Day 152: Darren Campo
“… all of these things branch out into every conceivable direction, and there’s just no end to it once you’ve found what you like. … it’s a map without a big X. It’s sort of a map where there’s an X everywhere you’re stepping, and it just keeps going on into infinity.”
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Toni Reece: Thank you so much, Darren, for agreeing to be part of the Project today, and before we begin, can you please introduce yourself?
Darren Campo: Thank you, Toni, yes. My name is Darren Campo. I’m the author of a novel called Alex Detail’s Revolution as well as the head of programming for the cable network truTV.
Toni: Well thank you, Darren, and when you think of that word inspiration, who do you inspire and how do you think you do that?
Darren: I don’t know that I can inspire someone directly. My sense of it has always been that inspiration is sort of a byproduct of living an authentic life and engaging in the sort of what you are meant to be here to do. And in doing so and living the life that you are meant to lead, you will then inspire other people, so it’s going to become a byproduct of what you are doing.
You may behave a particular way in a difficult situation and someone sees that, or someone may say to you something and it inspires you and you’re inspiring them, and it’s sort of a mutual chain reaction that happens. I find with a lot of people who say I’ve inspired them, I want to tell them they’ve inspired me first, and I don’t know where it started.
Toni: So chicken and the egg is what it sounds like.
Darren: Yes.
Toni: So from your perspective then, how you inspire others is really by just living your life to the best that you can live and set a good example with that.
Darren: Yeah, I mean, I do think it begins like a lot of things. I think it begins with humanity and with empathy for another person, particularly if they have specifically set out and approached you and said “Can you help me with something,” and you listen to that person. You say “Well, can I help this person?” And if by making that person … you know, sometimes your friends want to be put into a better mood and if you put that … if you transfer that to the people who work for you or the people who might be reading your book, and you’re thinking about …
When I have characters in my book, they’re engaged in some particular activity. I take it very seriously, like these are real people living real lives, and I want their actions to be relatable to people.
I’ve been surprised as a lot of people who read my book, there are very diverse characters and nobody sort of … everyone picks out a different favorite character. And the fact that they’ve projected onto it is an inspiration to me, but it means it spoke to them, so we’re both doing something.
Toni: Absolutely. So how do you think inspiring others either by your writing, the work that you do, the way you interact with people, do you think that there’s also a way that that might help others explore their own potential?
Darren: Yes, I think that there are a couple of components to it. A lot of it is sort of … there’s sort of a mechanical component to it which is the understanding how somebody accomplished something. I find that, for me, is very helpful if I’m undertaking, you know, something to … we always sort of … I think things will happen faster than they do and to know that there are hurdles along the way that we face and the challenges, and to have people help us through it is really good.
But there’s also an emotional aspect to it which is that helping people feel good about what they’re doing from day-to-day, whether you’ve, you know, given someone directions who was afraid to ask and you just caught a glimmer in their eye, or you’ve, you know, done something to make somebody feel better about a particular situation – I think they go hand-in-hand.
Toni: It’s almost … what I’m hearing from you is it’s almost recognition to either someone’s, like you said, someone’s looking a certain way and maybe you’re recognizing that they need a little help, or recognizing someone’s work or connecting with them emotionally. It’s that recognition and awareness that you bring to your relationships or to your characters that may help to, I don’t know, help lift them up a bit to explore their own potential; that’s what I’m hearing you’re saying.
Darren: Yeah, I think that’s right, and I think it can happen in so many different ways. It can happen in a very intentional way, but one of the most … one of the ways that I think I put myself in a better mood a lot of times or make myself happy is to … I find myself on an elevator and I see somebody, you know, with a nice umbrella, and I just say something because just the act of saying something nice or engaging in conversation has value to it.
When you’re looking at your Blackberry and have your IPod on and you miss that opportunity, it’s not only a missed opportunity for a really positive mutual interaction where you feel better and the other person feels better, but it’s sort of a debit later on in the day when you think “Oh, I meant to say that and the elevator doors closed.”
Toni: And you missed out, and you missed out. So, Darren, what inspires you? What do you need to be inspired?
Darren: I think you need really a curiosity and a curiosity about something, and I think that if you follow your curiosity … I’ve looked for the answer to this question, and I’ve found a couple of different really good pointers.
One was from Joseph Campbell reading his works and he said, you know, look back to what you did as a kid for play because, as we become adults and we have to pay bills and take care of people, we sort of get blocked up and we’ve kind of forgot what we intended, or you know, we started doing something and we find ourselves doing something else.
So, how do you find just that thing that you enjoy doing? That for a lot of people, sort of … we all sort of in the realm of ordinary day-to-day concerns of “I have to pay my bill and get the car fixed and pick up the kids, how am I going to have time to do what I enjoy? Or how do I even remember what I enjoy doing?”
You know, a lot of people find themselves in that situation and if you think back to what you did as a kid for play, you might find that you had tea parties with stuffed animals, you know, you like entertaining or you like doing … I used to, you know, play with my friends in the swamps on these adventures, and now I’m writing books about the same sorts of adventures. That’s a really good place to start, and I think a curiosity about yourself is a really good thing to have.
Toni: And when you’re … when you’re looking for that inspiration, do you tend to reach for the same things, to see the same things that kind of spark, you know, a creative process in you?
Darren: It’s funny, I think people have a variety of interests. In life … life is so compartmentalized into kind of our career and then the people that we relate to day-to-day that we sometimes miss out on broader opportunities for what we like doing.
I saw it happen, and it was really miraculous. My mother, a few years ago, was for some reason just picking stones up and she could be on the beach, you know, where everyone picks stones up, but she was also walking, sort of parking the car and she’d stop and pick up a stone, and we didn’t know what she was doing or why she was picking up stones. She just liked it and didn’t really make a big deal out of it.
A couple years goes on, she has a lot of stones, and she starts sort of making sculptures out of them. And one day she replaced the latch on her pocketbook with one of these stones and she called it a power stone. She ended up – now she makes a line of pocketbooks with power stones on them.
Now, her intention wasn’t to make pocketbooks; her intention was nothing other than the joy of like just sort of a meditative state of looking at the ground for a stone. But it came to me that if just doing what you like to do for a few moments a day and not worrying about the outcome is just enormously valuable.
I think we spend so much time worrying about outcomes in life that it sort of ruins what we were doing. So you sit down to do something you like, like make a dish and you say “Well, you know, what I want to do is I want to write a cookbook,” and suddenly you’re afraid of the outcome. “Is someone going to publish my book? Am I going to get enough recipes?” And then it becomes a chore. So if you can, as much as possible — and it’s hard to do — not worry about the outcome and say “You know what? I like doing this. This is a corny record I like listening to; I’m just going to listen to it.”
Toni: It’s great because it’s just fascinating … there’s a lot of people that have been saying something similar on the Project that if you … whatever you’re working on, don’t be invested in the outcome because it will taint it.
Darren: Exactly. Now, like so many things, easier said than done. The outcome can be disappointing and you know, I wrote … when I was writing this novel, I didn’t really realize I was writing it. I had written … I was writing a lot of short stories and shortly, it was maybe 10 years ago that I actually started writing it and spent … but I was having email exchanges with friends and I was just being funny.
I was playing characters and pulling in other characters and they started to criss-cross, and I started writing a short story — which was Chapter One which turned into the sequel to the short story, which was Chapter Two — and I realized I was writing a book and sort of eased in … it’s like getting into a pool, you know, slowly instead of diving in – where you’re like “It’s going to be too cold, I’m not going in.”
So yeah, I think something about not thinking about the outcome … when I finished the book, I did try getting it published for a few years and certainly didn’t have much success, but I was disappointed, but not terribly disappointed because I didn’t set out to do it for the outcome, and I ended up writing another book after that.
So, I think if you ask yourself “Am I doing what I’m doing because I like it or because I value the outcome?” you could … it will really reveal a lot.
Toni: Have you always had the aspiration to be a writer?
Darren: I have. I really think I have. I just remember writing stories as far back as I can remember, and I don’t think anybody ever quite … you know, I never had sort of encouragement or discouragement; it was just something that I’m writing a story about, or I had a dream about. So it was very fortunate that nobody ever pushed me to say “Well, if you’re going to be a writer, be a writer or, you know, don’t.”
Toni: Well because you’ve actually done … just using your example of the email exchanges with your friends and coming, you know, playing with characters in those email exchanges, it reminds me very similar of your mother picking up the stones and now making, you know, purses with stones on them; and your email exchanges, your characters came to life in a book. It seems all very synergistic to me.
Darren: You know it’s funny – it’s almost a physical explanation of that sort of ying-yang thing.
Toni: Yeah.
Darren: We’re very much in the Western focus of cause and effect. Like you go out, work hard for something, and you’ll get it, right, and that’s having a goal and pursuing it, which we’re really good at in this society.
But what we’re not good at is saying … I’m going to … the other part of it, the yang part of it, which is “I’m going to sit back and let the Universe come to me and fill in the accepting of it.” We spend more time chasing than saying, you know, “Come in.”
So I think that when you’re looking at your activities, and you’re saying it’s valuable just to have activities you like doing for the moment that you like doing them, it’s almost … the purest thing I can think of is choose a song I like listening to, right? I’m not worried about an outcome. I know I’m going to enjoy the song.
And if you engage in a couple of different things in the course of your day which you just like doing for yourself, I mean, so long as they’re not destructive things, but they’ll take you somewhere, and you don’t even have to worry about it, and you don’t really have to worry about it because just the act of doing them has value in itself. It’s meditative, it’s refreshing, it makes you feel good. The activity in itself is the value.
Toni: So how does all of this that you’re involved in and you’re doing and you’re learning, how does it correlate to you exploring your own potential? What are you doing to keep exploring that potential?
Darren: You know, I think what happens is that when you find a thread, you keep following it, and there’s never an end to it. There’s never an end to anything. I paint pictures, and I finished the picture and I paint another one because I want to know what’s over there in that picture. And I think with anything that you find, you know, if your joy is particular, one of the great ways to find things you like is, you know, an author you like and you start reading everything that author wrote and then you read what influenced her or him and it just keeps going on and on, and there’s no end to it.
Toni: So for you, what does that mean for you? Where does that take you?
Darren: I don’t know where it takes me, I just know what the things are that I enjoy and that they go other places. So I know I enjoy writing, and I know that I’ll always write. I know I enjoy making TV shows, and I’ll always keep making TV shows, and they all interconnect with other stuff. There’s music involved in making TV shows, and there’s science involved in writing, so I get very … I write science fiction, so I go to the planetarium and I visit with … you know, I talk to scientists and I read Scientific American and I go take … so it’s, it’s … all of these things branch out into every conceivable direction, and there’s just no end to it once you’ve found what you like.
Toni: There are words that come out during these interviews that I just write down randomly when I’m listening to certain people, and I just wrote down the words for you “treasure hunt.”
Darren: That’s what it’s like. That’s what it’s like. And you know, there’s no – you know, it’s a map without a big X. It’s sort of a map where there’s an X everywhere you’re stepping and it just keeps going on into infinity.
Toni: And the good news for you is that you are aware that you can follow any of those routes as long as you are happy doing it and you don’t have to be invested in those outcomes.
Darren: Yeah. I think it’s important for everybody to remember that because it’s really easy to get down to get angry or to have lots of these sort of negative reactive emotions to just the challenges of a day, and to know that you can, no matter what you’re doing, that you can find a moment of peace is important.
Toni: You’ve given a lot of really cool information in this interview from your perspective, and there’s going to be a lot of people that will draw great value from this, and we can’t thank you enough at the Get Inspired! Project for taking part in this interview today.
Darren: Well, it’s very kind of you to have invited me to participate.
Toni: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.
Darren: Thank you, Toni.
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For more information about Darren Campo: Darren.Campo@Turner.com
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