AN EXPERIMENTAL LIFE

Travel
Daniel favors cities with commuter trains (NYC, Portland, Berlin), and thinks living immersed in another culture helps destroy parochial attitudes like bigotry. He also likes virtual travel (interacting with other cultures through charity). When traveling, Daniel eats locally and continually experiences "the chameleon effect" with dialects.
Intellect
Daniel is continually making use of certain disciplines to optimize and enhance his life. His primary lenses on reality are history, sociology, psychology, story, art, cultural anthropology and the Aristotelian sciences of logic, aesthetics, and ethics. Daniel is talented at brainstorming, gifted at persuasion & extrapolation, & skilled at debate (though he almost never agrees to do it). Daniel's goal is to live as an artist and social entrepreneur.
Perception
Daniel thinks people are continually communicating on many channels at once, in a way they can neither fully control nor ever shut off. Posture, gesture, intonation, pauses, breaths, body movements, involuntary physical changes (like eye dilation), and clothing and ornamentation communicate more effectively and often more clearly than words alone. Daniel is always listening on multiple channels as well as contributing to the myriad of broadcasts.

Art
Daniel is passionate about dance, committed to writing, ecstatic about film, and deeply into books. For Daniel, art is the quintessential source of metaphor for understanding and summarizing human experiences. It is also how we express passion as sophisticated fervor, through chaos and discipline, wildness and control.
Work
Daniel takes vocation as seriously as a religion - as a primary source of transcendent meaning (like art). He has no desire for a traditionally defined career or conventional job, preferring to invest in small companies. He puts a premium on independence, mobility, & creating time for other interests. Daniel consults, teaches, writes, and persuades as his vocation. Daniel is a serial founder of businesses, organizations, and publications.
Style
Daniel is constantly thinking & acting like a teacher, lover, builder, or social engineer. He thinks by talking or writing so that, for him, they are virtually the same thing. He has generally lived by and made a living by communicating what he thinks. He has a broad range of tolerance for all kinds of unusual things & thrives in open environments, full of creativity, new ideas, & candor, but finds stifling environments too restrictive. Think TED rather than Walmart.

Physicality
While dance is both an athletic & artistic endeavour, martial arts also helps center Daniel in his body, as does walking & hiking. Having once operated a landscaping company for years, whenever Daniel can't get enough physical activity, he is likely to find some reason to work outside. Most recently, he constructs feral cat houses.
Health
Daniel is a vegetarian for ethical reasons, though he does eat meat (eats local) when he travels. About half the year, he's also a vegan (for religious purposes). Daniel cares deeply about ethical consumerism and ethically sourced food, as well as humane animal treatment and organic farming. Health is a bonus feature of this. Daniel thinks eating as healthily as possible and amping up on high quality supplements is far less expensive than health care.
Ethos
Daniel takes the asceticism of the Desert Fathers seriously. His goal is to learn to imitate them and overcome the passions while creating peace, justice and mercy. In the meantime, he considers fasting and charity the bare minimum effort he can make. These interrupt the assumptions of the dominant culture and its pervasive psychology, placing one in physical contradiction to it. His goal is to one day be able to give away most of what he earns.

A Handful of Valuable Things Learned in Life
- THE WORLD IS BIG: The world is always more than the thing we call the world. The moment we write something off as weird or the wrong way of doing things, we find that we're only in one little corner of the world proclaiming it to be the whole. The world is without end.
- THE WORLD IS NOT THE STANDARD: The whole world and all authority can be wrong, and logic can tell us so. And then we can find the courage to stand alone, if need be, and resist, even if it comes down to just us.
- WE CAN DO WITHOUT CONTROL: Freedom from control isn't irresponsibility. You can decide not to answer to anyone, to shun all authority, to reject mechanisms of control, and you will still be able to sustain yourself through courage, determination, and personal cleverness.
- LOVE IS ALWAYS POSSIBLE: That anyone can be loved is a miracle, but miracles are normal. Some of us are made to believe that we cannot be loved, not really, not authentically - that all relationships are shams. But those who have demonstrated to us forcefully the reality and possibility of love have overcome the need for mere belief.
- EIGHTY PERCENT ACCURACY IS SUPERB: If you bet with someone who bets a lot (takes risks, tries new things, experiments, works on ill-defined problems with imperfect solutions), and he gets it right 80% of the time, you'll do better, all things being equal, than betting with the straight up winner who bets only rarely. Accepting imperfection allows you to make more decisions, more often, and gain more traction over more ground, than waiting for something you can etch in stone.
Background
Daniel was raised mainly in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis-St. Paul), but is really from 'everywhere'. He lived in some dozen cities before he was 18. His father was in the Air Force and Aerospace applications. As an adult, he continued to travel: lived 3yrs in Korea, did his Master's degree through distance learning, and went to work for a major hotel corporation, rolling out software implementations in various cities - New York, Chicago, Seattle, Hawaii, Vancouver, Aruba. He recently helped launch a hotel software application project in Oklahoma. The Soprano-like mix of Jersey/NYC/Boston accent stuck to him like glue while working on a business sales project specializing in the Eastern Seaboard for a telecommunications company for some years, but you can hear a tinge of Minnesota in it as well some effects of time in the Southern US. He is "Eastern" Orthodox and apolitical.