Live from New York…

Friends, Romans, Coloradans, lend me your ears:

Welcome to my first newsletter. Why am I writing a newsletter in 2015? Apparently, newsletters are still very popular. Social media hasn’t killed the email and people spend a lot of time reading emails (at work). There’s a Bernie Sanders joke here somewhere, but Larry David beat me to it.

Now, you may think I am going to start spamming your mailbox with emails, but since it’s taken me almost two months to write this first one, I think you’ll be okay.

I want to take you back to August 22, when I first tried to compose this newsletter on a flight to Chicago. I ended up spending the whole flight writing what turned into my first Blog Post: In All Seriousness, the reason I joined Experience Institute.  Then, I spent the next couple of days worrying about what Experience Institute would be like before it began.

Luckily, I met a lot of great people, especially my classmates, and learned a few things about myself. The biggest leap I made came courtesy of Eric Staples, who did a workshop on personal motivation. Eric has a system of archetypes that allowed me to realize that we all make decisions based on our feelings. In Eric’s words, I’m a heart person. I found out that my goal in the world is to be a caregiver to others. I want to achieve this by being a magician.  A magician, from Eric’s presentation, “creates transformation; changes how we see the world, presents new realities; delights with imagination and cleverness.”

Eric’s talk led me to my goal for the year. I want to create places of inspiration, humor and wonder through storytelling.

With this new understanding, I moved again, this time to New York City for an apprenticeship. For ten days, I made the commute from my apartment near Columbia in a nice part of Harlem to an apprenticeship in Soho with the hope of telling stories. Unfortunately, the apprenticeship wasn’t what I had hoped for and I wasn’t the best fit for the position. To put it simply, it was a mutual breakup.

My second blog was all about the lessons I learned from the apprenticeship.

So, now I’m in New York, listening to a song written in a Chelsea hotel by Bob Dylan “Vision’s of Johanna,” planning my next moves. Now that we’re all caught up, I’ll try and figure out what I’m doing with this newsletter before next time.

Thank you for your support and time,

Derek Kessinger