People I Adore (part one)

A shift is starting to happen in my design, in my content, and in the way the elements of me all interact. I’m not going to explain the big picture until I’m ready, but I am going to tell you why I added so many links to Virtual Magpie and to this site in the last few hours. These are people who are really having a powerful effect on me, and I want to introduce them to you. Here are the first three, for your generous attention.

Emii, my little sister. Em hijacked a friend, packed up a car and moved to New York to seek her fortune—just a year or two before I did something similar. She’s writing and performing amazing music, inspiring thousands of people, and changing the world (on her own terms). I keep being amazed at how similar we are without really spending any time together. Serendipitously we’re both into personal development, personal power, personal potential, and making things happen in a way that makes us crave new knowledge and skills and understanding. I have often felt disconnected from her—there are a lot of ways in which we just aren’t close at all—but discovering that she was breaking a path a lot like mine (and yet, completely different!) was very connecting, very exciting.

Marty Whitmore, brilliant illustrator. Marty is the friend that I hijacked, and it’s his car that we filled with our lives before making the epic move to Austin. We’ve worked together for four or five years, but in the last few we’ve become incredibly effective partners. He contributes glorious artwork to my projects, and I have made it one of my big important goals in life to build his evil empire. He is mind-shatteringly unique, courageous and frightfully daring (like his artwork). I am seriously proud to have anything at all to do with him, and I intend to make him a crazy successful son-of-a-bitch if it’s the last thing I do. ;}

Pace and Kyeli, communicators extraordinaire. I met Pace and Kyeli a few years ago when Marty and I moved to Austin; we got to know them gradually by attending the first several runs of their communication workshops. I’ve worked with them in several different capacities, but now is the most exhilarating our work has ever been. Marty is illustrating their first book, The Usual Error, and between the four of us we have built them a gorgeous blog and website for the Usual Error Project, their super exciting communication initiative. The insight they offer is simply amazing, and I highly recommend it. Pace and Kyeli are the originators of the Connection Paradigm theory, and they’re hell-bent on changing the world. They’re also the first colleagues with whom I’ve something like a Hill-esque mastermind group vibe, and these days we meet weekly for bold ideas, out-of-the-box brainstorming, and startling clarity on our individual worlds. Those meetings are invaluable to my process, and precious to me.

I’ll be posting the rest over the next day or so. I hugely appreciate your time—thank you for reading. :}

Tagged as: communication, emii, kyeli, martin whitmore, pace, the usual error project