The Bird Saw It

The Bird Saw It

A note before you start. This one comes with a song. It’s called “Looking Up.” Read first, then let the song find you on the other side. Before they sat down, I was watching a bird. It was working the banana plant at the table next to mine. In and out of the broad leaves, checking angles, very purposeful. The harbor was behind it. Boats in the channel. The mountains past that. A clear Fourth of July afternoon in Santa Barbara, the kind you drive across the state for. Then the family arrived. Mom, dad, three kids, two grandparents. Tourists, obvious from the cameras and the way they sorted themselves into chairs. Good vibe. Having the grandparents there made it feel even better. The adults had chosen well: a great table, a beautiful day, the whole harbor to look at. Then out came the iPads Through Another Lens is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. One in front of each kid. Snap, snap, snap. The kids went still. Heads down. Totally trained. The parents stood at the table long enough to order from the server, then walked away. Nothing at that table moved. The girls in their pink hats. The boy in the teal shirt. Three screens. The harbor behind them. Nobody looking. I looked at my lunch companions and said, “I have to take a picture of this.” I did. And I sat with what I was feeling, which took me a minute to name. It wasn’t anger exactly. It was something closer to grief. Because fifteen feet behind those three kids, through the glass, was the harbor. Boats. A holiday. And six inches into the banana plant, a bird was working very hard at being a parent. It did not have a phone. It did not need one. Every single thing that bird needed to do for its young, it was doing. I thought about my friend Michael. Michael is a stay-at-home dad in Santa Barbara. His son is three. There is no TV in their house when he’s around. No phone screens. His son has essentially zero experience with them. When a friend texted Michael a photo and said “show this to your boy,” Michael didn’t. He didn’t open the phone. He didn’t show the picture. Instead, they walk. Santa Barbara is good for walking, and they make the most of it. Michael teaches his son the way Sesame Street used to teach all of us, out loud, in the world. They count things. One of those, two of those, look at that. His son is three and he knows where he lives. He knows his street. He knows his neighborhood. Michael has taken the job seriously in the way only someone who has thought hard about it does. Here’s the part I keep thinking about. Michael figured out that his son loves music. So he went to Suno and started making songs out of the lessons. Things they’d learned on their walks turned into songs. Now, when they drive somewhere, his son listens to songs his dad made for him. Reinforcement, joy, presence, all of it at once. Michael invented his own Sesame Street and put it in the car. Three kids with iPads at a harbor restaurant and a dad making his son songs about the world outside the window. Both scenes happened this week. Both are real. The question isn’t whether our kids should use technology. The question is what they learn to crave. What they learn to reach for when there’s a choice. I’m at the Cold Spring AI Summit in Montecito this week. Two days, workshops, keynotes, people thinking hard about what AI does to kids and classrooms and learning. The question of AI and our children, from parents, teachers, and administrators in K through 12, is one of the most important we have right now. But I keep coming back to the harbor. I spend an enormous amount of my life in front of screens. More than most people, probably. It’s the nature of the work. And what I’ve noticed is that when I have the chance to be with humans, I put the screen away. Not because someone told me to. Because I crave the humans more than I crave the screen. I think most of us do, once we slow down enough to notice it. The question isn’t whether our kids should use technology. They will. They already do. The question is what they learn to crave. What they learn to reach for when there’s a choice. Three kids, three iPads, a harbor full of boats, and a bird working a nest in the banana plant twelve inches from the back of their heads. The bird saw everything. Thanks for reading Through Another Lens! This post is public so feel free to share it. Listen to “Looking Up” on Suno: https://suno.com/s/NexgQwX5Tl2lae1J [https://suno.com/s/NexgQwX5Tl2lae1J] Get full access to Through Another Lens at marksylvester.substack.com/subscribe [https://marksylvester.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

I Said No Twice Before I Said Yes

A note before you start. This one comes with a song called “Two Words,” written as a companion to the essay. Listen first and let it set the room, or read first and let the song land after. Either order works. Both are short. When I asked who wanted to work in the film business someday, I expected a forest of hands. Twenty-Five teenagers, the first morning of the Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s Teen Film Camp, all of them there because they applied to be. This had to be a room full of future directors and editors and cinematographers. Two hands went up. These were fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen-year-olds. Beautifully bouncy, gloriously distracted, the kind of room where confidence shows up and disappears on a ten-minute cycle. You can’t lecture a group like that. You have to show them something they can feel. And the thing I most needed them to feel had nothing to do with a camera. In a few days, they would be making films in crews of three and four. Four teenagers, four people each privately sure their idea is the one that should win. Whether that crew makes one good film or four half-films nobody finishes comes down to something smaller than talent. It comes down to how they answer each other. Through Another Lens is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The Circle So we didn’t start with gear. We stood in a circle outside, and one at a time we tapped the shoulder of the person beside us, held their eyes, and said three words. “I’ve got your back.” Then we threw an imaginary ball around the circle until a banana and a frog joined it and the whole thing fell apart laughing. Both were the same lesson, wearing different clothes. Pay attention to the person across from you, or you drop the frog. Presence first. No But, Yes But, Yes And Back inside, I gave them three ways to answer a pitch. No but. Yes but. Yes and. Then I asked a team leader to stand up and pitch me the movie his crew was about to make. He got a sentence in and I no-butted him. It’s been done, I said. The budget won’t cover it. The lead should be older. Every door shut before he reached it, and he slowed, then stopped, the way you do when you realize the person across from you was only waiting for a gap to say no. I told him to start over, and this time I was generous. I nodded, I smiled, I yes-butted him. Yes, that’s interesting, but what if the ending changed? Yes, I love that, but the lead should really be older. By the third soft agreement, his idea wasn’t his anymore. I’d agreed with every word and walked off with the whole thing. That one is worse because it looks like collaboration while doing the same damage, and it’s the one that runs most of the meetings I’ve ever sat in. Then I told him to pitch me one more time, and I said yes and. He gave me a kid who finds something. I said yes, and the thing he finds is alive. He came back fast, yes, and it’s been waiting for him. Yes, I said, and it knows his name. And he was off, both of us building the same thing in the air between us, the idea getting bigger every time it changed hands. He didn’t stop when he ran out of pitch. I had to tell him we were done. He sat back down buoyant. You could see it on him from across the room, that lit-up thing a kid does when something he made got bigger instead of getting taken. I asked the room what was different about the three. They knew. Same pitch, same kid. The only thing that changed was the two words I chose to meet him with. No-but kills a room fast, and everyone watches it happen. The slow killer is yes-but, dressed up as agreement. Yes-and is the only one of the three that leaves people with more than they walked in carrying. That is the whole game on a set. No-but kills a room fast, and everyone watches it happen. The slow killer is yes-but, dressed up as agreement, which is exactly why it survives in rooms where no-but would get you thrown out. And yes-and is the only one of the three that leaves people with more than they walked in carrying. Being nice has nothing to do with it. Yes-and keeps an idea alive long enough to find out what it wants to be. Everything I put them through that morning was improv, the same games I play on a stage on the weekends. Yes-and is its first rule. It turns out to be the first rule of any room where people are trying to make one thing together. Intention Once an idea is alive, you can ask the harder question, so I asked it. How do you want people to feel when they walk out of your film? That one landed like a foreign language. They’d been thinking about the shot and the gear and the cool idea, which is to say they’d been thinking about themselves. Almost none of them had pictured the person on the other end of the work. Yes-and is what carries a crew across that gap, because you can’t build toward a stranger’s feeling while you’re still guarding your own pitch. Five Days The clock on them was brutal. Five days to make a five-minute film, shot on iPhones, cut on laptops, every crew teaching itself to direct, light, cast, edit, and produce all at once, the whole thing due in front of their parents on Friday night. Under that kind of compression, talent is not what saves you. The crews that finish are the ones who can answer each other with yes-and. The ones stuck in no-but and yes-but spend five days defending pitches and screen a mess on Friday, if they screen anything at all. The Back of the Book Then I turned the intention inward. I gave them one quiet minute and a single instruction. Write down how you want to feel at the end of this week. Keep it private, in the back of the book where nobody will see it. And when the week gets hard, when you are stressed or sure your film is falling apart, open the book and read your own words back to yourself. I know that one works. I have watched it work on me for years. Write down how you want to feel at the end of the week. When it gets hard, open the book and read your own words back to yourself. Their films screened for their parents last Friday night, five days after almost none of them would raise a hand for a job in the credits. The films matter to me less than what got written in the back of those books, and what happened to the kid who felt yes-and work on him in front of everyone. That is the lesson I hope outlasts the week and the month and most of what they think they came here to learn. It is why I make the drive up to the Whittier Ranch every year. Listen to “Two Words [https://suno.com/s/asGl74bQlICDdE2X]” on Suno Get full access to Through Another Lens at marksylvester.substack.com/subscribe [https://marksylvester.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

The Long Line: What Father's Day Means When You're Standing in It

What's in this episode • Why I never wrote a Father's Day piece until now • My father, the sports page, and the decision I made at twelve • Raising my son alone at twenty-one • The orchids by my door, and losing my father and son the same year • Three grandsons, one bay, and a photograph from a tug • Older is what happens to you, elder is what you decide This episode • Read the full Sunday Story: https://marksylvester.substack.com/p/the-long-line-what-fathers-day-means [https://marksylvester.substack.com/p/the-long-line-what-fathers-day-means] • Subscribe: marksylvester.substack.com [http://marksylvester.substack.com] More from Mark • TEDxSantaBarbara: tedxsantabarbara.com [http://tedxsantabarbara.com] • Mark Sylvester: marksylvester.com [http://marksylvester.com] • An Embarrassment of Pandas (improv, the Alcazar) • Carpinteria Improv Listen to “I Show Up” on Suno : https://suno.com/s/Q5dQJvKYhDyxMWkg Get full access to Through Another Lens at marksylvester.substack.com/subscribe [https://marksylvester.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

The Move

What's in this episode Tuesday morning at IdeasOut: what the working day looks like in 2026 Fifty years across five rooms: chef, Wavefront, TEDx, speaker, platform builder The Hamilton flip: don't wait for the invitation, make the room Why every tool turned out to be the same tool The throughline you can't see because you're inside it The question to sit with: what have you been building all along that you didn't know you were building The leave-a-comment invitation that closes the series This episode Part 4 of 4 in the "Preparation for Spontaneity" series The series close Last Saturday: "The Bridge" Two Saturdays ago: "The Pattern" Three Saturdays ago: "The Exhaustion" Read or subscribe: https://MarkSylvester.substack.com More from Mark TEDxSantaBarbara: tedxsantabarbara.com [http://tedxsantabarbara.com] Mark Sylvester: marksylvester.com [http://marksylvester.com] An Embarrassment of Pandas: anembarrassmentofpandas.com [http://anembarrassmentofpandas.com] Carpinteria Improv: carpinteriaimprov.com [http://carpinteriaimprov.com] Get full access to Through Another Lens at marksylvester.substack.com/subscribe [https://marksylvester.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

The Bridge

What's in this episode The 25-foot walk to the red circle in Fargo, summer 2018 Why the producer who'd built the room for over a hundred talks still froze on stage The most honest line in the series: I was afraid to freestyle The cultural fight underneath everything: systems people vs creative people, both wrong Father Tom in 1978: the bridge handed across from a kitchen chalkboard Why most knowledge work refuses the bridge (and which organizations don't) The setup for next Saturday's series close This episode Part 3 of 4 in the "Preparation for Spontaneity" series Last Saturday: "The Pattern" Next Saturday: "The Move" (series close) Read or subscribe: [paste Substack URL] More from Mark TEDxSantaBarbara: tedxsantabarbara.com [http://tedxsantabarbara.com] Mark Sylvester: marksylvester.com [http://marksylvester.com] An Embarrassment of Pandas: anembarrassmentofpandas.com [http://anembarrassmentofpandas.com] Carpinteria Improv: carpinteriaimprov.com [http://carpinteriaimprov.com] Get full access to Through Another Lens at marksylvester.substack.com/subscribe [https://marksylvester.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]