I am starting a new musical project and the most fun thing I can think to do with it is dance. I’ve been watching a lot of YAKfilms and CirqueDuSoleil recently and I would like to do something similarly captivating. Let’s combine urban dance, acrobatics, and indie rock into a really fun show to perform in theatres, music venues, and film. The first two creative elements I want to put together are a great vocalist to interpret the music and a choreographer to help me pull together the visual forms.

VOCALIST: My preference is a female vocalist who could also cover keyboard, guitar, or bass parts, but I am open to other possibilities. If you would be excited to work with the music in this demo, contact me.

CHOREOGRAPHER: If you have contacts in the local dance community and would like to help me put dancers with these tracks, contact me.

I just threw this together today to see what it would look like.

Note: While Americans tend to be more specific when they refer to their form of housing, whether it be a room, an apartment, a condo, or a house, the Portuguese generally refer to them all as casa (home).

Home 1

While living in a hostel for the first two weeks after my arrival in Lisbon I made a lot of embarrassing calls to non-english speaking landlords. After my Portuguese classes started at the university I discovered that they had a directory of student housing available and I rented my first room for €450 from a nice, slightly crazy part-time model law student.

Nothing really crazy happened here, except for when I got depressed for a whole week and couldn’t get out of bed. Thank god for television. The most difficult thing about moving that I always forget about is my local social support network (aka friends). Oh, I should also mention the time I walked into the neighborhood market and accidentally asked for penises (pilas) instead of batteries (pilhas).

Home 2

Next I moved in with my girlfriend for a couple of months. There was a churrasqueira right across the street. Wow, that thing smelled bad.

Home 3

Soon afterwards we moved in with a Portuguese-German capoeira-dancing couple. The street we lived on wasn’t a street, nor was the next one it intersected with. It’s a little hard to explain for those who have never seen it, but the old neighborhoods of Lisbon have plenty of addresses that exist on public stairs winding up through the city, branching off into hidden sidewalks. We lived in one of these neighborhoods called Bica.

It smelled from the dog shit everywhere, but it had a great view of the Tejo river and a weird abandoned backyard across the wall with chickens and cats.

Home 4

Around the corner and down the stairs about 50 feet away I moved in with a friend who had recently acquired hot water for the first time. There was no door on the bathroom and I could hear everything my housemate did, but my share of the rent was only €125! In the photo above I cranked up the shadows to reveal more detail. There was an old barber across the stairs who charged €5 and had some 1980s pornographic calendars on the wall. The best thing about these last two houses was that they were a block away from the biggest open market in Lisbon where I could get a pound of fresh olives for €3!

The weirdest thing that ever happened was when my housemate lost a tooth and didn’t get it fixed for days. Or was it when the other housemate starting doing drug deals in the living room maybe?

Home 5

This was the best and last place I lived in Lisbon. Half of the reason it was great was because my housemate and friend Rafa was producing records. There were three bedrooms so we had a pretty respectable home studio setup. The other half was that it was big, cheap, and had a great view of the river, the train station, and people standing in line at popular Lux dance club at night. There was a scary abandoned apartment on our floor where the ceiling had caved in and the Brazilian neighbors seemed to be holding some kind of seances, but here is the story I really wanted to tell you:

For the first couple of months that we lived there we had free electricity and free water. That is, we never received any bills and no one every came to inspect the equipment, until one day. I heard someone coming up the stairs so I peeped out of the peep-hole and watched a water-company rep turn some valves in our hallway. Then he left and the water was off. Huh, that’s simple, I thought as I inspected the valves. All I need is a wrench. My girlfriend and Rafa cautioned me against it, but I was determined to steal water, so I turned the valve ever so slightly. It gave so I assumed I was doing the right thing and kept turning.

Before I knew it the valve shot out, water was spraying down the stairs, and my imminent extradition from the country flashed before my eyes. I was so scared. Rafa came to the door and said, “Nathan what have you done?” I looked around wildly trying to think of something. Then, at the base of the stairs I saw the valve that had shot off. I grabbed it and shooved it back into the pipe. Luckily, it held and I ran back into the apartment to hide. Turns out the screw was threaded in reverse. Whoops.

I’m still not really sure how I got out of this. I called the landlord to tell him that the wall was leaking so he called a plumber who just came and fixed it. No questions asked. Later I had to make several trips to the office of the water company to get our service back. Apparently no one had paid the bill in 10 years and they held me responsible. I said, “I’ve only been living there 2 months. How could I have used that much water in two months?” To that the water rep said, “I don’t know, maybe you have been filling up a swimming pool every day.” Awesome.

Now about the electricity. Should I tell you the details, or just let you generate some mental images of Rafa, standing on a stool, replacing the hand-made jumper to bypass the main fuse?

I have a really hard time setting goals. This has to do with my fear of commitment as I spoke about briefly in my last post, or at least that is my self-analysis. I have a really hard time following through when I am not 100% clear about my motivation. If the work is hard and I start asking myself why I’m doing it, boy do I get pissed.

In an effort to break this habit and increase my goal-setting abilities I am joining Steve Pavlina in his free Passive Income Series. Normally I wouldn’t share this publicly because for mostly people money equals hard work and passive income just makes us think of scams and spam. In spite of this taboo, It’s important for me that I share this goal with you in hope of positive support and encouragement. This project is the training wheels for the bicycle that I will ride to a larger goal.

GOAL: Create a new stream of passive income by November 1, 2012, that generates at least $180 per month on average and endures for a minimum of 5 years.

I believe I can do this because I am not starting from scratch. I have been working on building an audience since my first rock band in high school and I already have some ideas for generating the stream. This stream will earn about $10,000 over the next 5 years, but more specifically, it’s the right amount to pay my utilities every month.

It would be great if you would like to join me in this series. While Pavlina is a good coach, he has far too many readers to work with them all individually. So if you are going to do it, email me or comment in below and we can share our experiences. Expect to succeed.

Steve Pavlina’s Passive Income Series:

1. What Is Passive Income?
2. The End Game of Passive Income
3. Set Your Passive Income Goal
4. Commit To Your Passive Income Goal
5. Jobs vs. Passive Income
6. You Earn Passive Income by Being More Generous
7. to be continued…

MY UPDATES FROM FOLLOWING THE PASSIVE INCOME SERIES

Put Your Goal in Your Face: I printed this and posted in near my computer and on my table – I am now successfully creating a new stream of passive income by November 1, 2012, that generates at least $180 per month on average and endures for a minimum of 5 years, and I’m doing this in an easy focused manner that delivers creative content for many others around the world.

Create Consequences for Failure: If I fail to complete this goal I will sell my desktop computer.

Involve Others: I am blogging about my progress on this site and have posted it on my FB timeline. Still hoping to find an accountability partner.

Stop Being So Selfish With Your Value: Society doesn’t care how hard you work. It doesn’t care how creative you are. It only cares about the value you’re actually getting into people’s hands. That’s what you get paid for — for value delivery — not for your ideas, or your long work days, or your intrinsic value as a human being.

What value do you deliver to your friends and family? I caring, fun, challenging, and supportive.

What other forms of value could you provide if you made an effort? Creative solutions to live event production challenges. Digital media production and distribution support. Entertainment (music, theatre, comedy). Education (audio tech, language, travel).

Every few months I get really upset with this cycle and decide to end it once and for all. In the past this has taken the form of moving, quitting jobs, starting new ones, quitting projects, starting new ones, and most recently, reading self-help books. I’m addicted! They always leave me so inspired and I love sitting down to plan my “ideal life” and to set 5-year goals. Unfortunately, I can never finish the books because I can never decide on my “passion work” or my “life purpose project.” A year ago I started Sound Design Live after reading Crush It and I was super excited about it for two months, then the bottom fell out and and all of a sudden I didn’t care about it any more. Now I’m so scared of that happening again that I only want to start a project when I’m sure it is perfect. That is, the right one for me, the one I won’t give up on. (Note: I’ve since come around to Sound Design Live again and discovered that I really enjoy working on it, just not every single day as I was doing a year ago.)

Who is Nathan Lively? Am I a rock star, a theatrical sound designer, an audio visual technician, a comedian, an online publisher, or a writer? I’ve printed so many different business cards that it has become obvious that I am not a skilled tradesman, I am a generalist. Although I become enamored with the idea of being the charismatic expert in a particular field, this is mostly my ego looking for a proven path to recognition. It sees a path, like being a sound engineer for bands, and wants to follow that to the top of the mountain for everyone to see. The truth is that I may never decide on one thing that I would like to do every day. Maybe this is why I run 5 websites and have lived in 7 different cities.

I am envious of the people who have one project and one goal and work on that day in and day out, because it must feel great to have such devotion and focus. I, on the other hand, merely have a set of criteria I would like to follow: focused creation, joyful sharing, positive abundance, and spiritual experience for the highest good of all without expectation. It took me a long time to come up with that personal recipe for happiness, but it still doesn’t solve the problem because what kind of cake am I going to make with it? Now you understand my cyclical morning hope of explosive inspiration and why the following quote resonated so deeply:

Inspiration is for amateurs.
The rest of us show up and get to work.

Sign on to a process and see where it takes you.

You don’t have to invent the wheel every day.
Today you’ll do what you did yesterday,
tomorrow you’ll do what you did today.
Eventually, you will get somewhere.

No one gets anywhere without help.

If you are overwhelmed by the size of a problem,
break it down into many bite-sized pieces.

Quadriplegics don’t envy the able-bodied,
we envy paraplegics.

I am confident that no artists has more pleasure,
day in and day out, from what they do than I do.

-Chuck Close

I am an A/V Technician for Stage, Lights & Sound in Richmond, CA and I am helping them upgrade their wireless microphone inventory. As part of the upgrade, we are selling off some used, but very high-quality material. As the technician who used this equipment in the field, I can guarantee that it is fully functional and in great condition. Click on the images below to open the respective Craigslist ad.

	Shure SM58 UT2 Wireless Microphone System UT4 – $199