We caught up with the brilliant and insightful John Garcia a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
John, we’re so excited for our community to get to know you and learn from your journey and the wisdom you’ve acquired over time. Let’s kick things off with a discussion on self-confidence and self-esteem. How did you develop yours?
This might sound odd, but a lot of my confidence and self-esteem was developed through what might be consider “weird” choices, and learning to process and incorporate social reactions while not succumbing to societal pressures. When I say weird choices, I’m not talking about “Ozzy Osbourne biting heads off rats at concerts” kind of weird. I wasn’t out in the streets screaming random nonsense because I flipped a coin. On a micro-scale, some examples are like trying out new socks, a different flavor of ice cream, or a different pair of pants. I think a lot of people clutch tightly to their current preferences as a doctrine for how they should always exist, they say things like “I could never…”, “I can’t understand why…”, “I don’t think I’ll ever…” and so on. In reality, those same people are always contradicting those limitations, they’re just doing so in a way that comes more intuitively. When you attempt to go against the boundaries or preferences you’ve set for yourself, other people notice and remark on it. I think of the classic gag from Airplane!, when a woman notices her husband orders a second cup of coffee she thinks to herself “My husband never orders a second cup of coffee at home.” and later repeats that mantra when her husband loses his lunch because he “never loses his lunch at home.”
There’s a tendency to conflate consistency with identity, and that results in pressure to erode the confidence and self-esteem required to enact change. Being comfortable with the concept that there isn’t a monolithic identity you inhabit, but looking at yourself as a multifaceted individual with agency is key to thriving in uncertainty. When I was younger, around middle-school, I made a voluntary choice to always wear micro-fiber sweatpants, hand-stitched by my mother. I was also forced, under medical circumstances, to wear a plastic girdle for spinal correction. Both of these accessories were perceived as identity by my social environment, and deemed different and lesser. I endured bullying and prejudice, as a result I quickly learned if I let the social perception overwhelm me, I would be letting others define who I am and what I like. I opted to draw a line in the sand, shrug my shoulders, and say “I am who I am, only I get to define that.” I’ve carried that epiphany with me ever since, and it’s the corner stone of my confidence and self-esteem. You are who you are, I am who I am. If you change who you are tomorrow, it’s up to me to embrace that change not suppress it.
Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
I am a Tech and Community Manager for the Austin-based non-profit Hyperreal Film Club (HRFC). This is not my day job, it’s a labor of love. I discovered this non-profit after the shelter-in-place order was lifted for the COVID-19 pandemic. I’ve always loved film as an art form and a source of escape. The pandemic strengthened that love and led to me discovering this org. Hyperreal’s mission is to help local filmmakers gain community exposure and share mind-expanding experiences in the form of weird, wild, and obscure movies. While streaming services offer algorithmic curation that caters to your existing preferences and helps you nestle snuggly into what you already like, Hyperreal presents a human-curated selection of in-person communal film experiences that can expand your preferences –all while spreading awareness of independent filmmakers looking to share their art with the world. HRFC also offers community-sourced content like reviews, interviews, and poster art, as well as a Discord server to help connect film lovers and filmmakers.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
1. The ability to recognize and act when you’re deferring your agency to someone or something
The bystander effect is a phenomena that embodies a scenario of deferring agency. When you’re in a crowd of people you feel are equally capable to take on a task, you might find yourself thinking “I know what needs to be done, but surely someone more qualified than me will do it.” This causes a self-imposed paralysis and apathy. I believe part of this is your brain thinking it will conserve energy if you don’t act, the other part is your self-esteem yielding to the myth of an unattainable qualification required to take action. If you actively acknowledge that you’re yielding agency to others, you’re allowing active decisions to be made on your behalf or the community’s behalf, then you put yourself in a position to choose an alternate path and shake yourself out of inaction.
2. The knowledge that you are a different person today than you were yesterday, and you’ll be a different person tomorrow.
I could drum up some scientific citations about the rotation of cells in your body actively reincarnating who you are, but that’s an appeal to the physical concept of being different. The knowledge that you are a different person today than yesterday is also a metaphysical concept, and that’s what I’m referring to. If you suddenly decide you have a new favorite movie, doesn’t that indicate change and imply an alteration in the monolithic identity of “you”? I believe understanding this concept helps detach from the more toxic traits of identity enforcement. You don’t have to like what you liked yesterday, you don’t have to eat the same food tomorrow that you had today, etc. When you realize this, you can more easily change and adapt who you want to be and spend more time enjoying who you are in the moment –this will show through in your expressions and interactions.
3. The quality of relentless curiosity in spite of complacency
In the early years of life, curiosity is essential to gaining stability. The more curious you are, the more you learn, and the more comfort you are able to establish with the skills learned. Later in life, we often try to be “only as curious as is needed”. Once something is deemed “good enough” we are more likely to move on and never explore deeper in that direction. Adults are more likely to pick movies based on aggregated critic scores or algorithmic recommendations, make decisions at the supermarket based on brand recognition, and will often take the shortest distance to any one point because it gets them to their destination faster. All of this in the interest of reducing risk. Risk of wasted time, having a subpar life experience, and so on. The dirty secret here is there’s no real risk in indulging the longer routes, the lesser known brands, the poorly rated movies. Time is only wasted if you believe it was wasted, if you explore a dark cave and find that it ends abruptly with no treasures at the end, did you not still derive some suspense, thrills from plunging into the unknown? To paraphrase as quote from the Blackberry (2023) movie (something I never thought I’d do), “Perfect may be the enemy of good, but good enough is the enemy of humanity.”
My advice to those looking to incorporate these into their journey would be to keep a journal with three daily questions:
– What was a big decision/action I made today?
– Is there anything new that I like or dislike? Why do I believe I like/dislike it?
– What’s something I’d like to learn more about or something I wish I’d known about?
These prompts can help track milestones and inform how you can explore, learn, and reinforce real-world instances of the concepts above.
Thanks so much for sharing all these insights with us today. Before we go, is there a book that’s played in important role in your development?
There are plenty of fictional books that were formative to who I am, but I find myself often recalling segments of the 2017 non-fiction, self-help book “Learn Better” by Ulrich Boser more so than the struggles of archetypal figures from a fairytale. The entire reason I sought that book out was to try and understand how best to communicate with other people in a way that sticks. I think we all experience these intense moments of emotion, and we want to share the significance of those moments with others, more so than we want to share the actual moment itself. “Learn Better” isn’t a dedicated guide to sharing an experience in parity, it’s a collection of observations and studies that show you how to help others grow along with you. Two core lessons from the book that I carry with me are:
1. If you have a vision that you understand, ask someone else if they understand it. If they don’t, try to find something they understand and walk them toward your vision from that anchor point.
Too often I’ve encountered people who are teeming with passion for a project or nostalgic for a memory that only they can understand. They don’t often take the time to offer their hand in walking me up to the importance and the contextual root of their passion, but they still expect reciprocated enthusiasm. I think authentic, genuine enthusiasm can be felt stronger than feigned interest or lip service. It’s not the case that everyone should have a pitch deck ready to go in case they need to explain their favorite childhood experience, but every conversation is a two-way street. The person telling an important story should strive to instill the importance without taking it for granted, and the listener should ask genuine questions if they feel disengaged. No story contains value on its own, but we can infuse it with significance.
2. Let your brain burn a bit before asking for help.
In an era with AI Text Model and Search Engine solutions, searching for non-philosophical answers has never been easier. It can be so easy, in fact, that we may prefer to reach for our phone or a keyboard before we would dare use our grey matter powers to conjure a fix to our problems. This second lesson is more in line with meditation in the sense that it emphasizes letting a particular experience play out. Before I run to a computer to try and remember how to do math, the definition of a certain word, or what an abstract piece of art might mean, I let my mind linger in that limbo of uncertainty. In instances where the knowledge is required for work, I find that I retain it better if it frustrates me for a little bit longer than I would like it to. If it’s purely for entertainment or experience, I believe it settles into more unique folds of my mind if I give it a good pondering before consulting what a scholar or a peer may believe.
These two pieces of advice have helped me learn from and express my experiences in a more refined way, and I can’t recommend this book enough.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://hyperrealfilm.club/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hyperrealfilmclub/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@HyperrealFilmClub
