If you give a mouse a cookie

If you give a mouse a cookie

I wanted to be a coach

actually I wanted to work in a gas station - there’s a deep nobility in honest labor- doing something that needs doing

My girlfriend wanted me to get my act together - maybe get my station, my future, my essence, in tune with hers

I didn’t want to coach, but also I didn’t want to talk to people, I didn’t want to negotiate, evaluate myself, or have myself evaluated by others

I wanted to go unnoticed, to live a simple life

but I thought maybe I could be wrong and it was worth a try

So I was coaching, and I got better at responding to people, not great but better, and I made plans, and I got to know my students, I got to really care about them

not really because I needed the money, when you take a vow of poverty, you don’t need the money

but your expenses start to be covered by a network of people who appreciate what you have to share, you being you, going and doing - it’s true ..in the gas station also

I sell something that was given to me for free, in some way it’s better than free, it cost me the opposite of my life

And I was selling it for cash in a shoebox and we thought we could soup it up a bit. Maybe paying for my half of a car with 20 dollar bills wasn’t the flex I thought it was at the time.

So we made a name - the movement creative - and I learned that a high school drop-out can become a gym teacher if they have a dba. I have a folder with drawings from the kids in that gym class in 2011. Some of them started doing parkour with us again - it being a distant memory of childhood - our contract only lasting a couple of years. They don’t remember us, for them it was just a regular thing for a NYC school - the only of it’s kind, to have a parkour program for 4-10 year olds. I didn’t know what it took to be stable at that time - to be a pillar, a rock, I still don’t.

We got paid 50 bucks a class and we paid two coaches 25 dollars to be there. We had 19 classes there a week and I could add that up, multiply it by 50 weeks in the year and feel like I was doing pretty well. I coached many of the classes myself, and I was giving a reasonably paid job to many of my friends. It felt good.

Also that meant that there was exactly 0 dollars left over for anything else we needed. This was ignored for the first 5 years of the company. Maybe I would recommend that to everyone. It means that we paid coaches well in an industry that didn’t.

I think it’s important to respect coaches, all teachers, in general, financially and within a system.

That cost also meant that countless unpaid hours of backend work, management, website, marketing, and all the other expenses of equipment and the gas it takes to keep the lights on at the company tipped the scales deeply towards frustration and resentment. Not mine in my blissful financial delusion, but mine to carry.

In the end that was too much to bare. In exchange for this financial naiveté I gave up several years of the friendship and support the company was built on. While we were ingratiating ourselves to our community and our vision with cheap prices and high pay we had strained our systems to their breaking point.

We were paying for insurance now, and equipment, we had a business bank account and I would regularly patiently wait months or years for schools to pay. For jobs long done. Also, we was changing, because we didn’t have the strength to escape velocity with these extra systems online. In a real way we became as close to me as it had or has ever been. A rocket ship painstakingly built for many, hoped for three, and in the end only capable of getting one out into orbit.

I am lucky - the monkey in space. All it cost me was my sanity and friendships and all the money I had ever had and probably all the money I will ever have.

Saying we was me is a rude oversimplification. The truth is once I broke through the atmosphere there were many people around me to keep this thing running. Technicians beyond my mastery, under who’s loving eyes I, we, I grew. There were friends who came from out of state to live with me, and many others who put down what they were doing, at great expense, to try to make this work.

We almost didn’t get to orbit. There were moments there when a single person booking a month of private lessons with me was the difference between paying rent and not. I was skipping meals to afford payroll, which continued for far too long because that felt like it’s own kind of nobility.

I didn’t really want to coach. I relate to learning through the environment, like we’re conduits of knowledge inspired by the shapes around us. I did however want coaching to be an option for people, even me. I saw passionate caring people getting paid bottom dollar to share what they loved, I saw an undulating mass of a community needing a sense of validation, and I saw in myself what I thought was confidence and know now is hubris that I could solve this problem well enough quick enough.

We’ve been around for 14 years. But I mean, we’ve been around. We are a Theseus ship of deadbeat dads. Underpinning this relentless pursuit to continue is a trail of bad blood and broken contracts, lost relationships. It’s not all that, it’s actually not mostly that, maybe even it’s barely that, and it would be disrespectful to ignore it completely.

We’ve had a thousand shapes, and envisioned many more. We’ve tried many things that work, some that worked but don’t and some that didn’t but probably in the future will. We added benefits like 401ks and PTO, we made everyone an employee and have even had a successful workers comp case filed against us, which I see as a great victory - that we were able to have the systems in place that when someone got hurt on the job they were taken care of.

I can’t imagine not caring about the poeple that work with me. One because I have lost years with people I love because I didn’t care enough or in the right way. Two because people have been willing to give a piece of themselves to this project. It is an amalgam of souls, and that’s rare. There is a call to order that the work we do together is a reflection of the people we are, that how we relate to one another tangibly impacts how successful the company is.

In many ways I would say how we work together is more important than the work we do, because it is the work we do.

This vow of poverty has come with me. When we make more I look to add more security to the jobs we give people. When we started I wanted to pay people more than 12 dollars an hour because I wanted this to be a smart choice for someone’s future, for it to be a long term decision.

This was the perspective of a financially allergic teenager who didn’t care about his future. What mattered was that an hour of work here paid more than an hour of work there.

No one asked “what about a day, a week, a year, a decade?”

It took me that long to realize that paying better has got to mean at least a year, probably five and ideally 20 and that looking at other youth activity businesses was not going to cut it for building a station that could support us all. I had to look at schools, the ones that worked, maybe more like private schools or the public ones in other countries where the teachers and the programs are better resourced, where there’s a system of mutual respect built into the fabric of the organization.

That is the work we do, of trying to make the process of getting where we are going manageable for the people doing the going. I want to change New York City’s relationship to movement, I want people able to jump and play and move and feel free the way I felt free when I started. I want the lessons I never learned in gym class but I learned from parkour to be taught in gym class, to be taught in math class, to be taught on our first and last days in our careers. And more than that I want that to be done with the least harm and if I dared to dream, the most joy.

I didn’t want to coach, I wanted to be free to train as I chose, but to coach I had to make a company. I didn’t want a company, but I needed insurance,  and to have a company that could afford to pay for that I had to have a team. I didn’t want to have a team, I wanted to be on one, and in order to be on one I had to start one, to lead one, to support the team I had to win contracts, I had to be a sales person, eugh, I’d rather coach, to win contracts I had to learn how to be clever, and dependable, and most important to listen, I didn’t want to be clever and dependable and to listen, I wanted to be free, and finicky, a creature of the forest and sky, but to be clever and dependable and to listen, I had to learn who I was,

maybe somewhere at the heart of it I realized that whether or not I wanted to be I was a coach. That the decision I thought I was making didn’t exist, and that even if I don’t know why, that’s ok.

I gave the mouse a cookie

I am the victim and hero of my life. I have stripped myself of the freedom I held dear, and I have found an unrelenting calm persistence inside of myself to keep going with the faith that we will figure it out. It only takes one more step.

I am dragging a man dragging a boy up a mountain towards a view I’ve never seen, and I’m the boy, and the mountain, and the view,

and I’m the man.