Trav's Blog: Updates on Trav

I had a great weekend at “Veggie Fest” in Naperville, IL, just outside Chicago. 16,000 people came together to listen to talks (such as one by Rajinder Singh, the living spiritual master representing Science of Spirituality), eat vegetarian/vegan/raw food, learn about all kinds of holistic/alternative health practices, and more.

I also had a highly productive week with my blogging, in which I wrote 1st and 2nd drafts for 10 blog posts! This week I begin the design phase- an exhaustive look at the cheapest and most effective way to set up an eye-catching, original blog. Wish me luck!

This week, I am sitting down to crank out all the content I can for my blog-to-be. It will determine my initial direction, and once I’ve got a solid reserve of content, I’ll feel confident to move into the design phase and then launch my baby.

On the home front, things are good- Living on my own with Carolyn is awesome. I recently did a 16-hour driving trip to Friend’s Camp, the quaker camp I went to for 3 formative years as an early teen. My sister is going the very same thing. The trip was made AWESOME by stopping at the library and getting out 3 audiobooks, which I listened to for most of the ride. The library is my new love, and I’ll be milking it for all it’s worth. I absolutely love having a free resource for books, audiobooks, and movies. Entirely free! It’s a modern marvel that’s hundreds of years old. Life is good.

Hello again, sorry I haven’t updated in so long.  I figured it was about time, since settled back in the United States from Spanish some time ago.

For the last week and half, I’ve been living in Saratoga Springs, a classy horse-racing hub and home to Skidmore College.  I’m feeling acclimated to this new experience of living ‘in the world,’ and sharing a place with another person (my girlfriend, Carolyn).  I’m loving having a free gym only 1 minute away, as well as a library for free movies, and a host of great working places around Saratoga (I’m writing this from Uncommon Ground, the downtown café on Broadway.  A little noisier than the Borders across the street, but free wifi!).  Most of all I love having more time to read, write, and continue planning for the bigger and better blog ‘commercial’ blog that I will launch in August.  It’s my chance to build a writing portfolio, gain great experience, and begin to build an online business I hope to maintain for some time to come.  Things are moving, along albeit slowly.  I did a number of huge brainstorms last week that have left me with a handful of potential blog titles, one near-definite subtitle,  and a general plan of the kind of service I want to offer.  This week: Writing a lot of great, pilot content to go live when I launch the blog.  Next week I plan to research potential design options and ‘build’ the blog over that time.

Summer is sure looking sunny!

Drop a line if you want to pay me, Carolyn and the new place a visit- it’s the perfect summer home.

Oh, and I hope you like the new look.

Although I’ve listed music behind writing, I love it just as much. It comes more from the heart and soul and less from the mind. But it’s also even more competitive and unreliable a business, and some would say, like writing, a dying business. Regardless, I believe so long is there is human society, music will exist as a viable profession. But neither of those factors matter much to me. Just like writing, music is something I will do to the grave. Its part of how I celebrate being human, part of how I feel alive. Even more, I know that my dedication to music for music, alongside my dedication to improving and strengthening myself, will pay off in a hopefully lifelong to play and write music, actually progress with age. So long as I am me, I will have to give music an honest shot, now while I am still young, without waiting any longer.

The main reason I was dissuaded from not ever considering a musician’s path seriously was because of the competition. I won’t question the inherently competitive nature of a business with its fair share of passionate, driven and talented musicians, but I believe this characterization is distorted. First of all, music has a very low barrier to entry. There are millions of casual players in this country alone who will never put in the time and energy required for a serious career. On the next wrung up there are people who put in the time and perhaps have the talent, but don’t understand or strive to understand the business side. They see their role in the music business too narrowly, and never learn how to sell their stuff. I believe I can avoid this by taking a more holistic approach to music in which it becomes a perfect marriage of my burgeoning interest in entrepreneurship and my lifelong love of creativity. I will educate myself and know my business and know my craft. There are hundreds of books on composition, on theory, on songwriting- neat little baskets of ideas waiting to be picked up and added to my repertoire. These are steps which aspiring musicians rarely seem to take. They think you’ve just got to have “it,” and while talent is ultimately the dealmaker, strategy, marketing and the true business of the music business appear woefully neglected in aspiring musicians. Strategy is something I care deeply about, and its the field in which I want to write as well: personal-development is the strategy of human excellence. It applies to music in the way that one crafts musical habits and devotes oneself to the instrument and to songwriting, the way in which one develops the techniques of composition and arrangement, the smaller but impacting skills one can learn along the way (ear training, for example), networking, marketing, group dynamics and communication…. It’s not hard to see the cross-over into personal development, is it? As I embrace entrepreneurship on the writing side, I’ll be helping my musical career as well. I’ve heard it said that the most successful artists today aren’t always the most talented, but the best businesspeople. This seems especially true for music, especially today.

Another concern is that I have not been playing long enough. I’ve been a drummer for a while now, and will absolutely take those skills into my music, but my voice and the guitar are fresher developments only seriously undertaken in the last year and a half. That’s not much time. But consider that I’ve been writing music in my head, saving melodic ideas or bits of lyrics, for nearly my whole life. I remember being 5 or 6 years old and swinging in my uncle’s backyard on my cousin’s swing set, and in the 45 minutes to an hour I was outside, I composed and sang an entire “album” in my head! That kind of compulsive composition has never stopped- it’s scribbled on a thousand notes from a thousand separate moments, all stemming from the same recurrent inspiration to play. Besides a period of 6 months or so near the start of college, I have always entertained the dream of a life of music. I can look at any year in my life and see that I was dreaming about music during that time- sometimes more important than at other times, but a dream that’s never died and never could.

This kind of creative path is in my genes. I’ve got the music DNA coming at me from all direction: on my mom’s side, all three of my uncles have played in bands all through their lives, even played in bands together (complete with 3-part harmonies), and two still make music professionally. On my dad’s side, I’ve got a father who plays a mean harmonica, an uncle who graduated from Berklee College of Music and took a shot at music for many years, and a third uncle who also tried to make it with a band in his 30’s. It’s little surprise I have the same inclinations. In fact, the whole orientation of my aptitudes is geared towards abstract creative works like writing and music. And my best sense by far is my ear, whether in writing or in music. I won’t ever be fully alive if I don’t have a career that requires my ear. I’m not made to be a builder, computer programmer, or architect like many of members of my family. My aptitudes for that stuff are my absolute weakest. I do best with abstract creative projects, ones that constantly require new, fresh ideas. I feel at times like I am carrying a torch that they have genetically passed onto me, that it’s my moment to take up the calling, that there’s hope that I can push myself and achieve just a bit more than they did. Whatever I do, I do for them, in a way.

I believe the surest formula for excellence is a ferocious dream and an uncommonly powerful strategy, topped off with some preferable initial conditions. When it comes to music, I like to think that I have all three working for me, and I can’t wait to see where this passion takes me in the next year. As mentioned previously, this summer I am minimizing my responsibilities in order to focus on the previously mentioned online business, and writing music. This coming fall, I’ll be taking guitar lessons and a music technology course, which will show me the ropes of a semi-professional studio and grant me free access to it! Needless to say I’ll be recording like a maniac during that time, probably continuing into the following spring when the music tech II is offered.

Whether it’s this passion or my writing that ends up paying the bills, it’s really all the same for me. What’s important is the commitment of my time towards engagements that make me feel most alive. In 21 years of searching, music and writing are the best I have found that work best with my skills, personality and passion. It was never a secret to me that writing and music would play formative roles in my life. The breakthrough was realizing that I had to pursue them directly to live without regrets and be doing what I love. No more neglecting a passion to maintain “security” when that very security is stifling to my passion, my aspiration, and my intuition. No more eschewing my own greatest dreams because I see that they are shared by many others and the going won’t be easy. And perhaps most of all, no more wasting time by not allocating mine directly to what I love the most. It’s economic, it’s romantic, and it’s 100% me… What else can I do that satisfies all three?

Nearly everything about living and studying in Spain continues to be excellent. The time I have to think, write, and listen to music has been invaluable and prompted surprising revelations about how to make the most of my last year of college, and what I want to do with my life. This week I’ll discuss one of the two revelations I’ve had about what I want to do with my life: two specific callings which I am making my foremost priority for this summer and the academic year that follows it. Here’s how I would sum it up in two sentences:

I love to write and make music above all else, and I am betraying myself if I ignore these passions. Specifically, I want to write on the field of self-development, make my own music, and make these two pursuits my highest priority, starting now.

On writing

One of the hardest things about college has been determining what the hell I want to do. Initially I felt best about studying government. It’s was fun to learn about the general condition of our world today and put my privileged life in perspective. Politics offered all of that, kept me sufficiently interested in my studies, and generated enough positive feedback from professors, family and friends to keep me on track. But I never loved it.

What did I love? Certainly writing, that was never a question, and it always tended to be on this particular point that I was shining in class. The simple act of writing is one that I relish more than 75% of everything else I do in a day. But writing needs a topic, and a writer needs an expertise. If you’re looking to make a career out of writing, that topic better be something you’re going to love when you’re blindsided by the inevitable storms of life, or when the reds drop an A-bomb in the middle of America. It’s got to be your passion. The urgnecy of finding a passion became clear to me after I took the Johnson’O’Connor this winter. I tested exceedingly high in foresight- not the day-in, day-out variety of the immaculate time-keeper. I am horrible at that stuff (what can I say? My dominant hemisphere of my brain doesn’t function in relation to time). The kind of foresight I am talking about is the need for firmly rooted, long-term purpose.

Purpose! The antithesis of complete spontaneity and totally in-the-moment behavior. That describes a lot of my family pretty well- better to go with what you feel than with what you plan. I sometimes act that way, too. But purpose is unfathomably more important to me than unfettered frolicking through my time on earth. The wonderful thing is that once I identified the need to find a grounding purpose- which I define here as a vision of and plan for life- I found that the answer I was looking for was already in my hands.

One of those answers was clearly writing. Not just any writing, but self-development writing. Writing that is reflective on the self and seeks to improve it. Writing that seeks to tangibly and strategically de-stress life while making it more productive and passionate. Writing that concentrates meaning and cuts out the drudgery to the greatest extent possible. The field of self-development had been intriguing to me for a long time- it struck me as an answer to what I have always perceived as a great lack of aspiration in our times. Too much reliance on cheap, mass media- too much television, too many movies, too much unhealthy food, too much complacent with crappy jobs, to much surfing on things other than water. Eventually I realized that the dreams I held were too important and too ambitious to acquiesce like that. It irked me to ignore them.

The search began during my senior year of high school. It started with learning visual memory techniques that allowed me to memorize the presidents by number permanently and within a short amount of time. Pretty soon I was using it to ace simple recall quizzes in school and boost my vocabulary. I was doing better in school by being creative! Why wasn’t anyone teaching this stuff? Next came speed reading. Within weeks I was reading 3 times faster and with far better comprehension (the number now? Closer to 5 times faster at my slowest).

But I wouldn’t say my interest in this field really manifested until the summer after sophomore year. I had just sworn off some poor lifestyle choices picked up in college and was hungry for fresh direction. Part of it came from my spirituality. But a large part of it came from reading a little book called Getting Things Done. For me, this book was a catalyst for beginning to unlock powerful, dormant dreams, thinking beyond college towards the rest of my life, undertaking a 6 days-a-week exercise regimen, taking up a vegan diet, and re-applying some of the visual memory techniques I had learned in high school to ace three difficult courses at Georgetown University.

But then I was back at Skidmore, taking 5 classes, having a go with my rock band, playing drums for a student musical, working on a campaign in addition to volunteering for it, and more. I swung too far to the other extreme of trying to get way too much done. This ultimately left me in the position of doing much less, or at least creating much less quality and value. I wasn’t dying of stress, but I was perpetually unsatisfied. The semester died down, and I ended on a good note. But it was clear I didn’t have a winning formula.

Eventually I landed in the Iberian Peninsula, and everything change. Gone were the extra distractions. Gone was the wild workload and numerous extracurriculars. Gone was the lack of introspection, perspective and renewal that my fall semester had sorely lacked. Suddenly the time for personal review was available yet again, and what I want to do for the foreseeable future became clear. It was writing, and specifically self-development writing.

It’s not just that I want to write about self-development at some point in the future. I’m responsibly throwing myself into it now. This summer I will launch a personal-development blog and treat it like an online start-up. Here are just some of the benefits I see in my choice:

1) Burning intrinsic motivation: Writing “professionally” (read: with the goal of attracting web traffic and making money) in this field is something I have an indefatigable urge to do, and it flows from a personal interest that has stood the test of time. I was already writing self-development articles before I realized I wanted to write self-development articles. It was hard to stop myself from doing it.

2) Maximum generation of value: Imagine if I committed to a generic writing and editing internship like I initially planned. Sure, it would beat the late-shift on the front end of Wal-Mart. But not by much. That’s because there’s a gaping degree of separation between the value I would be creating under those conditions and the ideal value I am creating through direct pursuit of my passion. With an internship, I wouldn’t be building the specific skills I want to invest in for a career. I wouldn’t be as happy. I certainly wouldn’t be as focused. And I would probably have no better idea of what I wanted to do in the end.

3) Timeless appeal: Pursuing self-development writing is something I can see myself doing, if only for fun for the fun of it, even if I wasn’t making any money, for my entire life- it’s the values of personal responsibility, commitment to excellence, and growth that appeal to me.  But the reality is that with sufficient patience, it can be a respectable money-maker. I am in a unique position in which I can responsibly make this website my foremost priority (i.e., my job). Who knows, someday I might end up like Steve Pavlina, a popular self-development blogger who makes a 6-figure income from a website that cost him less than $20 to launch and on which he’s never spent a dime for promotion. He also recently wrote his first book (the publishers approached him after reading his writing). Even more, the background “work” for this blog includes reading hundreds of books which I would be trying (and likely failing) to find time to read anyway! It’s the ultimate excuse to study what I love.

So there you have it, a rough outline of part 1 of the 2 lifetime goals I am undertaking. I probably sound a bit ballsy, delusional, and even self-righteous writing all of this. So be it. What I’m expressing is the clearest and most exciting perspective on what to do with my life I’ve ever had. It leaves nothing inside me unsatisfied and unaddressed. It channels my vision and focus just enough. And for the first time in a good long time, I am healthily obsessed with something again.

So please, bring on the commentary! Let me know what you really think! Criticize my reasoning! Just try and eviscerate my dreams!

In case you’re confused…
Curious about just I mean by “self-development writer”? Look here, here, or here.

For me, the experience of studying abroad in Spain is a lot like the experience of infancy. Every environment is unfamiliar and new, and I’m surrounded by innumerable things for which I have no words (or at least, the words I do have, much like infant blabber, are useless). Most of all, life in Spain requires a mix of ambitious determination to keep learning despite the overwhelming volume of new information, and tireless humility to necessarily and repeatedly make mistakes. I have to stomach the fact that nearly everyone around me has superior expressive powers. A college student is relegated to blubbering (but hopefully endearing) foreigner status.

But each day I improve, and everything gets a bit easier. In the nearly four weeks I’ve lived here, I’ve gone from a complete inability to express most thoughts, to the ability to express basic ideas and feelings on just about any subject that two people would talk about (though many subjects require aggressive, agile maneuvering around the words I don’t yet know). Class is no longer a frantic rush to write down every mysterious word I hear, and I can joke around with the program staff, my host family and Spanish-speaking friends.  Even if the joke may be really be on me….

Speaking of my family, I have the tremendous fortune to live with a great family of three madrileños, Flor and her sons Fabio and Marco (12 and 17). Flor is fantastic about making vegan food, giving me Spanish conversation, and generally giving me the independence I want in an experience like this. We live a good 45 minutes away from my program center (where I take two classes: advanced Spanish language, and 20^th century Spanish civilization and art) and even farther from the university (where I take one class English literature… what?), but that gives me nice chunks of time to read, write, and occasionally meditate.

And then of course, there’s Madrid, a behemoth-sized city in the heart of Spain, the capital, the cultural mecca, and the home of the famous “madriz” accent. It’s also the place I call home for the next 3 ½ months. It’s wonderfully sunny here, requiring as little as a t-shirt or as much as a light spring jacket, and I’m told it only gets warmer. Here in Madrid, I’m learning how to navigate a city many times bigger than any other I have ever lived in, how to find vegetarian restaurants in a nation of ham, how to do laundry in a kitchen (where one finds a dishwasher in the typical American home) and then hang my clothes three stories up over an unforgiving parking lot, how to eat lunch at two and dinner at nine without burning out too early or waking up too late, and a thousand other smaller things for which I had no concept of and certainly no experience with before I arrived. And of course I shouldn’t omit that every day I seem to learn something new about one Travis Webster-Booth.

In fiction, authors reveal their protagonists best by colliding them with other characters and circumstances. On a daily basis, that’s what I’m experiencing in the 1^st person here in Madrid. And I love it (In between my infantile babbling).

If you want to contact me, skype, e-mail or facebook work the best. If you want to send me something in the mail or call me, let me know and I’ll pass on my new number and mailing address (both are posted on facebook).

To my family and friends across the country and around the world, you can probably feel me heaving a sigh of relief. After the final week of summer vacation in Maine, my parents and I drove out to Saratoga Springs in our overstuffed CR-V, arriving on Skidmore campus to settle my possessions into the apartment I share with 6 other students. Though I live directly across the street from my former house, this is a transformed village from the one I left four months ago. Unlike last year, the vast majority of my neighbors are also third year students, the same classmates I have gotten to know the best over the last two years. My way of life has also shifted; instead of heading to main campus for meals at the dining hall, I am finally heading to the kitchen to cook. Instead of ID’ing my way into a residence hall to see friends, I knock on the door to their apartments.

From the moment I arrived to this very moment six days later, my time has been as packed as the family car I drove in. I’ve gotten a preview of 4 of my 5 courses I’ll be taking in the next four months, and I’ve found plenty to be excited about. I’m taking two writing-intensive courses in two different languages (English and Spanish), a linguistics class to supplement my study of language, a very demanding class in political philosophy, and drum lessons. My four main “academic” interests- writing, language, the political world, and music- will all be healthily challenged on a daily basis. Incredible! Each semester seems to bring me into deeper harmony with my purpose, and this semester offers to fulfill my passions like none before.

Not surprisingly, politics has followed me from Washington back to college. Skidmore is planted in one of the districts which shifted from Republican to Democrat in the 2006 elections and there will be frenetic political activity right up to the November. These are bountiful times for government majors, and I’m excited to say that I’m suspending my much beloved job at Career Services to work as a Canvasser for the New York State Democratic Party for the next two months. It’s down’n’dirty grassroots grunt work: I’ll be going face-to-face with residents of a relatively conservative region to talk politics and persuade them to vote blue this year. I’ve never undertaken a challenge that’s anything like this one.

For the first time in my musical life, I am in a position to play original music professionally. My band, the Silent Kids, is a musical duo consisting of myself and my good friend Andrew Lane-Lawless. The two of us recently scoped out the restaurant and bar circuit of Saratoga with copies of our first EP, Louder Than The Sun, which paid off in the form of an audition and several future gigging possibilities. Having a two-piece band has been great; it has been amazing me for me to play a part in a constantly growing musical process, watching Andrew’s songwriting develop, my drumming mature, and our band chemistry strengthen. This semester brings completely new opportunities to share our music on and off-campus, and we’re more ready for that now than ever.

With all this possibilities floating around, I couldn’t be happier with the prospects for the semester, and I’m committed to starting out strong. Three themes encapsulate my attitude to the month of September: they are foundation-building, centeredness, and momentum. I’ll work to creatively apply them all throughout the coming weeks. It’s a transitional period of growing new roots in a new community, remember, honing and affirming priorities and purpose for this stage of life, and extrapolating positive summer habits into the long and transformative fall season. Much like my junior year of high school, I sense that this third year is a time to master perennial challenges and capitalize on fresh opportunity in way that seemed unfathomable in the first two years. I’ll be writing more on how that process unfolds in the coming weeks.

Welcome to the groundbreaking of Words of Webster-Booth, a hybrid professional and personal blog showcasing my writing and ideas across music, politics, books, and life. For professional contacts and prospective employers, this site is your direct connection to my written work. For family and friends, it’s a way to stay informed of what I’m doing week to week, and to learn about the most exciting things I’m involved with.

For this pilot post, I’ll offer a three-part taste of what I will be covering in the coming weeks, months, and years: one music review, one book review, and a personal update on where I stand today. The only thing missing is an entry on politics, something which I am deliberately holding back from at this time, but which I promise will be available for next week’s update.

So relax, and scroll down the page to enjoy whatever brought you to my new domain. I’ve tried to keep things interesting, and I hope you like what you read and learn.

With one week left before classes start up at Skidmore, I am ready to go back to school after a very busy summer. Most of my summer was spent in Washington D.C. enrolled in the Engalitcheff Institute for Comparative Political and Economic Systems (it’s nickname- ICPES- is even worse, don’t pronounce that in front of your house guests), a 2 month study program of 3 classes and 32 hours of interning a week. It was grueling. Working from 9-5 and then going to class from 6-9 is only fun when you’re studying what you love and consciously making time for the things that matter most. I tackled this challenge by creating a host of new habits to help me get what I truly needed amidst the insane busyness. Essentially, I began keeping electronic or physical logbooks of everything I that’s important to me: time spent working out, playing guitar, writing, and meditation. I also measured for content, making notes on what I had done. What was most satisfying about this approach is the focus and consistency it gave me to achieve results without devoting large chunks of time at once. Even though I typically only played guitar for 10-15 minutes, it still translated into new songs learned, speed improvements and greater overall comfort with the instrument. Even though I wasn’t doing marathon workout sessions, I spent enough consistent time in the gym (and running outside with my College XC-running roommate) to end the summer much stronger than I started it.

One major lifestyle change I experimented with was veganism, treating it like a personal case study, and I’ve kept this diet going. It has helped to end some recurrent minor health problems (i.e., the “stuffiness” that dairy causes some people to feel) and definitely gives me more energy.

All this, of course, says nothing of the three classes I was taking: Comparative Economics, The Transformation of American Politics, and an Internship Seminar. Each one had its benifits. Comparative Economics was extremely challenging to my preconceptions about globalization and free markets, and taught me a lot about different perspectives on economic systems, as well as what is so wrong with many of the systems of the third world (more on this in an article to come). The Transformation of American Politics was actually taught by a Skidmore graduate who focused on certain nuances in the American political system that were completely unfamiliar, allowing me get a lot from the course. The Internship Seminar might as well have been called “A Look Inside Washington,” as it dealt exclusively with the institutions that run our national government. It culminated in a group presentation pitched to the class.

Though I did very well academically (two A’s and an A-) and it looks as though I will get credit for these courses, I was disappointed to learn that they won’t factor into my Skidmore GPA because they are not Skidmore classes. Oh well. The whole experience was tremendously positive, and unquestionably developed my sense of independence.

Since that program’s end 3 weeks ago, I’ve been organizing everything that had been cropped up at home before I left: organizing CD’s and backing them up on my external hard drive, organizing my chaotic desk (a first in about 10 years), organizing an overflowing e-mail inbox, and organizing and selling off old textbooks from the last 2 years of college. I read Getting Things Done at the outset of the summer, and I’ve been using that book’s system to great effect, especially with organization. The two most useful habits it recommends are to use a single “input inbox” for everything you need to organize (or as few inboxes as you can get away with), and creating a projects list of all the more-than-one-action commitments you have. There’s a lot more in that book, but I’ll leave it up to you to discover it.

Now that all the organizing is over, I’m involved in a planning phase to help me manage the incredible scarcity of time inherent in the college experience. I have a good number of passions that I want to enjoy equally at school, and I’m hopeful that in this coming semester I will actually have a shot at balancing them effectively. Generally, I believe that the more reflecting I do and the more useful guidelines I have provided for myself, the more effective I am with my time in the moment. I don’t have to sit down at the drum throne and tool together a good practice schedule every day, because I will know ahead of time exactly what I intend to do and what kind of time I need to do it.

So that’s where I stand the week before my third year of college. You could say that I am over the sophomore slump, and much like this same time in High School, I have a clear idea of what I want to do and how I’m going to do it.  Naturally, that feels pretty good, and I’m excited about how it will all come together back in Saratoga Springs.