Newsletter #2

Hello,

My mind is a bit scattered this week, and I still haven’t come up with a great system for keeping track of all the ideas I have for the newsletter throughout the week.

This particular newsletter is funny because, as I’m trying to gather my thoughts on what I want it to be, I’m talking about how we took abstract ideas with The Hero’s Journal and Atypical Life and brought them into focus.

Today, we’re continuing our Hero’s Journal storytime, defining what Atypical means, sharing my favorite book recommendation, and lastly, geeking out over some coffee.

The Hero’s Journal

Our story picks up at the end of May 2018. Nick and I had decided to explore the idea of a story-driven daily journal/planner/thing. We had a significant brainstorming advantage at the start—Nick and I were roommates. Naturally, two weeks after we decided to work on it, I moved to Arizona for a job.

The idea was still in its infancy and was now at risk of slipping through the cracks. But one thing you have to admire about Nick is that if he sees an opportunity, he’ll push to make sure he sees it through.

For the entire month of June and most of July, Nick and I would get on the phone after work every day, trying to figure out what this project could become. We researched different journals, storytelling philosophies, and goal-setting techniques.

One day, after three weeks of nonstop brainstorming, Nick called me, saying there were too many ideas and his head was spinning. We knew what could go into the journal, but we hadn’t yet defined what it was. At that point, we were like detectives in those crime shows, with pictures pinned to a corkboard but no connecting yarn.

This is how I remember it: During one our calls, I interrupted Nick mid-thought and said, “Tonight, sit at your computer and type out everything you want this thing to be. Don’t get up until all your thoughts are in a Google Doc. When you’re done, send it to me, and I’ll go through it to make sense of it all.”

Sometimes, when trying to make sense of an idea, you need to clear your mind and get everything out. If you’re working alone, come back to it in a week; if you have a partner, have them read it with fresh eyes. It’s not rocket science, but it can be a game changer.

This exercise is where we’ll end this week’s storytime. The moral of the story: Give yourself the freedom to explore an idea, and then step back to come back to it with a clear mind.

Atypical Life

Where did this name come from? What is an Atypical Life? These are good questions—ones that Trey and I have spent a lot of time trying to define and answer. It’s funny how naming something frames how we think about it. When I spent two months with Trey in Lisbon at the start of the year, this conversation kept surfacing without a solid conclusion. We talked about the values we thought embodied an Atypical Life, what we wanted people to feel when living it, and circled around the elephant in the room: What does it actually mean?

Our recent breakthrough? It’s not fully defined yet.

We came to realize that by living the Atypical Life, as we know it, the values and definitions would reveal themselves along the way. Initially, the pressure stemmed from not fully understanding what it meant in its entirety. However, there was no pressure surrounding what we already knew. So, we decided to reframe our approach: what if we embraced the Atypical Life one principle at a time?

For the foreseeable future, our merch releases will be centered around these principles as we discover and define them.

In June, we launched our first line of merch. On the back, it says in bold letters, “Excellence in the Pursuit of Excellence.” Excellence can be achieved, but how you do one thing is how you do everything. When you shift your perspective from seeing excellence as an achievement to seeing it as a way of being, the results follow—and more importantly, you give the tasks you care about the respect they deserve.

Our next launch will define the next principle of the Atypical Life: Constant Evolution to More. Stay tuned for that.

Reading

I’ll be honest—I didn’t read much this week. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have a book to recommend. When my friend and business partner asked me for a book suggestion, the first one that came to mind was Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

This book is a perfect blend of philosophy and narrative. It explores what quality as an ideal truly is and tells an engaging story of a man traveling across the country on a motorcycle with his son. Nothing better than that.

Coffee

One of the things that first drew me to coffee was the global scale involved in producing a single bag. Today, I’m highlighting a coffee roasted in Japan, grown in Colombia and Guatemala, and brewed in California. Globalization is wild.

We’ve got two coffees from a Japanese roaster called Acid Coffee.

The first is a Colombian Geisha, processed using a combination of washed and fermented methods. If you’re not familiar with fermented coffee, here’s a quick primer:

Coffee beans grow inside a cherry-like fruit. Typically, the beans are extracted and either washed or sun-dried. For this particular lot, the cherries were vacuum-sealed with water and tropical yeast for 48 hours before the beans were removed and washed.**

They say it tastes like sake. I can’t confirm that, but this one was a crowd favorite among the guys. (I have a few friends in town)

The second coffee is a natural Geisha from Guatemala. It’s great because of its simplicity. It’s funny how, with coffee (and many other things), the less processing involved, the more effort it requires. Natural processing means laying the cherries out in the sun for about two weeks, ensuring even drying. This one’s my favorite because it tastes like a quintessential, high-quality coffee.

Summary

I wrote this newsletter backward: I started with coffee (the one thing I knew what specifically I wanted to talk about), then moved on to books, and so on.

Starting with what you know can help you gain clarity on the unknown.

I also love starting with coffee because it’s something I’ve been learning, practicing, and improving at since I was 21, just for the joy of it. It gives me hope that as I continue this newsletter, I’ll grow as a writer, storyteller, and thinker.

Until next time,

Kyle

**I got my info about how they fermented the coffee from their website which I had to translate from Japanese so this may be only partially true. There are a lot of things you can use to ferment coffee.