartphone, I would waste an awful lot of it.

My current phone? I don’t get lost in it. I make my call. I send my text. I move on. I leave myself time to stop and stare.

It is a phone that allows me to focus completely on what I am doing.

Of course, now that I’ve said all that: I’m going to get lost on the way downtown tonight. I’m going to need directions. A song will come on the radio, and I’ll want to download it. I’ll forget to make reservations at the place I’m headed. I’ll see something that demands to be sepia-ized. I’ll have an urgent email to send out.

And I’ll understand why everyone else has that thing in their pocket.

But me? No. Not yet. Not ever, I hope.

A Eureka! Moment: Why I Only Have Good Ideas When Tiny Scraps of Paper Are Around.

The revelation came to me in the moments before sleep, and I went searching for something to scribble it down on. All I could find was a small envelope on my kitchen table.

But what else could I be expected to write on in such a moment?

What hit me last night, what pulled me out of bed and sent me searching for any scrap of paper, was a simple truth: I only have good ideas when there’s barely anything around to write on.

I have owned dry erase boards that I’ve never used, oversized notepads that stayed blank and binders that held nothing.

But I’ve captured eureka! moments on cocktail napkins, scribbled genius ideas in the margins of newspaper columns and on business cards. I’ve rarely had success carrying around a notebook, with one exception: in the summer of 2008, when I had this bound, 3” x 2” pad that I covered every inch of with tiny thought bursts during my travels in China.

The more I consider it, the more the words jotted down last night on the back side of that envelope ring true: “The profundity of an idea varies in inverse proportion to the size of the paper it’s written on.”

eurekamomentsgraphed

Or, in words: the smaller (and stranger) the thing I’m writing on, the greater the eureka being written. [1. This may explain why I’ve jotted down great ideas on the inside of a paper towel roll but never on an actual, oversized paper towel.]

I’ve always kept these big legal pads around for the moments in which I’d need to fully flesh out an idea. But maybe it’s that a confined space — forced brevity! — is the key to innovation.

Shouldn’t the best ideas should be jotted down in their most basic form first before being carefully considered and expanded upon? Isn’t it only fair to let a spark turn into a slow burn, to let brief moments of genius turn into something of scale?

This is the kind of revelation that could force a change in lifestyle. I’ve started thinking about getting rid of all the big legal pads around my apartment. With the money saved, I could head to a local paper store instead and buy a stack of customized cocktail napkins. (“From the Desk of Dan Oshinsky,” they’ll read.)

That’s just one idea; I still haven’t decided what the next step is. But I’m not too worried. I picked up a tiny green receipt from a parking garage the other day. It couldn’t be more than an inch tall and two inches wide. I guess I’ll just have to keep it around and wait for inspiration to strike.

A Brief Commentary on Why Today is Not Important, Even Though Everyone Keeps Telling Me It Is.


Two things — important things — are happening to me today. I am a very passive observer in both events.

1. I turn 22 years old.

2. I graduate from college.

I know that May 16, 2009, is supposed to be a monumentally important day in the life of Dan Oshinsky. A half dozen of my relatives are here to pinch my cheeks and remind me of how they knew me when I was twenty minutes old. My mother has brought along framed photos of me in rare childhood moments in which I was not napping or eating. My father has been basically beating me over the head with regular, all-caps emails that read “YOU’RE OLD” and “MOVES FAST, DOESN’T IT?”

Look, I get it. I’m a year older than 21. I’m graduating from college. These are big moments. And if I was a generation older, I’d probably be writing this in a diary, or maybe on a CompuServ message board. But I don’t have a diary; I just have a blog.

And moreover, I have no reason to believe that this day is important.

In terms of life’s little narrative arcs, I suppose my family has a point. But it really only means something to someone who’s seen the entire arc. Context is everything.

A birthday hasn’t felt significant to me since I was nine years old, when I realized that I was soon moving out of single digits. It felt significant then; it still does today. I liked the fourth grade; I miss kickball.

And a graduation hasn’t felt important since I was 11. The Wood Acres Elementary School graduation ceremony was a big deal. As kindergartners, we’d filed into the gymnasium for something called “The Clap Out.” All of the other classes from all of the other grades were packed into the gym, too. Someone had created an aisle through the middle of the gym, tiny orange traffic cones marking the path of least resistance, and we pressed up against those cones, looking like mini-Moonlight Grahams, wondering if we dared cross the demarcation line. We watched as Ms. Hall, the Principal, called out the name of each fifth grader, and we reached out our hands into the aisle as each fifth grader ran through it and high-fived everyone within wingspan. And we vowed that when fifth grade came around, we’d do something infinitely more cool than just running down the aisle and high-fiving the rest of the school.

So for six years, we thought about incredible feats that could be achieved while running through a gymnasium at top speed. We planned. We plotted. We schemed.

Then fifth grade came around, and Ms. Hall called my name, and I burst out of the hallway and down the aisle, doing the only thing you can do while sprinting through a crowd of 500 people: high-fiving everyone in sight. Then I went into the aisle and high-fived all of my friends. It took an hour for the swelling in my right hand to go down.

That felt like a big deal then. But this? The Dan Oshinsky Story — a heartwarming tale of a suburban-bred kid who graduated thanks to some very favorable odds — isn’t coming to a theater near you.

So today is one of those days that really only means something if you’re looking at the big narrative arcs. That’s why my mother will be crying today, though, to be fair, my mother would probably cry if I told her that I had a buy-one-get-one-free coupon at Waffle House.

And here’s the thing about narrative arcs: sometimes you’re not sure where they’re leading. Sometimes, you’re not even sure where they’re starting.

Sometimes, you just don’t know that much at all.

———

H/T to Carbon NYC for the photo at top.