To start, I wanted to sell 1/1s to help build my brand and get noticed. In my opinion and in my situation, editions are something that I will consider down the road once setting the floor price for my work (the cheapest someone is able to pay). Each person can have a balance of 1/1s and editions that works for them. There is no “right” way.
I wanted to try and provide as much value to my potential collectors/investors as possible. I wanted to pair my passion, photography, with something that I found valuable: mindfulness.
Mindfulness
Mindfulness is a way to drive my passion forward. Of finding balance in my life, maintaining positive mental health, and keeping me grounded. It’s a feeling that I associate with being in Africa under the stars (see my first collection Begin, Again).
It’s something I struggle with, along with many other people. Of staying present, spending quality time with others, of paying attention to things.
The more I thought about attention, mindfulness, and photography, the more I realized that I had no problem paying attention to things that I am passionate about. When I’m in the zone with editing or shooting, it feels as though time has no meaning. It feels like I’m flowing from one moment to the next, fully present in each.
Flow has been a large part of my life over the last two years. I have thought about the book “Finding flow” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi every day since I first read it in 2019.
Flow is a concept that has different meaning to each person. Timelessness, accomplishment, being in the zone, feeling fulfilled, acting without thinking in a positive way. But there tends to be three components of flow that most people experience:
(1) A clearly defined goal during which all other goals are set aside
(2) The task has meaning to you
(3) The task is at the edge of your abilities, but not beyond them
The ability to focus on a task that you care about for an extended period of time that challenges you just enough that each moment feels like one of discovery and curiosity.
Flow is one of the best ways that we can improve our attention. I personally find flow with photography, editing, sports, intellectual conversation, and perhaps most of all, reading.
Reading is an activity that has been in great decline over the past few decades. In 2014, 57% of Americans did not read a single book the entire year. Instead, people spend their time on shorter and shorter activities. Shorter videos, shorter shows.
Most people find it difficult to find flow because of the effort it takes to make something effortless. I view flow as a lottery system. I have a chance to randomly enter flow throughout my day, but it is unlikely to occur unless I take intentional steps to try and find flow.
Each action I take to put myself in a situation where I might find flow is another lottery ticket that I get to play. The more tickets I find, the increased likelihood that I find flow. Mindfulness and intention help a lot to cultivate the ability to find flow more regularly. In other words, deliberate attention and focus are needed to regularly find flow.
That same algorithm that we try to keep happy by constantly feeding it with increasingly rapid and spastic content is causing the style of content to shrink in duration and increase in aggressive style to grab your attention. It is intended to be distracting, which decreases your attention span.
Attention is essential for so many things. If I actually want to accomplish something, I must be able to pay attention to it. Attention is essential for allowing people to communicate complicated concepts to be able to improve the world, improving mental health, improving poverty, conserving the wildlife, saving the planet.
An overload of information makes it hard to pay attention to things like we used to be able to, and that’s having a negative impact on the health of the planet and everything on it, as well as on the quality of our lives.
So, I thought that maybe I could put out an NFT series that improved mindfulness and showed people slower content, to help improve the attention span of others and inspiring others to do the same. To help others find flow.
But how could I get people’s attention without damaging it in the process? I needed a healthy way to help people slow down.
Breath
I personally have found breathing to be the most consistent focal point of attention that can help me find a state of mindfulness. Paying attention to my breathing regulates my body, slowing my breath and my heart rate, improving my metabolism.
So, I started working on a series of animated astrophotographs. I zoomed in and out to simulate an inhale and an exhale, timing the frequency to a rate that I found personally relaxing and mindful. I was literally breathing into the photo to try and bring it to life. After making three different works of art, I found the breathing frequency was between 11 and 13 seconds.
Around the same time, my partner (@_taylorrmoon) read a book called breath that she was recommended by a medical doctor. The book is by James Nestor and provides a mix of anectodical and scientific experiments that have had positive impacts on people’s lives. He researches different theories about breath in different cultures.
One thing consistent across many cultures is practicing breathing, whether it be by prayer, holding a note, or doing dedicated breathwork to calm the mind.
Another consistency across cultures is the frequency at which breath occurs. There are very specific breathing patterns that can help the human body work optimally. For example, breathing at a rate of 5.5 breaths per minute means breathing in and out in 11 seconds, or 5.5 in, 5.5 out.
The average person breaths about 12-18 times per minute (bpm). This is 2-3 times more breaths than 5.5 bpm. We can only take a finite number of breaths in our lifetime. The average number varies on where you live and your life circumstances, but it is generally noted that breathing less reduces heart rate and increases lifespan.
I read more on breath in scientific papers that talked about slowing the breath. I came across meditation guides that help people slow their breathing. One guide is called the “Shift” by Komuso.
Komuso has an excellent summary of why breathing properly can improve the quality of your life. I recommend reading their “The Science” section
Effectively, the tool, the Shift, provides a way to channel your breath through a small tube, forcing you to slow your breathing. I bought one for myself and my partner, and we both found it to be very helpful when dealing with stress or anxiety.
I applied to be an ambassador of their affiliate program so that I could provide a discount to others. If you use the code “wanderloots” you can get a 15% discount. Note that I do make a small commission.
The 5.5 bpm rate described in breath and in research papers was very close to the empirical rate that I naturally found in my art pieces, so I modified the length to be 11 seconds and keyframed the animation to simulate an inhale and an exhale.
Now that I had solved the physiology part of the collection, the breathwork, I needed to focus on the story so that I could bring a flicker of emotion to the art. I needed to demonstrate the flame of my passion for astrophotography.
Storytelling
So, I took Brandon Sanderson’s free creative writing course on youtube. He is one of my favourite authors and it was a fantastic course.
Through this course, I learned how to write my feelings and experiences with photography and what I hoped to achieve through it. Really, I learned how to make it interesting to people.
This is the marketing component of NFTs. Many people hate on marketing because they think art should be able to sell itself because it is good. I wish that were the case, but that rarely happens.
To make someone care about owning your NFT, they first have to see it. That is an essential prerequisite. If they don’t see it or hear about it, they will never buy it. Marketing is merely the practice of trying to get your work in front of other people.
To make someone care about owning your NFTs, they need to resonate with it in some way, or you need to provide utility through them. Both are fine, it’s up to you what type of project you would like to create, but either way a purchaser is going to want to value it enough to spend money on it.
Note, utility is a complicated subject. I personally did not want to promise any kind of utility with my work, since I wanted it to be about the art instead of perks of owning the NFT. That said, the mindfulness and breathwork aspect of my art was a form of free utility for anyone to use, whether or not they owned my NFT.
So, how could I make people feel? I told the story on why I cared about photography. I told the story about the peace and mindfulness I felt while I was travelling in Africa, and how that feeling stayed with my when I returned home. See the full story here: Begin Again
Not only did I use my journey to and from Africa as the foundation, but I also brought in a component of mindfulness: beginning again. Many people feel anxious when they get overwhelmed with things they need to do.
An addiction to screens and social media makes this worse, making it so that the average human attention span is less than 6 seconds. That’s worse than a gold fish. No wonder society is getting more anxious.
The story is about remembering that you can always make the next moment count. If you can intentionally take a breath and start fresh, you can work to hold that attention for longer and longer. It does take practice. It is a skill.
Next Step: Selling NFTs
So, I created a collection that I personally found valuable to my own mental health and mindfulness and shared it with others. More on that in the next part of the journey: How I Made my First NFT Sale.
If you’re interested in reading more about the tech behind NFTs and Web3, I put together an intro and FAQ.
