I’ve been a movie buff since Nickelodeon, and over the years watching them to improve my storytelling skills to write. As an over analyzer, I love it—it’s why I started writing as a kid to put my creative noggin to work. Ironically, reading wasn’t my thing, I just had a lot to write about. But who cares? Who reads a random black boy’s stories? He’s different, yeah. But if I told you he did this, to write that, what movie do you think he’d be mimicking? Go ahead, read on…
October 24, 2018
I’m an odd storyteller, bad if I had to say. I try my hardest to make each story sound as if I know where I’m going with it. Typically, I aim for an unexpected epiphany, joke, or smile. There are certain styles of storytelling that extract messages, and character driven personas I hate practicing. They hinder creativity by being under the spell of story structure, or wait, maybe that’s just me and my incompatible gift…
You see the guy Ted Striker below? He’s nervous. Much like how I was walking into that conference room with my old boss to tell him this.
“I’m leaving the company in six months to write full-time….”
That afternoon, I was advised to put in my two-week notice. Why? Because that’s business. Cut the dead weight and today!
Sound like a great story yet?
The conversation with my boss came down to me understanding the three types of people there are in this world, so I credit this to him.
As a leader in sales, he’d tell me about these people in the workplace; they either act as victims, survivors, or navigators.
Victims complain.
Survivors do what they must to satisfy themselves and others. At most, they’re meeting expectations—modest at best and they’re also boring.
Navigators get shit done and are aloof about being above and beyond. They embrace potential in every moment which is why people don’t get them. They aren’t just robotic workers, they prove scalable progress.
Joe said I was a navigator. I sold and upsold some contracts and made a lot, I mean a lot of money in my first eight months. But it was nothing compared to the money upper management took.
It turned me into the Howard Hughes of contemplation; analyzing how I’d hound my accounts for more money, and beast through the weeks to surpass my quarterly goals.
This ambition, however, started up in the air, building out the VehicleDigest five-year flight plan. Between trips, work trips, on the bus and at home, I’d be updating Trello. It got worse at my desk when I’d notate ideas in the app while speaking with clients. I was relentlessly Hughes in thought as determination took over my will to execute the plan, make money, and be on my fuckin’ way about it.
Yearning with desires to navigate my own creative ventures, and alone anticipating I’d get very little help, there was a lot in me feeling the success of my eventual failures.
They say once you reach a certain point, it’s hard turning back and settling for less. Or worse, you get what you’ve always been asking for, only to find you’re asking for a lot more once you’re there.
In planning my own baggage claims to write flights-of-life, and touch down in exotic places, not only did I want to grab luggage from carousel 7, but money bags baby…
How so? Didn’t know—but I felt so. If I can succeed through them, I can excel by me to write and be free.
Although it wasn’t my plan from the beginning, the jump out of a W-4 made my flight load much lighter through the weeks.
So light, I glided North.
Kept my head up, and voyaged upward as the Radio Flyer of my dreams lifting off.
Guess who’s the dead weight in this part of the story? It’s a story of the within, becoming without. I get spiritual as f*ck…
You see my kinfolk below? They’re aviators. Before that they were brothers, cousins, sons, fathers, uncles, and they still were even in uniform
Technically the beautiful negros above are actors. But for whom each represents, are men leaving behind that lifestyle to become navigators of the skies—fighting to protect your granfolks’. Flying to disprove the perceptions out of all them folks.
And what these movies have to do with my story of walking away from a six-figure salary job, is airplanes.
Writing, flying, rhyming, forget a civilian lifestyle, I wanna’ do odd shit. Like this…
Why? …it’s just how I feel.
Between our most exciting moments in life I think we all deserve a dancing journey en route. To navigate through the steps of life’s rhythm and spread our wings to embrace the happenings.
Victims won’t get this.
Survivors fuel off the victims, and will often become one or the other.
Navigators are asking themselves, “who am I today, and within my personal circumstances, where do I go?”
Of course when Joe told me I was a navigator, I felt confined by not creatively navigating through the structures of corporate America. Meaning, I couldn’t compartmentalize, yet.
Without a doubt I knew I’d make it far in aviation sales, and again, I did, but with all that money, I wanted to play on airplanes.
So honestly, Joe, when you told me I was a navigator, in my head I said, “nope, Aviator.”
And so on one glad morning, I could fly away to write my stories. Because if I didn’t, they’d tell it the way stories are always told.
-Budd
(Real Tuskegee Airmen)
This Is Where BuddWrites 