MegaFishbein is a collection of lessons, life-hacks, and lifestyle: A journey of a creative hell-bent on perfecting his process.
Pathologically curious and never satisfied with the "norms".
That mindset followed me into Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return: a seemingly playful, Victorian-style home concealing a dense, obsessive, multi-layered interactive narrative system—part immersive art installation, part archival puzzle, part alternate-reality fiction engine disguised as spectacle.
Me oh my. What a brain fuck.
Much of what we call stress is misdiagnosed. It is rarely the result of too much responsibility or even genuine complexity. More often, it emerges from an excess of points of engagement — too many small demands competing for attention without any meaningful hierarchy. Modern life is saturated with hooks: notifications, artificial urgencies, loosely scoped problems, systems that reward responsiveness over coherence. Each hook is minor in isolation, but collectively they fragment attention so thoroughly that depth becomes inaccessible. The exhaustion that follows is not caused by difficulty, but by shallowness repeated at scale.
There’s a strange alchemy to stress.
Give me one small problem and I’ll worry it to death. I’ll pace around it, circle it, polish it until it gleams with imagined consequence. My mind, when underfed, becomes obsessive. When there’s only one mouse in the room, it gets all my attention.
But introduce a bigger problem and the first one disappears.
I was deep in another edit session when a message blinked onto my screen:
“We’ve heard about this thing called FEST. We might want to go.
Would you want to shoot it?”
I actually laughed. Heard of it? I’d been circling this scene for years. Friends With Benefits—the FWB DAO—was the first collective where I felt my weird tangle of polymath proclivities made sense: art, music, crypto, tech, film philosophy. Every summer, they threw a gathering in the redwoods of Idyllwild.
FEST.
It began by accident. I was walking to a Portland Timbers match, looking for something light to pass the time at halftime. Fifteen minutes to read, that was the goal. I slipped into Powell’s on the way, scanning spines the way you might scan a grocery shelf when you’re hungry but not sure what for. I walked out with Walking in the Woods, the English version of a Japanese text about Shinrin-yoku — forest bathing.
In 2023, Ruby Thelot wrote an essay called How to Develop Taste. It’s good. The kind of essay that makes me jealous, makes me feel like I’ve been circling around an idea for years but someone else went ahead and nailed it down in clean type. He wrote about how to develop taste: touch things, listen, say yes, archive, love. And I kept nodding along, thinking, yes, yes, yes…
And also…damn, damn, damn.
Ruby wrote the instruction manual. What follows is my confession.
But here’s the truth — passive systems are never passive.
They’re replicators, not replacers.
Every time I experiment with new tools, AI systems, or organizational changes at BRAEID, I realize: I’m not stepping away from the business. I’m extending myself. I’m magnifying my reach. And now, as I prepare to hire a client project manager — someone who, ideally, works fluently alongside AI tools and can manage accounts, follow-ups, deliverables, and billing — I’m confronting the deepest layer of the passive system myth.
The question isn’t “Can they do the work?”
The real question is: Can they extend me?
Over the years, I’ve noticed something curious: though I self-identify as a pathological productivity obsessive, my best decisions never seem to come from a spreadsheet. They emerge from somewhere else—a way of seeing, building, and evaluating that I rarely take the time to articulate.
So today, I’m writing down what I’ve never said aloud: the implicit code I live by.
"If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together."
This African proverb encapsulates a paradox every entrepreneur eventually confronts: the allure of solopreneurship versus the power of partnership and teamwork. Each path has distinct advantages, and choosing between them requires self-awareness, clarity of purpose, and honest reflection on personal goals and temperament.
As a creative entrepreneur, I've experienced both sides of this paradox intimately. Flying solo, I've moved quickly, pivoting without meetings, debates, or compromise. My calendar has been entirely mine, allowing rapid experimentation and swift decision-making. The solopreneurship route is undeniably appealing when you crave autonomy, speed, and the flexibility to constantly reinvent yourself.
In a bustling world where multitasking is often misconstrued as productivity, and our daily deluge of tasks perpetually threatens to drown and derail us, the need for a novel approach to managing our days is more pressing than ever. Inspired by the distinct and intuitive behaviors of animals, this blog post explores a unique method of structuring task lists. By compartmentalizing tasks into categories represented by animals, we can not only bring a sense of order to our chaotic days but also align our work habits with the natural world's wisdom.
