Experience and the Universal Mind

Meeting people, icons, local developers or artists, legends and figureheads in the industry is eye opening. Some of us try to maintain our composure. We make fools of ourselves as we try to be impressive, stand out or make a connection. Some of us try to play it cool and keep it real. They push down that excitement as they have seen this situation before. It is not new, we rationalize, and we dismiss the need to be excited. Yet, we want to be excited. We fumble or ace it, and either way, we grow on numerous levels. Social, professional, personal. We connect to some form of a greater mind, really, tapping into this universal understanding that we are all in it together. We aren't sitting at home on a Friday night. We are hip, with it, and a part of something big, even for just a moment. You are a part of this club no matter where you are in your own journey. You just won't always see that.

The only difference between you and them are the amount of people paying attention to what they say, potentially.

They deal with the same macro and micro problems you do. Exactly? Well, no, but listen in on any interview or personal conversation some of your favorite developers participate in. Listen to how they describe dealing with time, scope and cost on a billion dollar project just as much as a small team dealing with a few thousands dollars. We all revel in the moments of success, express bewilderment at how things use to be and how things have changed. Not in a way that condescends, but in a way that does not take our experiences and successes for granted. In a way that shows thanks for the opportunities and shows pity for the folks that are trying to find similar success in a saturated market, talking to potentially combative or manipulative media and doing it all from their home. In a way that says "good luck" for having to deal with things as they are now.

Big or small, everyone deals with the same problems. It merely appears in different forms with different names and different solutions. As Joseph Campbell put it in the closing words of Hero with a Thousand Faces, "The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding. 'Live', Nietzsche says, 'as though the day were here.' It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal---carries the cross of the redeemer---not in the bright moments of his tribe's great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair." We are more connected than we realize in this day and age, and not just due to social media or the internet. In many ways we use all of this advanced technology to do what we always have done, share stories and just talk and connect with one another.

The majority of the moments in my life where I think on this and feel connected to something greater have taken place in the last year. Conferences, exhibitions, meeting local developers, new students, prospective students, people from all works of life and reinforced this more and more. Last night, during an exclusive Ask Me Anything, I couldn't help but fall. It makes me sad, seeing all of us sharing these struggles. It motivates me, thankfully, but I always have to crawl out of a hole to get to that productive stage of this process. In a way, I grieve. I don't do it for me, but everyone. Even you.

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