Creative freedom, School, Micromobility | #9

Been listening to quite a few podcasts about Patreon and Kickstarter lately. This idea of gaining creative freedom, or research freedom, is perhaps something that I find many different communities strive for (the new indie vc movement, digital nomads, patreon creators, kickstarter creators, indie hackers, to name a few.)

I’m very excited to see where all of these movements lead to, and genuinely hope that I will be able to contribute to it. Perhaps, launching BBCube is the first step toward that.

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Some of the Secret Project Taiwan members are in SF this fall as exchange students. Meeting with them has reminded me of the sptw sessions that I ran in the summer of 2015 and 2016. To a very large extent, that’s still the project that I’m the most proud of, and would like to continue working on at some point.

The question I’ve been thinking about this week, in relation to creative freedom, is whether there should be a school that helps you to gain creative freedom. Job security is no longer the only goal people have for their careers. However, it is still very hard for people to wrap their head around, and be brave enough to get started with gaining creative freedom (especially those who live in an environment that culturally encourages to climb the corporate ladder, or stick with a ‘safe job’.)

Most schools today ride on their existing reputation and cannot promise job security. What I like about Lambda School’s model is that they’ve structured their business model around motivating themselves to help students secure a job. What I wish exists, in addition to what Lambda School is doing, is perhaps a school or program that teaches people courage and assists people in launching their indie products.

I believe that Secret Project Taiwan was a step toward that direction, but currently I don’t know how I could be taking it another step furthur.

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Now that scooters are back in SF, I find myself not liking it as much as I thought I would. It is still very convinient to have scooters as a transportation option, but I’ve been using JUMP bikes significantly more. JUMP bikes are cheaper than scooters (per minute), you kind of get an exercise out of it, and it is fun to zip around the city.

I’ve been doing some desktop research on different ebikes brand, as well as the renting and charging as a service that Uma offers. It is so fascinating how very few people/organizations saw micromobility coming, yet it is changing how lower and middle social class people can commute. I remember hearing someone complaining about how “we were promised flying cars and we got 140 words (Twitter)”, but I personally think the future always play out this way, and there’s nothing bad about this. A society advances not necessarily because of a new invention, but because of a new way to organize existing things.