Chris Ming, Author at Christopher Ming Blog

notes

Reading: Amarillo Slim’s Memoir – In A World Full of Fat People

Last updated on March 9th, 2019 at 03:51 pm

I finished Amarillo Slim’s memoir, In A World Full Of Fat People as my non-work related read. For work reads, the challenge is dealing with volume, so they require intense focus, and brute forcing my way through manuscripts and scripts. Basically, it sucks 80 percent of the joy from reading. Allocating time for non-work related reads is my way of saying, “I never want to not enjoy reading.” One hand washes the other.

I broke into this memoir because I love gambling and books on gambling. I didn’t read it with the idea of finding takeaways…

But I just couldn’t help myself.

There are major correlations between his anecdotes and self-dev (maybe not self-dev exactly, but bear with me, I’m about to drop some education on the practical application of Slim’s gambling philosophy):

Amarillo Slim was one of the world’s greatest proposition gamblers. He bet he could beat “Minnesota Fats at pool with a broom, Bobby Riggs at table tennis with a skillet, and Evel Knievel at golf with a carpenter’s hammer.” But Slim’s philosophy to be a winning gambler was simple:

“I never make a bet unless the bet is already won.”

Put another way, in Slim’s words:

“I learned that there are people who love action and others who love money. The first group is called suckers, and the second is called professional gamblers, and it was a cinch which one I wanted to be.”

What he’s talking about, is preparation.

Slim would practice with a skillet at table tennis for weeks before setting up his mark. When another mark wised up to the skillet gambit, he’d practice for months with a coke bottle to break him.

He’d master every pool hustle there was until he could do it with a broom. Blindfolded.

And Slim had patience: he would take his time laying the trap for a sucker, losing a little at a time until he was “ready to break the sonuvabitch.”

A full write-up to follow, but my major takeaway is self-dev is preparation. You’re preparing yourself, arming yourself with abilities to win the bet you place on yourself. These bets can take on many forms:

A negotiation next week.
An interview three months away.
Business decisions of tomorrow that’ll influence you for years to come.

Bets are won and loss in the preparation.

Photos Credit: pokerwire

notes

Listening to: Jenny Blake Interview

Last updated on March 9th, 2019 at 03:51 pm

I’m listening to David Siteman Garland’s interview with Jenny Blake of Life After College, on The Rise to the Top. I finished the interview yesterday, on my way home after my first visit to SoHo house. Which, by the way, I had zero idea on how to find the entrance to. #FirstWorldProblems.

The two major discussion points I found really interesting were:

1. The process of product development, from book deal to course creation.

2. Transition of a brand, as Jenny shifts her focus away from Life After College and into the next iteration of the Jenny Blake brand.

Full write up to come. In the meantime, here’s the link to watch (or if you’re a badass mofo like me, you can download the audio so you can listen while you get your swell on, and get ripped).*

*(There is zero correlation between listening to this podcast and getting ripped. Unless it’s a reverse correlation.)

Photo Credit: Swong95765

career

Time To Get Back To This

Last updated on November 2nd, 2021 at 05:17 pm

Time to get back to this. Yes.

I’m moving large chunks of the “Moving to Los Angeles” posts to another blog, one geared towards Los Angeles, the entertainment industry, and personal finance.

RSVP

Last updated on May 5th, 2018 at 11:28 am

I don’t mean it when I say I’m only here for the open bar.

Because the food is nice, too.

career

Rebuilding Part 3 – “Assist”

Last updated on April 11th, 2019 at 09:18 am

A week after returning to the restaurant, I was offered an assistant position at a literary management company. Which made things tricky: work six days a week, plus my own writing, plus night and weekend reading. It could be done, but did I want to put myself through that?

I thought about quitting the restaurant. I remembered my father reminding me over the phone, when I first arrived in Los Angeles, “Look after yourself. That’s enough right now. Just do what’s best for you.” That’s what quitting would have meant: looking out for numero uno, making things easier on myself. It didn’t feel right, though. I couldn’t quit, effectively spitting on their faces, after they so graciously took me back when I needed help.

So I do both. My writing and job suffer for it, but that’s the choice I made. On my day off, I squeeze in down time and grocery shopping, maybe the gym or changing the car oil. The juggling isn’t easy, and you have to be ruthless with time to get it done. When I first arrived in Los Angeles, I weighed the pros and cons on taking an assistant job if you want to write, and it’s as simple as: you make time for it. You (as BJ Fogg so adroitly puts it,) “prioritize so hard it hurts.”

Besides slowing down my writing, assisting has opened my eyes to plenty of other weaknesses. Issues that I deferred for years, for the sake of writing and work. These days I wish I addressed those years ago, but for lack of that option, will settle for now:

I don’t know shit about the entertainment or book industry. My boss called me into his office, and showed me a novel with a risqué cover, a woman’s hot mouth pressed against a bare shoulder. Then he asked me where he should pitch this project, a mild erotica-thriller (in the vein of 50 SHADES OF GREY.) I didn’t even bother bullshitting my way through a response. I had no idea, and that’s a problem.
I don’t know enough about Los Angeles, my own backyard.
Assisting has shown me how difficult the process of getting anything made is, how many moving parts there are in this arena. Everything must align. The pegs must be in the proper row at the proper moment to have impact on the world. For every great writer who says, “I just focused on the writing, I didn’t play the game or network. I just wrote in my voice and did what I thought was right, and I made it” (e.g., Hugh Howey’s wonderful post on his success with WOOL in the Huffington Post) there are a thousand artists who won’t get in front of the right people because they didn’t do their homework.
I don’t spend enough time building relationships with other people. Which says nothing about being shy versus friendly, introverted versus extroverted – (self-examinations rendered moot when you force yourself to commit the desired behavior.) What I mean is that I’ve made a habit out of putting work/writing above everything, to the detriment of maintaining strong friendships and relationships. That’s something I want in my life, and it can’t be done sitting in front of a computer as life passes outside the window. This in turn means…
Work focused, not just harder. There are only 24 hours in a day, and you can’t keep adding to-do’s to the top of the pile. Pinpoint exactly what I want to work on at any given time, and attack that. Identify what can fall to the wayside, and then let it. It all falls back to elimination, followed by prioritization

Ideally, I wouldn’t be 26 years old, still waiting tables on weekends to survive. In an ideal world, I could make it as a writer without working as an assistant first. But there are too many other things to be grateful for to dwell on this inconvenience as I work and rebuild, to have impact on the world.

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Photo Credit: PCCare247

restaurants

Rebuilding Part 2 – “Square One”

Last updated on March 24th, 2017 at 06:50 pm

The first thing I did was go back to the Thai restaurant and ask for my job back. I hunted down the manager, who emerged from the staff room, cash drawer and last night’s receipts in hand, looking frustrated with her day already. I asked if she was looking for help.

“Yes,” she snapped. “Who’s asking? You?” she jabbed.

“Yes.”

“Oh.” She thought a moment. She started to ask a question, then stopped to ask a different one. “When can you start?”

I picked up my first shift back a week later. Three days after that, they cut me a paycheck – I was already back on the books. It took a total of ten days to take my first step towards rebuilding. I was ecstatic about the turn around, but there were mixed reactions as people found out I retreated back to waiting tables.

Some employees, like my manager, were genuinely happy to see me back. Others were pleasant, but they recognized this as a temporary move, the one-step-back to my next two-steps-forward. They understood the simple truth: sometimes, you just gotta make money.

The strangest reaction was from a young food runner named Rigo. Before I left, Rigo was my mentee of sorts: smart in his own way, a hard-worker for certain, but his own naiveties were often his own worst enemies. In the 9 months I’d been away, that naiveté had bloomed into a full blown sullenness, a FTW mentality, and I think he saw my return as a betrayal. Like, didn’t I tell him I was moving onto (bigger, better) things?

“What about everything you said?” he demanded. “About trying something once, then moving on? About always looking forward?”

“I tried,” I replied. “I tried something new. It didn’t work out. So now I have to rebuild before I try again.”

He shook his head, not understanding, and walked away.

The other noteworthy reaction I received happened last week, when I told another entertainment assistant that I moonlighted as a server. His eyes darted up from his Blackberry, as a flicker of recognition crossed his face. Then a hint of smugness with the words, “Oh yeah, we order from there all the time,” treating my statement as if it was an admission of humiliation. It wasn’t.

I’m not immune to what others think, though. There’s a reason why I still haven’t shared with my family that I returned to waiting tables, something I started when I was 14 years old. There’s a reason why my bosses don’t know why I cut out at six o’clock sharp on certain days of the week. Not humiliation per se; humility, however, is safely in the ball park. But there’s not a dumb egg amongst them, so it’s likely they already know – it’s just a matter of who’s going to bring it up first.

Then there’s my own pride I have to contend with, the idea that I am “too good” for this station in life. Last night, I approached a couple to get their order. The man looked me in the eye and said with a straight face, “I take it this is not your day job.” When I asked him if it was that obvious, he shrugged and returned his gaze to the menu. “You stand out. You don’t belong here.” Then he ordered a vegetable pad thai.

It reminded me of my friend Karen’s father, a man whom I met only once. He was a multiple-Master-degree-bearing man who found himself jobless in 2008. He remained jobless as he uncollected his unemployment checks. And he continued to remain unemployed through 2009, and into 2010. His ex-wife, Karen’s mother, busted her ass to provide for Karen while he shrugged off his various parental duties, like child support, or being-the-fuck-around. Not that he didn’t receive job offers – he received several – but he refused to take one that was lower than his level of “prestige.” The jobs weren’t good enough, and he let his family suffer for it.

When I let that inkling of superiority creep in from the edges, threatening to leave me feeling ungrateful or entitled, I compare Karen’s father to my own. He had his own fiery and tumultuous rise in the restaurant business, where he reached an enviable level of success for someone barely into his 30’s. And when it all crashed down around him, he found himself set back further than where he started out seven years previous. My father, too, had to rebuild, but with a family of six, he had far more at stake.

He took on a blur of jobs during those years, as he worked to right his course. He managed sewing factories in Queens, a failing Chinese restaurant in Albany, then he tried getting his foot in the door at the chain restaurants. So between sending out resumes and going on interviews, my father started waiting tables again, swallowing his pride, and providing for his family.

Which is how I know that no matter my humility, or the smugness of others, or what any customer may say, I’m right where I belong.

Photos Credit: gttexas

career

Low Point

Last updated on March 20th, 2017 at 04:55 pm

No one expects to wake one morning and say aloud, “Yup, this is it: today’s the lowest point in my life.” You don’t anticipate rolling out of bed and thinking, “I don’t have a fucking clue why I’m even getting out of bed today.”

You sort of just arrive. While you’re pouring your Fruit Loops, or dumbly clicking your mouse. Or head to your unpaid internship, where you watch Youtube videos for eight hours straight in an urban cave shared by two dozen other 20-somethings, an activity gently dubbed as “business development.”

A few weeks shy of my 26^th birthday and inside that cave was where I sat, unsatisfied with my work, unsatisfied with my writing. I didn’t know what I was still doing in Los Angeles. Later that day, I trudged back to my car in the rain, and I found a lovely note from the county’s parking enforcement, asking to please remit $63 to their offices.

If a child kicked my shins and a dog pissed on my shoes, I wouldn’t have been surprised. All I wanted was to bury my head in the sand. I wanted to stew in my misery and “figure my shit out,” whatever that means. It’s the approach I took for the first 25 years of my life: bottle it in, tell myself not to be a pussy, and get back to work – except it’s taken me 26 years to realize how self-destructive and insidious self-this behavior was. Doesn’t matter how hard you shovel, you can’t dig your way out of a hole.

Instead I called a friend. And she stayed on the line until I spilt everything I: how incredibly shitty I felt about myself, and what I hadn’t accomplished in two years, that maybe it wasn’t worth it and I should move back to New York. I told her I didn’t know what I was doing with my work, that I hated being poor and stopped feeling good about writing a long time ago.

Nothing was resolved. She didn’t offer any takeaway or sagely advice. But that wasn’t the point. She was there to listen when I needed to say something.

Part of me knew that the job would get better. That if watching Youtube videos and buying up channels was a skill I wanted to excel at, I could get there. I just didn’t know if this particular dip was one I wanted to conquer. No matter how good I got at it, would I be happy signing Youtube talent?

I quit the next day. I decided this wasn’t where I wanted to be in terms of my career, my writing, or my finances. I couldn’t unravel which tangents brought me down this path, so my only choice was to start retracing my steps, trying to remember when my trail was last good again

Photos credit: A guy called John

career

A Series of Experiments

Last updated on November 3rd, 2021 at 03:23 am

This is a continuation of the previous post, thoughts on living in Los Angeles after two years.

The other day I was hunting through my closet and I realized: I had nothing to wear. I felt a familiar flash of junior high awkwardness, tearing through dresser drawers looking for something acceptably cool. At the time, I think I settled on a baggy polo and a pair of Dockers.

Aka the epitome of pretty-lame.

On this go-around, it wasn’t my level of awesomeness hindering me (a level which clearly has grown exponentially since high school.) It was my experiment in minimalism two years ago, where I gave away everything I owned save for few choice selections. It was an adjustment, but well-suited for my goals at the time.

Now that I’m living in Los Angeles? Not so much.

Annoyed as I am though, I think if I didn’t put myself through that, I wouldn’t be standing here in my Culver City apartment, the one besotted with Craigslist furniture and a dish set that sort of showed up in our cabinets one day. I couldn’t grow resentful at the thought of sacrifice because I had nothing left to give up. I couldn’t grow jealous over things I didn’t have because I didn’t have anything. If I didn’t make those choices, the thought of moving across the country would have seemed more daunting.

Looking at life through this lens, it feels like all events leading up to now are just a sequence of experiments, one building upon another. Minimalism was an experiment in sacrifice. Summer days spent working in Chinese restaurants as a teenager were lessons in work ethic. Solo traveling was an experiment in being comfortable in my own shoes.

Even writing a blog, is an experiment in making myself responsible for my words. Each post is an experiment in hitting “publish.”

I mentioned how the idea that Los Angeles is feeling less like an experiment, and gradually receding into what feels like life. In its wake I’m left with one idea: experiments sometimes fail. They almost always end. Score isn’t kept by how many tallies you have in one column or the other, but rather, how close are you to the life you imagined for yourself?

That’s the goal of these experiments in our lives: not the individual successes or failures, but whether the sum of their parts brings you where you want to be.

Photos Credit: glencm

los angeles

Two Years in Los Angeles

Last updated on May 4th, 2018 at 07:06 pm

My two-year anniversary with Los Angeles approaches. Living here was an experiment, drawn out on cocktail napkins and e-mails before throwing my life into a car and arriving with no job, no apartment, and no clue. And as much as there is to love about LA, looking around at the trappings of my life, it’s obvious I never thought of it as more than an experiment.

notes

I Am Reading A Visit from the Goon Squad

Last updated on March 9th, 2019 at 03:51 pm

And it’s like coming back home. It smells familiar. You can take off your shoes and get comfortable, because you’re in the hands of an artist, who may not show you where she’s taking you, but she won’t release you from her world either, until there’s nothing left to explore. I had forgotten – this is what made me want to tell stories in the first place.

That’s what (all non-affiliate links) A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan did. So did Everything is Illuminated (Jonathan Safran Foer,) The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz,) City of Thieves (David Benioff,) and (crossing genres now) BRICK by Rian Johnson, 500 DAYS OF SUMMER by Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber and shit, okay really genres hopping Pain (Johnny Cash) and the time I listened to an artist whose first name was Neal and last name I left in Nashville at the Bluebird Cafe, who sang “That’s My Son” which still keeps me up at night, but right then I had to march up to him and thank him because that song meant the world to me, even though I knew I’d probably never hear it again and haven’t since.

Photos Credit: Arts Westchester