The Work | Adventures | Shawn Lenker

A book-lined studio room with two leather armchairs facing a camera stand, a whiteboard on an easel and daylight through a tall window. — Two Chairs, One Camera Two leather chairs pulled up facing a light stand, with the whiteboard and the shelves behind them. The format is not the point. Being genuinely useful to a stranger is the point.

Two Chairs, One Camera Two leather chairs pulled up facing a light stand, with the whiteboard and the shelves behind them. The format is not the point. Being genuinely useful to a stranger is the point.

Everybody has watched a version of the couple this chapter is trying not to become. They start something together, usually with a camera in the room. It goes well, which is the trap. The audience grows, the audience wants more of them, and slowly the marriage itself becomes the inventory: the anniversaries staged for the thumbnail, the arguments saved for the vlog, two people performing intimacy on a schedule. It ends, when it ends, as an announcement video with a somber title, monetized like everything else was.

I intend to build things in public with a woman I love, so that failure is my terrain, and pretending otherwise would be the first mistake. This chapter is mostly a set of fences around that pit.

The honest starting point: I already do a version of the work alone. I build things, I research things, I publish what I find, and the investigations on this site are that work carried out in public. It pays for itself and it is not a hobby, which matters here because this chapter, alone in the book, already exists in the world rather than on a plan, and most of what the other chapters describe gets paid for out of it.

A desk at night with two monitors, a brass lamp, handwritten pages open in front of the keyboard and stacked reference volumes behind. — The Version I Already Do Alone Two screens, a brass lamp, and a notebook open in the middle of a page. Sources stacked within reach, one person checking whether a claim actually holds.

The Version I Already Do Alone Two screens, a brass lamp, and a notebook open in the middle of a page. Sources stacked within reach, one person checking whether a claim actually holds.

The version I am after has two people in it. Not a brand, not a content strategy. Something the two of us actually grow, that solves a real problem for real people, that pays for the land and the orchard, and that does not ask either of us to pretend to be somebody else on camera.

The first fence: what it turns out to be gets decided later, and that is deliberate. I would rather wait until I know what she is unreasonably good at than pick something now and hand her a seat in it. If a business gets built around one person's strengths and the second person joins afterward, she spends the whole life of it as an assistant. No amount of goodwill later on changes what the thing was shaped around.

We film a good deal of it, and not the polished version. What the record should hold is two people learning something, including the stretches where we get it wrong and have to come back a month later and say so on camera. The internet has an enormous surplus of confident people who already know the answer and a real shortage of competent people thinking out loud, and the second is far more useful than the first. Almost nobody does it, because it means giving up the ability to look infallible.

A large working wall covered in diagrams and notes with several panels painted over and redrawn, above a wide desk of pens and inks. — Coming Back To Say We Were Wrong A working wall where whole sections have been painted over and drawn again underneath. The month-later correction almost never gets filmed.

Coming Back To Say We Were Wrong A working wall where whole sections have been painted over and drawn again underneath. The month-later correction almost never gets filmed.

The second fence, and the tall one, goes straight through the first paragraph of this chapter. Our life is not the content; the work is the content. What happens between the two of us at eleven at night stays ours, and if holding that line costs us an audience, the audience is the cheaper thing to lose. The couples in that first paragraph did not decide to sell their marriage. They declined to build this fence, and the algorithm did the rest one small concession at a time.

She does not need to be a co-founder, and I am putting that in writing because it is exactly the kind of expectation that makes a good woman close the tab. There is no equity she has to want, no title she has to hold, and no reason she ever has to sit in front of a camera. Some of the best partnerships in this shape are one person building the thing and one person who is the reason it is any good, and the second of those two jobs is the harder one.

What actually matters is that she is genuinely interested in what we are making, and that she will tell me when the last thing I published was thin. It matters just as much that she has something of her own, whatever it turns out to be, and that I get to be useful to it in exactly the same way.

I mean that symmetrically, and symmetry deserves specifics. If her work needs a year of my attention and mine can wait, then mine waits. I have watched too many arrangements where one person's work counts as the household's work and the other person's counts as a hobby everybody is polite about. Whoever ends up more visible, neither of us runs a hobby.

The last fence guards against a quieter failure. Two people who work together and live together can slowly lose every surface between them that is not the project. So on some nights we close the work and neither of us brings it up again until morning. That rule is maintenance, the same as oiling anything else two people depend on.

If all of this turns into a company the two of us run, wonderful. If it turns into two people with two separate projects and one very good kitchen table, that was equally the thing I was after.

A view through an open blue door into a second working room, a lit bench with pinned drawings and a desk lamp on one side and a desk beyond. — One Very Good Kitchen Table Two working rooms through one open door, each with its own bench and its own mess. One lamp burning in the cold blue.

One Very Good Kitchen Table Two working rooms through one open door, each with its own bench and its own mess. One lamp burning in the cold blue.

What the work actually is stays blank in this chapter, and the blank is load-bearing. Half of the founding team has not been met. The shape of the thing we build is one more question this book leaves open on purpose, and it stays open longer than any other, because it should.

A warmly lit open workshop doorway on a rural outbuilding at night, light spilling across flagstones, distant valley lights under a deep blue sky. — Whatever Shape It Takes One lit doorway throwing gold across the yard, with the valley lights far off below. A company we both run, or two projects and one table. Either was the thing.