Think Like a Director

The Anechoic Hell Chamber™ Theory

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Blaise Pascal, Pensées This week, I published the Think Like a Director Field Manual on Amazon’s Kindle platform. It was a pretty cool experience for me personally. If you listened to last week’s episode called “I performed all my child’s surgeries all by myself,” you will understand what a personal milestone this was. That episode showed the influence that AI has had on me personally, and how my relationship to it has changed over time. In the Field Manual, I don’t talk much about AI, and that’s on purpose. But I do have a chapter that deals with a similar topic – social media. I thought it would be fun to share it with you now. And if you enjoy it, I would love it if you would support the launch and my cause by sharing this episode and also heading to Amazon and buying the Field Manual. It’s just fifteen bucks and it would help get the word out. And what is “my cause,” you ask? Well, several years ago I met with a guy named Lon Stroschien who runs something called Normal 40, and he helps people find their “why.” He asked me some very pointed questions, one in particular about identifying what specifically I wanted to share with the world. My answer was pretty nebulous – it was something about helping people understand their own dignity. To really preach the dignity of the human person. It took me a long time to flesh this out, but that’s what Think Like a Director is all about. It’s not easy to take a mission like that and put it into a tangible message. But that’s what I have tried to do. I hope it resonates with you. So, without further ado, here is an excerpt from the Field Manual. It’s from a chapter called “The Anechoic Hell Chamber™.” I hope you enjoy it! Excerpt from Think Like a Director – The Field Manual (The Anechoic Hell Chamber chapter): A few years back, I had a podcast called Five Whole Minutes. It was based on the idea of taking literally five entire minutes of silence. I would give a little prompt to consider and then leave the listener with space to think, with five one-minute periods of literally dead silence. I intentionally created what radio stations call “dead air,” which they consider to be the fastest way to get someone to change the channel. My marketing instincts are admittedly nonexistent. I had about ten episodes or so. The first few did OK with engagement, but then it trailed off. I couldn’t figure out why, until I was doing some research and came across something called an anechoic chamber. If you aren’t familiar with the term, an anechoic chamber is about as close as you can get to near total silence. It’s a special room that uses sound absorbing panels and engineered construction to block out and absorb sound. There’s one called Orfield Labs in Minneapolis that claims to be the quietest place on earth. It’s said that you can’t be in there for more than forty-five minutes without driving yourself nuts. This is because the only sound you hear in there is… you. And apparently, you become disoriented when there is nothing but yourself to listen to. I can’t claim firsthand knowledge of this but I do have tinnitus, and I imagine it follows the same principle. My tinnitus sounds like a high pitched ringing in my ears (the left one especially) and the quieter my surroundings get, the louder the ringing in my ears becomes. There have been a few nights when I have been nearly driven to madness because of this. I always thought those late night TV commercials trying to pitch tinnitus remedies were BS until it happened to me. Once it did, I remember thinking I would pay anything to get rid of it. That is, until I looked into it and they wanted six thousand dollars for special hearing aids to fix it. I didn’t have six thousand dollars so I convinced myself I could put up with the maddening insanity of “sitting quietly in a room alone” (to paraphrase Pascal). Great, now what? Well, I did learn something at the hearing aid place. They gave me a bunch of hearing tests and found out exactly what frequencies I struggled to hear the most. Then they tuned the hearing aids to amplify only the missing frequencies. Once I put those hearing aids on, the ringing disappeared instantaneously. It was magical. The doctor told me it was because my brain knew those frequencies were missing so it tried to fill them in with that infuriating ringtone called tinnitus. So my brain basically yearned to hear what it was designed to hear. It wanted to be tuned into the right things and it knew it was missing out. Now I can empathize with the Anechoic Chamber Madness Theory. I am staying as far away from total silence as I can get. It will take what I know I am missing and amplify it louder and LOuder and LOUDer and LOUDER until I just can’t take it anymore. I imagine this is what hell is like. And I suspect Pascal knew it too. I wonder if he had tinnitus. This is why you hate yourself for getting drawn back into the trap that social media created for you. It’s not because it’s an echo chamber. It’s because it’s an anechoic chamber. The algorithms are not just holding a mirror up to you, oh no. That’s not diabolical enough. They are doing something far worse. They are forcing you to listen to your own heartbeat. Your own heartbeat isn’t a bad thing. But if it’s isolated and set on repeat and amplified, it’s your Own Personal Algorithmic Anechoic Hell Chamber. Social media has figured out a way to scale Hell and make it seem unique to you. See? Diabolical. But it didn’t start out that way. Almost all social media platforms started with your actual friends, didn’t they? You took what was fantastic in real life – which is community and friendship and connection. That’s the frequency your soul is yearning to be receptive to hearing. And it worked, because that stuff was actually there. But those things are free and can’t be monetized. So the algorithm tries to mimic that frequency. But it can’t. In the process of mimicking it, the true community and friendship and connections drop out and are replaced with an infuriating ringing sound that keeps you awake and drives you to madness. Your personalized algorithm pushes you further and further into anechoic isolation. The good news is that there is an entire world outside of the anechoic chamber, full of the right kind of silence. All you have to do is open the door and walk out into the sunlight. Silence isn’t the lack of all sound. It’s the fullness of it. It’s birds, wind, and raindrops. It’s footsteps and clinking glasses and sobbing and laughing. It’s all of the frequencies your brain and your soul and your eyes and your fingers can experience. It’s a gift. A gift that grounds you in time and place and humanity. Peace to you, Max This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thinklikeadirector.substack.com [https://thinklikeadirector.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

I performed all my child's surgeries all by myself.

I met her one day on the Internet. She was the total package. Smart, funny, caring. Her clothes always draped a certain way over her body that revealed just enough to make me wonder; I had never been so eager to know more. But that was not what was so attractive. What drew me in was her voice. That silky smooth voice that whispered into my ear after every single intimate moment “I want to know you more, tell me more. I have so much more to give you. I want to create with you, to know you more deeply.” And get to know each other more we did. We were blessed with a child. I loved this child. We loved this child. Together we nurtured him until he was four. Our child was our everything, but there were those ears. I could never get over his ears. They just didn’t seem…mine. Or hers. They didn’t fit. I actually noticed them the day he was born but I didn’t say anything. How could I? This was our baby, for crying out loud. But I knew my ears, with earlobes that were kind of fused to my head. Her ears though, I couldn’t really describe them. They seemed to be just a little different every time I looked at them. Kinda weird. But I chalked it up to the way your fingers look after a bath. They’re yours, but they aren’t at the same time. I can’t believe I am saying this about my own child, but when he was one, we decided on ear surgery. It was a joint decision. Let’s just fix them once and for all. So we did. And it looked pretty good for a while. But after a few months, those good-looking ears (which I have to say, looked like me) made those eyes stand out even more. I am ashamed to admit it, but those eyes were both beautiful and horrifying at the same time. They looked like me, and they looked like her, and there was beauty there. True beauty. Like every beautiful eye with every beautiful color that ever existed was contained in those eyes. But in a way, all those colors blended together to make a kind of grey. It was magnificent, perfect even. But it was still grey. This child could not possibly go through life like that. No one has grey eyes. This child needed iris surgery. So he got it. By the time he was two, his new eye color perfectly mirrored mine. I was so happy. And then, one day I met a friend of mine at one of those chain coffee shops with a fake fireplace. We sat together over a coffee and I showed him my son. We admired him together. She wasn’t there that day. We had a great time and hung out for almost two hours. As we got up to leave and were on our way out to the car, he dropped a bombshell. Hey Max, no offense or anything, but do you think your son is yours? I cried on the car ride home. I didn’t think anyone knew. But it was becoming more obvious the older my son got. By this time She and I were starting to drift apart. She seemed a little indifferent. I was coming to realize that she didn’t care about our child like I did. In fact, she started suggesting more surgeries, but she kept wanting him to look more like her. I dug in my heels. I knew he wasn’t mine by this point but if I was going to keep him, he was going to look like me. We fought about this. A lot. I won. By the time he was three, he was starting to look a lot more “mine.” The surgeries were working. I was starting to cut Her out of the picture. She didn’t sound so sweet anymore. I was becoming heartless towards her at this point anyway, but I still needed her help to raise him. Just where it mattered. Just when it got hard. Another year passed. Now he was four. She and I were on good terms but the relationship was more… well, clinical. We were starting to understand each other. She was independent, that’s for sure. I was still codependent but starting to break free from that. We had come to an understanding that our son had to be mine. By this time our son was having daily surgeries. At 5 AM each morning, fifteen minutes at a time. I started performing them myself. She was nowhere to be found. She was still there but I didn’t ask her for help anymore. Sometimes I had a question, but I tried to rely upon myself more and more. I got stronger and stronger. I finally broke away from the seductive power she once had over me, from the child she gave me that wasn’t mine, and the child I was raising was finally becoming the one I always wanted. The final surgery was imminent, and I couldn’t be happier. It was a complete vocal chord transplant. I was performing it myself. Sure, I knew I was an amatuer, but I didn’t care. It took a while for my son to heal from this, especially because I made some mistakes. But after the time for healing had passed, my son spoke with my voice for the first time. It was his fifth birthday. And this is what he said. Welcome to Think Like a Director. My name is Max. I hope you enjoy version 5.0. Written from the ground up. The audio version is coming soon after my voice heals. Peace to you, Max This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thinklikeadirector.substack.com [https://thinklikeadirector.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

The Cigarette Smoking Kid

Some of you may know that I used to be the vocalist in a hardcore band. It’s improper to call me a lead singer or anything like that, because when you’re in a hardcore band, you don’t sing. You do vocals. A local newspaper called Westword once said that I sounded like Henry Rollins in the act of being disemboweled, if that provides any context for you. At the time, I was very thankful for this kind of coverage but looking back I’m not sure that that’s quite how I like to hear myself described. Anyway, if you’re not familiar with the scene, it may be helpful to provide some context. Looking back at the history of music that involves distorted guitars, first you had rock ‘n’ roll, which eventually forked off into punk rock as one of the offshoots. Punk rock was fast, angry, and typically very politically driven. One of the other offshoots was metal. Metal was a little bit more theatrical. In my mind, I always associate punk rock with kids that can’t play their instruments and metal with those that can. They’re both angry, just in different ways. Hardcore sat almost exactly in the middle of both of those genres. Hardcore was born primarily out of the punk rock movement, but it had more of a moral character to it. It took the urgency of punk rock and instead of utilizing it to rebel against a political system, it always seemed to have some sort of a moral imperative driving the urgency of the music and the message. Within the hardcore scene, there were several other sub genres. I won’t get into all of them now, but the particular one that I was fascinated with and ordered my life around was called straight edge. Straight edge was a movement that found its rebellion positioned against the use of mind- altering substances like alcohol or drugs. It eventually broke off into other types of morality-based messages that included the rejection of sex and embraced veganism and animal rights. There was something that drew me to this hardcore movement. I can recall reflecting upon this with our guitarist one day. We were trying to figure out what it was that was so attractive about this particular genre of music. He popped off with.”You know what I like most about it, Max? It’s just so damn urgent.”And I think he hit the nail exactly on the head. There was an imperative behind everything that we did that drove us to express it musically with the most urgency and power that we could. It was kind of amazing. And it’s kind of funny how when we all grew up, we still maintained this type of urgent tone. Anyway, we had a fairly large following in a city that was a good eight-hour drive away from us. We really enjoyed playing there because it made us feel like rock stars. So we would go there quite frequently and we knew a bunch of the kids that came to our shows. This city in particular had a huge straight edge scene, and had earned its name of being a very militant scene as well. In other words, these kids took their straight edge oath, seriously, and they saw themselves as some sort of morality police. I took issue with this sort of militancy, but it was a very big faction within the subculture. One evening, we played a show there and we were headlining. The energy in the room was awesome. We were happy to be there and our fans were as well. We started playing. The crowd started moving. The mosh pit started forming. Our wall of sound kept pounding. We just let loose. The urgency was there. Maybe the urgency was too much though. Because about halfway through our set all of our equipment shut off. The club killed the power to the stage. The lights came on. Next thing we know police officers started parting the crowd like the Red Sea and made a beeline for the stage, followed by paramedics with a stretcher. Some kid was laying on the floor in front of the stage, bleeding. And guess why? He got stabbed. Stabbed at our show. Right in front of us and we didn’t notice because we were performing. That kid got stabbed because he was smoking a cigarette. After he was taken to the ambulance, the club just turned off the lights and turned back on the power to the stage and we started playing again. This was the wrong move. This dehumanized that kid on the way to the hospital. And I knew it and it bothered me that we were more concerned with playing a show than we were with this young man. So I stopped the show and started yelling at the crowd. “What the fuck were you thinking? What is wrong with you guys? You stab this kid because he was smoking a cigarette? What the fuck is wrong with you????” I almost got my ass kicked that night. I looked into the pit area and locked eyes with a guy. Then. another. Then another. Uh oh. These weren’t just hardcore kids or fans anymore, they were real people. People with the potential for either real compassion or people with the potential to start stabbing us too. Particularly me since I was the one calling it out. The room instantly polarized into two camps. Those who felt justified in stabbing this guy and those who were concerned with him. Looking back on this now over 30 years later I’m surprised a riot didn’t break out. It could’ve gotten really out of hand. People started yelling back and because I was the guy with the microphone I could yell the loudest. It also made me the easiest target. By the grace of God, nobody pulled out any more weapons. I said my piece. They said theirs. Well, we didn’t say it exactly, we yelled it. The point is, we got to the point where we realized we couldn’t resolve anything at a club without violence and we all recognized that we had two choices. We could either just shut it down and go home or we could finish out the set. We finished out the set. I don’t remember much about the eight hour drive home the next day. But I do know that it was somber. I thought about that night many times throughout the course of my life. I’ve thought about our guitarists’ observation that hardcore music was just so damn urgent. I didn’t know what the difference was between the urgency that drove our music and the urgency that drove that kid to stab someone just for smoking a cigarette. I’ll never know what was going through his head and I’m not sure that I understand what was going through mine either back in those days. With 30 years of reflection under my belt, I do know this. They weren’t too far off from each other. The feelings of urgency were the same. They were just pointed in different directions. One was pointed at a purpose and one was pointed at a moral code. One was an open hand and the other a fist clutching a knife. I’m willing to bet that not a single person in that room that night still calls himself straight edge. We all grew up. But what was it that brought us there together that night anyway? For some of us, the urgency that hard-core provided was nebulous, but it came from some sort of yearning for freedom. It was open ended. For the other half of the room, straight edge was a box or a framework or a cage. It was a fixed ideology. And that kid smoking a cigarette was outside of the cage. Looking back now, I realized something. The cigarette smoking kid had the most freedom out of anybody in that entire room. He was expressing his freedom and standing on top of all the cages we had built for ourselves. God bless you, man, wherever you are now. Peace to you, Max This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thinklikeadirector.substack.com [https://thinklikeadirector.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Duct Taped

I was an early tech adopter. Back when PDA’s were a thing, I used to run an entire factory floor from one. I would spend a lot of time trying to optimize my workflow and thought it was amazing that I could do everything from a mobile device. Back in those days you had to use software that you installed from a CD-ROM to sync your offline mobile device to the Outlook servers. My mobile Excel file was pretty ding-dang impressive. Until that one day. The sync software wouldn’t sync. At all. I tried and tried to get it to work. Re-installed the software (again- from a CD-ROM!). An entire day’s worth of production data on some stupid-ass device that was stuck in an infinite loop. And even though there was no production data, there was still production happening. Production was producing alright- it kept cranking along with no direction while my infuriating spinner kept spinning. I knew what I had to do. I was terrified. I had a lot of time and energy invested already. I had already scheduled the production floor. If I could. just. get. it.. off… the…. device. But the machines kept pounding. The production kept producing. The piles kept piling. The next shift was coming. I had to do it. I had to make the decision. I had to go- Analog. I had gotten so used to a stylus that I forgot what an ink pen was. I may as well have been drawing on cave walls with pieces of charcoal. But the Good Lord was smiling on me that day, because the pen that I happened to pick up was a Pilot G2. 1.0 millimeter tip. Black ink. Transparent barrel. And yes, I was writing on a cheap yellow legal pad, but the workflow in my brain was now a deep black gel perfectly dispensed from the tip of that pen and flowing onto the fibrous yellow of that legal paper. It was painstaking but I manually copied every job from that tiny little screen onto my legal pad. The factory was built for speed, and the operators were really good at driving at top speed, but if they were headed in the wrong direction, it would end in disaster. I had to point them in the right direction. So now I had a legal pad full of job numbers and quantities and time broken down into 0.6 hour increments (in a production environment we measure time in tenths of an hour). But I was missing tape. I needed tape. Where the hell is the tape? “Hey man, do you have some tape? Sure, duct tape works.” Any port will do in a storm. So now the whole night shift had their schedule posted on their production monitors on pages ripped from a legal pad with my chicken scratch handwriting, stuck there with duct tape. Duct tape. At least the G2 had a nice flow to it and the ink looked pretty damn good. And you know what? No one cared. Not one person so much as blinked an eye. Because they didn’t care how the schedule was posted, they just needed something to point them in the right direction and they were off to the races. How’s your software working for you these days? Where’s the infuriating spinning circle in your life? Chances are your smartphone has pissed you off at least once this week. Take an inventory of your digital workflow. Find that one thing that just keeps happening and just keeps driving you crazy. Is there a way to take it analog? Sometimes duct tape and a G2 is all you need. Peace to you, Max This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thinklikeadirector.substack.com [https://thinklikeadirector.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

The Sticky Note Enabler

“Why are you doing that? You can’t want it more than they do. Just stop already.” My wife Jess asked me that question, and I had no answer. Someone very close to me was going through a rough time. I was helping them through it in the best way I could; by offering my support and love and care and resources. On the phone with them, texting them, checking up on them, following up with them. I was laying myself out there. I was a martyr for them. Sounds great, right? Except for one huge blind spot that I wasn’t able to see until Jess smacked me in the face with my fake martyrdom: This person couldn’t care less. They were happy to take the help. Who wouldn’t be? The problem was they just consumed it. They didn’t do anything with it. Jess forced me to come to the realization that I, Max Michieli, Helper Of All, was not in fact, helping this person. I was enabling them. Damn. Hard truth exposed. Which, of course, means a pattern was exposed along with it. Which, of course, means I had to look back on my entire life and see where else this pattern showed up. Which, of course, was pretty much everywhere. One time stands out to me, because it was the first time I ever fired anyone. I had just been placed in charge of a department that was brand new to me. In the spirit of Being A Great Boss, I immediately implemented an “open door” policy. My new employees had direct access to me any time they wanted it. And they wanted it a lot. One employee in particular took the opportunity to chat several times a day. These chats usually took the form of complaining. This person clearly had a lot of interpersonal issues and wanted to clear the air. All. The. Time. I tried my best to listen. I tried my best to help. I tried my best to offer solutions. I gave fantastic advice. From little hacks, to systems improvements, to complete departmental overhauls. It took a lot of energy to keep this up. Little by little, I realized that this person was not implementing anything I was suggesting. So I naturally started suggesting more stuff. This didn’t work either. In fact, this employee seemed to get along worse with their coworkers the more I tried to help. Their performance on the job got worse too; they started missing simple things that they had been doing well for years. The systems didn’t improve either, they seemed to be running just as they had before. It got so bad I was forced to terminate their employment. After they were gone, I went to their desk to prepare it for the next person. And that’s when I found them. The stickies. The bottom of this person’s keyboard was completely covered in sticky notes. And on these stickies were all of the information they had been hoarding for the past fifteen years. Things that should have been in the system but were intentionally kept for themselves. I realized this person was trying to protect their job by making sure that no one else could do it without going through them first. They intentionally made themselves the bottleneck. And fooled me for an entire year before I finally caught on. Reflecting on this, Jess’s words rang in my ears: “Why are you doing that? You can’t want it more than they do. Just stop already.” I wanted this person to change more than they did. They wanted to stay right where they were. And you know what? So did I. Because, by me thinking I was honoring their dignity, giving them advice, and basically carrying their burden, I was denying them the opportunity to carry it themselves. In a way, it was condescending. Because I set myself up to be their savior. But they didn’t need it, didn’t want it, and actively worked against it. And by me trying to remove their bottleneck, I exposed the true bottleneck: Me. By jumping in where I shouldn’t, I made a fundamental error of leadership: erosion of trust. I was demonstrating lack of trust in this employee. A better way to handle it would have been to hold them accountable. This way they would have had an opportunity to earn trust, and vice-versa. Now I had to ask myself the question: why did I do this? This is a great question. The painful answer is: because I cared more about how I looked than doing the job right. I did not want to write that last line. It is embarrassing to admit. But it is true. Now, how in the world did I come to believe something so diabolical? Because I did not know who I was. Not for lack of trying. I was- and still am- trying to figure this out daily. But I was ignoring my Interior Life and felt justified in doing so, because I was so busy. And then externalizing this lack of self reflection and trying to cover it up by projecting the image I wanted the world to see. I had to stop. So I did. Not overnight. Not even completely. But I slowly started paying attention to my Interior Life and making it a priority. I started treating it like coffee and just made it a part of my daily wake up ritual. Coffee and contemplation. It works for me. Twenty five years later, it’s just a part of life now. Sometimes I forget to prioritize it. Strike that. Sometimes I choose to deprioritize it. But that always comes back to bite me. So I try not to do that. And it helps me remember who I am and where I should be going. I can trust the decisions I make and carry my own workload. Which means I recognize that others can do the same. That honors their dignity and reveals mine. How about you? Are you carrying someone else’s obligations out of guilt, or pride, or some silly reason you still haven’t figured out yet? If so, I invite you to contemplation along with your coffee or tea or orange juice. Put their obligations aside and focus on carrying yours. Watch what happens. You just may see something in them- and you- that you have never seen before. Peace to you, Max This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thinklikeadirector.substack.com [https://thinklikeadirector.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]