We were lucky to catch up with Brandon Bird recently and have shared our conversation below.
Brandon , thank you so much for joining us. You are such a positive person and it’s something we really admire and so we wanted to start by asking you where you think your optimism comes from?
My optimism comes from the fact that regardless of whether society itself deserves near term optimism, we experience existence as individuals and have more control over our personal experience than our society. While we cannot and should not disentangle from the needs of our world and others just to stay positive, I think we can strike a balance that allows us to retain optimism for ourselves even when the world around us seems bleak… In fact, I’d argue we really cannot achieve the macro existential needs unless we strike an internal balance with personal development and peace. People who ignore their existential needs and obsess over externalities ironically run a serious risk of becoming a menace to their own causes. Where do we get our lenses to perceive these issues and our tools to deal with them if not from our own emotionally balanced, healthy, developed minds? We can’t even outsource this intellectual heavy lifting to others because we can’t determine who to trust without possessing our own sharp tools and clear lenses. So I am optimistic because I know that whatever happens out there, I can always choose to eat well(ish), exercise, read a book, hang out with my fam/friends, work on a project, I can write, and all these things keep me optimistic about my own future. It’s just a happy aside that those inner prerogatives make me feel better equipped to assess and react to modern challenges externally during an information revolution where that’s no easy task.
Second, I’m optimistic because I have impacted externalities before. I can’t take credit for the serendipity of it but somehow, I’ve managed to be in the right place at the right time and was involved in macro changes for Arizonans. I was generally able to make the best of those situations. If people trust you, sense you’re just a normal, informed and honest person (see answer 1) and you’re willing to put in a little bit of effort, it’s surprising what can be accomplished locally -which is where most relevant issues are actually located.
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
The business I created and have run for the last 10 years (most of that alongside my wife who makes the trains run on time) is Golden Rule Botanicals on 7th Ave and Indian School in the Melrose district. For me it’s inseparable from my story and the advocacy I’ve been involved in. We try to focus on harm reduced, natural self-care choices. The “Golden Rule” part refers to products we trust and believe in -we’re uncompromising on quality. Essentially I took the things that actually worked for me, dropped the rest and turned it into a business that I still love.
We actually do have new projects in the works at the moment. We have a meteorically growing silversmithing brand that is presently producing stock and custom jewelry via our company Lore, found @loresilversmithing on Instagram. Somehow Lore jewelry has already made it oversees! In fact, we just had one of our necklaces stolen from a patron in Rome. Your Jewelry heisted in Rome, that’s when you know you’ve made it.
I’ve just completed a studio and will soon be doing a podcast designed to offer “Alien” perspectives from Neurodivergent people (Autism Spectrum or Aspergers). Neurodivergence can be alienating, can feel like observing humans from the outside. Many ND people are also unusually intelligent which is essentially the trade off and the reason ND people are not always upset about the way they are. Outsider status, intensity and smarts do not always work well at dinner parties… but it’s a great mix for figuring out complex issues at a time where the issues are increasingly complex. Our analysis has not caught up to the increasing complexity of the world, in fact we appear to have gone backwards. My goal is to run the other way and try to have some fun in the process. It’s a serious mission I intend to approach as not seriously as possible if that makes any sense.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
I’m afraid you’re not going to get terribly original answers here but that’s because many smart successful people before me have shared before. So let me validate my peers and forebears.
1. Resilience to failure: This may seem like an aside, but my best example is smoking -which I picked up at a time where basically 100% of people who played guitar also smoked cigarettes. It came time to quit. My first try was pathetic. My next try was a little less pathetic. It went on like that until one day… I didn’t even know that would be the time it worked, I just forgot to start smoking again. If I had been torturing myself about not quitting, if I had been feeling bad for every failed attempt, it never would have happened for me. Allowing myself the room to fail not just once but a dozen times and losing no dignity for it allowed me to continue learning from the experience and prevented burnout. It’s been much like this in business. Later on you’ll want to shore up every plan and stick every landing where you can but even then and especially when you’re starting out, you need resilience to failure.
2. Communication: Comm is considered a joke major. This is ironic, I see it as one of the least-joke majors in an era where the renaissance man, the everyday genius, has given way to the idiot savant. Communication is so all encompassing, it’s essentially an epistemology. Communication as a discipline will enable you to glean knowledge where others see nothing. It’s such an under-appreciated discipline that people don’t really guard against comm analysis. People and social phenomenon become an open book when you really seek to understand how people communicate intentionally and unintentionally.
3. Independent thinking: There is something to be said for reading the zeitgeist. However, you don’t want to BE a data point in the zeitgeist. Try your best to avoid thought groups and sclerotic thought patterns. Reject labels and categorization. Perhaps this won’t be relevant to every aspect of your being, but you should stretch it as far as possible. Don’t be a pretend iconoclast by adopting the persona or ideals of the people you think of as iconoclastic, truly chart your own course. Keep your input as dynamic as possible. You’d be surprised how wild my reading is. My Audible library may jump from a Physics book to a British WW2 fiction drama to Historical non0-fiction. My interests’ range as if I selected them by throwing darts at the internet. And I find common ground with many, many different thinkers. I’ll take it all and try to create an original, wholistic sense of the world from it.
One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?
Absolutely. I’m always interested in new projects and that usually begins with new friends. And while my time is precious, I can always make new time for worthwhile pursuits.
As for my podcast project, I may have someone else lined up to help host the show but its no certain thing. If anyone is or knows of someone on the Aspergers or ASD spectrum who’s an independent, open minded thinker and might be interested in the project, by all means, get in touch. If you’re a professional with a nuanced take on an issue you see as superficially understood at large and you’d like to have a conversation about it, I’d love to talk to you.
I’ve recently made a foray into the world of racing. I’m currently training and working on my own cars and will be driving an endurance car early next year. Really if I could totally have it my own selfish way, my entire career would be about cars, writing about them, designing them and driving them. If you ever need a car guy, I’m your car guy.
Contact Info:
- Website: goldenrulebotanicals.com
- Instagram: Doppel_Entendre, LoreSilversmithing
- Facebook: Brandon Bird
- Other: Im best reached at [email protected]
