Rick Kitagawa's Blog

The social machine of work tells us that unless we’re packed to the brim with a high demand of clients, or own our own company, or are meaningfully employed by a company we love, there’s something taboo about looking for work.

I imagine there’s ties here to the shame many feel about being unemployed or underemployed, survivor’s guilt of NOT being laid off or having a great job in a bad economy, and the overall societal messaging that how much money one makes determines how successful of a human being you are.

Of course, our society has also built up the myth of the lone hero who manages to do it all on their own, when in reality we’re only as good as our support structures that we have in place.

Whether that’s a trust fund from our parents or a rag-tag band of ride or die friends or the tech stack your solopreneur project is built on that consists of technology other people have built, nothing you do is by yourself. 

As a man, it’s important for me to debunk the lone hero myth, as it’s especially pervasive and toxic for us. After all, asking for help around making money reflects what it means as a man to ask for help. It also questions the canonized breadwinner role – what does it say about me if I show any vulnerability or cause others to question my ability to earn money for my household?

But in reviewing my Core Values, I realized that part of why I do what I do is about reducing shame in general.

Because when one reduces shame, a more equal world is created that allows people to show up as their true, authentic selves, rather than some mirage of who they think society wants them to be.

While I personally feel the stigma, tension, and fear around putting the little green ring around my profile photo, I also feel like it’s the choice that clearly aligns with who I am and how I want to show up in the world.

So today, I’m officially changing my LinkedIn status to “Open to Work.” After all, as a coach, visual artist, and consultant I’m always open to work, so why let some perceived notion about how other people will view me get in the way of being clear about who I am and what I do?

Let’s establish a new relationship with ourselves, work, and our humanity where asking for help is not a big deal, our value doesn’t correlate with our incomes, and we’re all open to new work.

PS – Managers/bosses – if you’re afraid of your employees being open to work outside of your organization, you need to reevaluate a) how much you trust them to manage their own schedule, and b) how much more effective they might be if they’re chasing their dreams on the side, c) what kind of job/culture are you creating where people might consider leaving, and d) how resilient/sustainable your org is if a single person leaving would destroy it all.

PPS – I work with people with marginalized identities who want to show up more authentically in their work and feel (rightfully) afraid to be themselves. If this is you, reach out here and book a free, no-obligation 20-minute coaching session and let’s get to work. 

Like settling the debate of whether or not pineapple belongs on pizza (it’s fine either way, tbh), this debate will never be settled. 

Why? 

Because it’s up to personal preferences and personal circumstances, but, as I have opinions about pineapple being a 100% acceptable topping on pizza, here’s the definitive guide for CEOs and owners to consider. 

Working from home is for your company if:

-You’ve built slack into your system through intentionality and eliminating reactivity as part of how you respond to your clients/customers

-You’ve created a resilient culture that prioritizes workers over the work

-You’ve given everyone an appropriately level of ownership and responsibility over their work

-You understand sunk costs, and are okay knowing that the business lease you’ve been locked into for ten years might be one of them.

-You have empathy for people who have different lives than you

-You’ve set up your team with the proper technological and infrastructure needs their work demands 

Working from home is NOT for your company if:

-You have to constantly jump from project to project and act reactively to problems that arise

-You prioritize the work over human lives

-You’ve created a culture of micromanaging and mistrust

-You need to justify (to yourself or someone else) the expense of having a business lease

-You need other people to cater to your whims and personal feelings

-You’ve set up your team with the proper technological and infrastructure needs their work demands

These are just a few of my favorite art toys designs, product illustrations and designs that I’ve created over the years.

To find more of my work, you can visit my shop here.

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After being persecuted, the practitioners of magik have gone underground, many of them even forgetting they have powers in order to fit in with society. However, with the Order of the Dark Wheel making their final campaign to end all life in the universe, these guardians of the planet have emerged from hiding.

The Witchez are a playable faction in my player-co-created storytelling gaming experience on the Tezos blockchain called The Cult and The Coven (TCTC).

You can mint your own Witch, with reveals happening every full moon, here. These are some of my favorite generated witchez to date.

Witch #660 Witch #447 Kat the Pyromancer - #419 Witch #270 Aine - #268 Witch #319 Witch #259 Witch #258 Witch #232 Witch #236{"captions":false,"galleryType":"pgc_sgb_grid","galleryId":"4a452572","images":[{"id":1525,"title":"660","url":"https://rickkitagawa.com/wp-content/u... #660","mime":"image/jpeg","type":"image","width":2560,"height":2560,"sizes":{"thumbnail":{"height":150,"width":150,"url":"https://rickkitagawa.com/wp-content/u... #447","mime":"image/jpeg","type":"image","width":2560,"height":2560,"sizes":{"thumbnail":{"height":150,"width":150,"url":"https://rickkitagawa.com/wp-content/u... the Pyromancer - #419","mime":"image/jpeg","type":"image","width":2560,"height":2560,"sizes":{"thumbnail":{"height":150,"width":150,"url":"https://rickkitagawa.com/wp-content/u... #270","mime":"image/jpeg","type":"image","width":2560,"height":2560,"sizes":{"thumbnail":{"height":150,"width":150,"url":"https://rickkitagawa.com/wp-content/u... - #268","mime":"image/jpeg","type":"image","width":2560,"height":2560,"sizes":{"thumbnail":{"height":150,"width":150,"url":"https://rickkitagawa.com/wp-content/u... #319","mime":"image/jpeg","type":"image","width":2560,"height":2560,"sizes":{"thumbnail":{"height":150,"width":150,"url":"https://rickkitagawa.com/wp-content/u... #259","mime":"image/jpeg","type":"image","width":2560,"height":2560,"sizes":{"thumbnail":{"height":150,"width":150,"url":"https://rickkitagawa.com/wp-content/u... #258","mime":"image/jpeg","type":"image","width":2560,"height":2560,"sizes":{"thumbnail":{"height":150,"width":150,"url":"https://rickkitagawa.com/wp-content/u... #232","mime":"image/jpeg","type":"image","width":2560,"height":2560,"sizes":{"thumbnail":{"height":150,"width":150,"url":"https://rickkitagawa.com/wp-content/u... #236","mime":"image/jpeg","type":"image","width":2560,"height":2560,"sizes":{"thumbnail":{"height":150,"width":150,"url":"https://rickkitagawa.com/wp-content/u... && window.PGC_SGB.searcher){window.PGC_SGB.searcher.initBlocks()}})()

I recently needed to refresh some things, and I ended up using an entirely new WordPress theme, so I tore some stuff down, rebuilt it, etc. etc.

I’m getting used to this new layout, but it’s been a helpful reminder that permanence is overrated and that adaptability is the key skill to survive our Brave New World.

After all, between the massive ecological and environmental catastrophes happening (chemical explosion in Ohio, earthquake in Turkiye/Syria, winter storm basically everywhere) and human-made madness (continued war in Ukraine, chemical explosion in Ohio), it’s easy to yearn for some stability.

I assert that stability is a state of mind. Having a job where you’re valued and paid well doesn’t mean it’ll be there tomorrow.

Being in a marriage of 50 years doesn’t mean your spouse can’t divorce you next year.

We often equate stability as long-term patterns, but in reality past performance does not always mean future performance, as much as we might want it to.

Nothing is stable if you take the time period of evaluation and stretch it long enough.

While that might be super destabilizing, I often think of it as empowering. After all, if we can’t count on anything 100%, then we can forgive ourselves with things go wrong and do our best at making decisions as if they were bets, rather than things forged in stone.

And I think it’s worth mentioning that the structure of the blog may shift a bit (if you haven’t noticed the leaning it’s been doing in the past few months).

I’ve been leaning into building in public more and more, and I’ll likely be dropping longer pieces, thrashing in public a bit, and talking about creativity, authenticity, and brand building more than I have in the past.

So buckle up (or unsubscribe if that’s not your jam), and let’s goooooooo!

Truffle salt, or salt that’s been infused with the flavor of white or black truffles, is expensive, flavorful, amazing salt.

I think it makes most dishes taste better, and I recently gifted some to a friend who’s a huge fan of the culinary arts. 

And as amazing as this salt might be, it does absolutely nothing beneficial for my other friend who doesn’t like the taste of truffles at all, no matter the fact that some people pay upwards of $300 USD per pound of these little mushrooms.

Value is relative, contextual, and completely in the eye of the person paying for it.

As I close out 2022 in a personal vacay, I woke up today remember that I could procrastinate no longer in doing my annual review, a practice I picked up from Chris Guillebeau a few years back.

Will there be lessons learned? Maybe! Will there be TMI? Maybe! Who knows, I’m doing this undrafted and writing in my blog’s composer as opposed to Google Docs, so we’ll see what typos I miss.

I should come clean that I really have no running format, as I only do this once a year, and it’s usually hurried and last-minute (as it is this year), so going back to check what I did last year seems like a luxury of time I don’t have. Regardless, I’ll try to lump things together around buckets of things I’ve learned.

SUSTAINABILITY

I started out this year in a flurry, overbooked and slightly overwhelmed. I was helping build out a live learning experience with DISCO called Practical Utopias for Margaret Atwood, all while head coaching a session of the altMBA as well as The Copy Workshop. And due to some scheduling mishaps, I was also cohort coaching in the altMBA as well. My January-March (while also managing some private coaching clients) ended up being me working three 20-hr/week jobs (while trying to maintain an NFT community). 

This is not advised. 

When everything wrapped up for me in April, I was pretty exhausted, and I wasn’t really satisfied with my output. When I had overloaded myself in the past, I usually could manage to rise to the challenge, but in retrospect I was responsible for a much higher level of work that required a much much higher level of emotional labor than in the past, and I hadn’t accounted for that.

Additionally, the nature of the roles required me constantly having to context switch from role to role (all were remote but time-sensitive), so it was surprisingly much more draining than me pulling a 75-hr week physically printing t-shirts.

While mostly nothing burned down, it was regardless a huge learning experience for me. Beyond understanding where the bandwidth was around my sustainability, it also really helped me make peace with the idea that I might be already doing enough. 

As someone that’s led a very unconventional career, I’m often plagued by impostor syndrome around how much work is actually expected in a role. Since I’ve worked for myself mostly, my expectation of how much someone needs to do is often drastically above and beyond what most people consider to be sustainable or even advisable levels of effort and work in a corporate role. 

By being forced to have to communicate stronger boundaries (to myself and collaborators) around time and expectations, I’ve been able to more clearly set healthier and sustainable boundaries around my work. Yay! 

DEEP DIGITAL ART DIVE + REFRAMING REJECTION

If you haven’t been following crypto news, there was a huge cryptocurrency crash this year, which obviously affects NFT art sales. 

Regardless of me losing about 60% of the USD value associated with my NFT sales and crypto “investments,” I continued to push ahead with my art, releasing 3 new collections on Tezos, a new collection on Ethereum (ok, now that it’s not the energy-guzzler that it used to be), 9 collections on Fx(Hash), and a whole PFP project (hello Dark Wheel Demonz!) that will be the second pillar to the blockchain video game I’m continuing to develop. 

It was an interesting space for sure this year, with many creators and collectors leaving the space. Between the crash and Twitter’s late-year Musk-driven descent into madness (an important place for collectors to find NFT art), it’s been much harder selling artwork this year than the year prior. 

It’s times like this that I remember how difficult it was to sell art outside of the NFT space (I have paintings that haven’t sold for decades!). This is a helpful reminder in a space that considers most collections or pieces that don’t sell out in 24 hours to be an abject failure.  

This year was a helpful reminder to not invest more money in something that you can’t afford to lose (especially in super volatile areas like crypto) and also that especially in a highly speculative, subjective field like art, you need to redefine your own metrics of success that are not bound to the actions of others. 

Sure, tracking sales volume and stuff like that can be helpful for accounting purposes and figuring out if you had a better sales year or not and helping you market and all those more obvious advantages, but getting caught up on it and letting it determine your self-esteem is a bad idea. 

My output this year eclipsed most of my years post-art school, and that is something I’m definitely proud of and chalk up as a success. 

I’ve met tons of rad artists, curators, collectors, and built a home-away-from-home on Discord, which has been super fulfilling. 

I also started writing screenplays, submitted to a bunch of art contests and won zero of them, curated a Halloween dark art event, created a digital gallery to focus on female-identifying artists with the proceeds of Witchez, got curated into a show by Superchief Gallery LA, and made a ton of art I’m proud of. 

So regardless of whether or not I’m selling enough art to buy a new car (I’m not), I’m pretty happy with all the different things I’ve created this year, and look forward to continuing to build and show up in a way that I feel successful regardless of the financial statements.

LETTING GO

2022 was the great pause on my collaborative consultancy Spotlight Trust. We still managed to do some great work with a few clients, but due to both of us working on other things, we paused the In Trust podcast (although more by attrition than general announcement) and I ended Season 1 of The Inner Monster Podcast.

I hope to getting back to podcasting in the near future, and I have some ideas of Season 2 of the IMP, but I’m also learning the importance of letting things go on pause when they need to.

I usually try to hang on until it’s too late as it’s pretty obvious with me still not giving up on a podcast that combines horror fiction with mythology and personal development, but I’m considering how it can evolve and continue on and what form that the podcast will take if and when S2 comes around. 

Also, Akimbo made the big decision to discontinue offering any courses besides the altMBA, so I’m currently under the impression that I’ve served as head coach for The Copy Workshop for the last time. While overall sad about the decision, I think letting go of The Copy Workshop was a bit more emotional for me, as I had served as head coach since the beta iteration, so even though it’s 100% Margo’s, there definitely was more ownership there in this workshop than the others I’ve had the privilege of coaching. 

But, it’s not my course, nor my company, so not only is it out of my control, but it’s also a nice reminder about focusing on things that we do have control over. 

I think it’s important to take the time to consider what’s serving you and what is no longer serving you, and if we ignore sunk costs, what might we let go of? 

TRAVEL + HEALTH

Lumping this here in the end as I’m not sure if there were any big lessons learned, but we took an extended weekend vacay in March to the beach and a trip up to Vancouver in July for a wedding, and did some Bay Area visiting this winter for the winter holidays. It was our first time out of the country since pre-pandemic, so it was nice to get on a plane again, even though I had already read the Carbon Almanac by then and felt extremely guilty about the amount of emissions plane travel uses. 

I also had two surgeries(!), both minor and mainly elective, but I bled a lot more this year than most years prior so that was fun, I guess. 

I got an exercise bike since I hate running and felt the need to improve my overall level of activity, but I need to rebuild the habit as my second surgery got in the way and I need to rebuild getting more movement in my did.

I’ve still managed to put off finding a new dentist, which needs to be priority one in 2023. For long-time friends, you’ll remember when I nearly died because I pulled this ridiculousness of not taking care of my teeth a few years ago. 

THE FUTURE?

A few people have asked me what I’m looking forward to for 2023, and I really didn’t know what to tell them. 

Not because I hadn’t thought about it at all, but as I write this, so much is up in the air for me and I’m just chilling here in the uncertainty about it all. 

I might be working with DesignerCon again next year. In what capacity? Who knows?

I might be working with altMBA next year, but maybe not? 

Will the national Skee-Ball tournament resume next year? Will I qualify?

We might get a grant from the Tezos Foundation to assist in building The Cult & The Coven, but we might not? 

Twitter might explode. The world could fall into chaos. There could be a giant earthquake and I’ll fall into a massive hole in the ground and perish. The zombie apocalypse might finally befall humanity. 

Well, some of those are more likely than others by magnitudes of order, but regardless, all I know is, once again, what I can control. And assuming I’m alive and breathing and the world exists relatively like it does today, I’ll be working on The Cult & The Coven, on my screenplays, and continuing to serve my existing coaching clients. Hopefully some new ones too! 

But as time and the ticking clock and shifting calendar reminds us, nothing lasts forever, and all we can do is prepare ourselves the best we can to sit with uncertainty, be grateful for what we do have now, and try to move like water, flowing around obstacles and riding the peaks and troughs that are inherent in our own lives. 

Wishing you an awesome 2023.

If you live in North America, the last half of December is usually either an incredibly joyful time, or one of dread. 

Perhaps the winter holiday season brings up feelings of warmth, love, and generosity.

Perhaps the winter holiday season brings up feelings of abandonment, loss, and lack.

Perhaps you might be feeling a hybrid of the two – after all, we’re all complex human beings interacting with other complex human beings in a large, complex system that is society and human relationships.

Regardless of your feelings this season, I hope you honor them. 

You do you, with all the cheer (or lack thereof) that you feel is appropriate. Just keep in mind that there are many others who feel the exact opposite of you and are equally valid.

We’ve all at least known, if not actually been, a disgruntled former employee. 

Disgruntled former employees (DFE’s, for short), are often problematic in the eyes of management. After all, they’re often the loudest, most publicly opposed to leadership. They’re completely unhampered by any societal obligations to their now-ex-coworkers, and unless you’ve bought them off with some sort of an NDA tied to compensation packages, might be the most likely to start talking about their negative experience with anyone and everyone who is willing to listen. 

From a leader’s perspective, it’s likely their quality of work has been tanking, they’re misbehaving around the office, and obviously don’t want to be there, so why should you listen to someone who was so obviously unhappy with their job?

Because of the power dynamic that might be keeping honest feedback from making its way to you is now removed and you might be finally getting exposed to what you need to hear.

People with hiring and firing power often underestimate the fear that most people have around their jobs. After all, especially in capitalistic countries with very little social safety nets, one’s job is most likely tied to their ability to survive. 

So while you might think that you’re open to feedback, unless you’re actively implementing and rewarding feedback from others, explaining why you’re not taking certain suggestions, and creating a space where the lowest-ranked employee can give feedback to the CEO, then let’s be real – you’re going to only get feedback that’s been sanitized and toned down, if at all.

It might be true that the DFE is bitter, disgruntled, and has personal issues going on – AND why do you think they’re bitter and disgruntled? Did you ever consider how the culture you’re building might have played into that? 

Perhaps it’s just a personality mismatch, or they’re not a good fit, or they over-represented their skills and are now flailing. Yes, it’s true, they likely have a part to play in their own frustrations and resentment. 

This also does not mean that you might be completely blameless either.

And now that this rogue maverick is free from the fear of you firing them or making their daily life a living Hell, they’re free to let you know what it’s really like. 

Granted, DFE’s probably won’t give you that feedback in a nuanced, fair way that’s easy to digest. But it doesn’t mean that it’s wrong.

A friendly reminder: the best way to avoid having DFE’s wreck your company’s reputation is also to prevent these people from becoming DFE’s in the first place. 

What blindspots might you be missing if everyone is too scared to share their honest feedback about you/the product/the culture/the company?