Crowdfunding: a frank discussion
LivingVertical isn’t for everyone. It’s for YOU. That’s why I am asking you for the opportunity to make this mission, this message my full-time priority by pledging support for our work via our recently launched Patreon campaign. It’s loaded with exclusive rewards which you can see for yourself, including our first foray into print media-The AdventureRx Journal.
Over the past few years you’ve watched me attempt to juggle the disparate goals of supporting a family and creating revolutionary adventure media that can overthrow the limitations of type 1 diabetes.
I’ve decided to stop juggling.
I’ve committed to LivingVertical full time. That means sink or swim-a test that I’ve been able to protect LivingVertical from for years. I’ve worked many different jobs to support this effort myself and I don’t regret keeping it on life support in order to get back to this point of giving it my full time focus. Now, the question is ‘How long can I afford to maintain this commitment while supporting my family?’.
When I first began working to create empowering adventure films, blogs and photos in 2011 I had a sort of luxury of being free to live in the dirt. Literally. I took great pride in doing more with less. It felt rebellious to start taking a stand without asking for “permission” from corporate sponsors. Having basically no overhead made us hard to squash-like post apocalyptic cockroaches. I never anticipated success. When Project365 was completed there was too much momentum to just walk away from LivingVertical-but no pathway for sustaining a living from it either. I assumed that if LivingVertical was good enough some company would sweep me off my feet and give us the financial support required to ride off into the sunset creating inspiration and empowerment for the world at no cost.
I often have been told that “It would be great if (insert drug/device company name here) sponsored you! Seems like you would be a great fit. Have you ever looked into that?” I have had some great relationships with sponsors in the past-but we never rode off together into the sunset. Short term engagements left me searching for ways to attract the next short term engagements. My focus couldn’t be the work and the message. The message mattered to me and my audience-but it wasn’t what was supporting me financially.
The reason I am attempting to crowd-fund the backbone of our support is because I want to change that. I believe that my audience and the message come first. Having audience support is what allows that freedom to exist.
No one is entitled to having an audience, let alone support from that audience. The fact that you’re here with me means that I’ve been given a wonderful gift already. I have no intention of putting my work behind a wall and making it pay-to-play. I’m asking you for the opportunity to make the free, public work of LivingVertical bigger, better and more impactful.
Love your limitation: The Unfinished Project
I’ve had an unfinished project that’s been nagging at me for a long time and you can’t slay big walls just by talking about it from an office chair. I’ve spent the last several years hating my limitations while doing very little to challenge their preeminence in my life. Some of that has been practically motivated-supporting a family does take time and money. A lot more of it though, was a fear of getting shut down. Failure. Now I’m back on a mission to do what scares me and share it in hopes of raising awareness and empowerment for type 1 diabetes.
It’s easy to talk about going beyond limitations but the truth is that before you can approach your limits you have to accept them. You have to love them, own them. Without them there would be no opportunity to transcend the challenge-which is how value is earned. We are not all special snowflakes. Value is earned, not given away like a consolation prize. I stopped earning and started coasting at some point in the last few years. I wondered why I found my well running dry.
I searched back through my past to try and tease out the point where I first started to coast-and I found it in Yosemite National Park, California, May 2012. I met my match on El Capitan. I came away from that climb defeated in a way that I have never really moved beyond since. That’s why I’m going back there this fall. I’m going to find my limits and dance with them. I expect a main course of humble pie and suffering. It’s not supposed to be easy-that’s not why I love my limitations. It’s an opportunity to struggle. It’s my genuine hope that this project will reach those who need it with a message of empowerment-and that it will reach the public at large with awareness of type 1 diabetes.
In the last couple of years I’ve enjoyed learning about optimizing my diet using ketosis. I’ve been so privileged to have access to a CGM. I’ve spent countless hours checking my graph to see that number, like a rat in a maze, running for the promise of the cheese at the end. I kind of got addicted to winning the diabetes game because I could keep my numbers really tightly controlled-within a really tightly controlled environment. I spent many years advocating for type 1 as a reason to get outside and challenge fear-while ultimately succumbing to the trap myself. Turns out that having great numbers while living your life in service to a numerical readout isn’t really winning anything. Winning boils down to investing success in the opportunity to fail.
I’m not beating myself up about the past-it’s important to confront failures. We are too often scared of words like “right” and “wrong”, “good” and “bad” because everyone wants to know that they’re not the sum of their failures. Ignoring failure is the greatest failure of all though. It prevents us from growing and putting that shortcoming under the boot on the way to a higher summit. This is how I know that there is still a need for empowerment. For awareness. For a reminder that just because we aren’t wearing an orange jumpsuit doesn’t mean we can’t be held prisoner. The tools we use to create a brighter future can become a hindrance if we are not vigilant to look beyond them.
I’m calling it The Unfinished Project.
I'm back, and I'm sorry.
In the past few months I have been circling the wagons and getting the website rebuilt with the aid of Splitter Designs. I was confronted with the disparity between what I wanted to create and the reality of what I have been producing . The last few years have felt pretty unfulfilling-hollow, as though something has been missing from my work. I looked back at the posts and pictures and kept thinking ‘Is this the vision? Is this the best you have to give? Where is the passion, the fire and the cutting edge?’
One of the things that has been skewing my vision over the last few years is a desire to be perceived as successful in order to attract sponsors. How else does and athlete/speaker/artist feed make a living? No one wants to sponsor failure. I needed to make a living doing what I do-creating adventure media that inspires people through my struggle with type 1 diabetes. As that reality grew, it stole my fire-my joy. I stopped speaking to the people who were supporting me and I moved on to the people who didn’t care, who needed to be convinced of the value of the LivingVertical mission. I wanted to convert new followers more than caring for my existing ones. By simply reaching more people, I hoped that I could develop LivingVertical into a quazi-Team NovoNordisk, replete with corporate support and hundreds of thousands of followers-and a salary that could support my work and my family.
What I have found reflecting on all of this is that there is no shame in failure if you choose carefully the hill on which you are prepared to die. There is no honor in measuring success in terms of mass appeal or financial gains. I am returning to LivingVertical-full time until I cannot sustain it further. I have returned to the reason I started blogging and filming in 2011-to shake things up. To challenge the perception of chronic illness as weakness and to inspire interaction with the natural world around us a the means to win the battle for our minds. I don’t think my work will ever be a “good fit” with selling drugs or devices. I am fine with that. I’m done measuring success based on distracting people who don’t care. This may be the hill on which LivingVertical goes to die and while it may never be trending on Twitter, it will be honorable and true to the vision that inspired its origin.
I am thankful to have every one of you here-because you do care (or you wouldn’t have read this far!)-and you are the audience that I should have been serving all along. I am sorry for failing to see that over the last few years. I am lucky to have finally put my finger on what was missing in LivingVertical. Now let’s go rattle some cages and challenge the conventional wisdom, the marketing drivel and the stereotypes. There’s still work to be done around here.
