Author: Jason

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Adults are ruining everything.

Exhibit A is the art of collecting.

Take baseball cards. At the risk of sounding like Grandpa Simpson, when I was a kid, packs cost fifty cents and came with fifteen cards. My brothers and I rode our bikes to the card shop and spent our allowance chasing the last card we needed to complete a set. Every pack felt like an adventure. Occasionally, we’d save up for a whole box or get one for Christmas.

Then adults took over.

Collecting stopped being about the fun of trading with friends and became all about rare inserts and making money.

I’d love to share the hobby with my sports-loving son, but it’s barely recognizable. Back then, a $15 box held 36 packs—540 cards. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $40 today.

Now, a box costs around $70 and contains just six packs, for a total of 72 cards. The selling point isn’t the cards themselves—it’s the chance to find autographs, relics, patch cards, and color parallels (whatever those are). It even warns that special insert packs may contain fewer cards.

Cool, cool. 

Sorry, son, no baseball cards for you. Dad has a mortgage to pay.

I don’t begrudge people who treat baseball cards as an investment strategy; I just wish there were still an option for those who want to collect them for fun.

For kids, that’s the whole point, and it always has been.

We recently hosted a virtual Ice Cream Social in The Wonderground. We had an energetic discussion about the collections we had as kids. Things like stickers, stamps, bottle caps, tigers, tractors, unicorns, Matchbox cars, and Garbage Pail Kids were brought up. (You had to be there for Kim’s explanation of her empty Tic Tac box collection.)

The subjects were diverse, but the common denominator was FUN. 

Until adults proceed to ruin it.

Believe me, Adultitis is all over the art world, too. I created Wondernite to help counteract the stuffy galleries, pretentious gatekeepers, and astronomical prices that are more about reflecting status than the quality of the work. 

I believe art collecting should be fun and accessible to everyone. Sure, I sell original paintings, but I consider anyone who has ever owned a print, calendar, or even a sticker with my art on it as an art collector.

That’s what inspired the creation of The Collector Club, which is open to Founding Collectors who want to secure the very first release. I wanted to make it affordable and fun. And there’s little more fun than receiving a surprise in the mail every month. I can’t wait to see the diverse and creative ways people will store, display, and enjoy their collection. If you like my art, I hope you’ll check it out, but more than that, I want to offer a warning and some encouragement.

Collecting as an investment strategy or a way to show off can invite Adultitis to take over.

These days, I collect Funko Pop figures. I took my stand against Adultitis early on. Retired ones can go for a pretty penny, but I specifically remove mine from their boxes and throw the boxes away (gasp!) because I collect them for FUN, not a retirement strategy. 

Again, there’s nothing wrong with collecting things with the intent of making money. I just want to remind you that it’s not the only reason to collect something. 

You’re still allowed to collect things just for fun!

I hope you are already collecting something that brings you joy, even — especially? — if it’s nerdy, weird, or completely devoid of any possible commercial gain. If not, maybe today is an opportunity to resume a collection from your childhood. 

Remember, the best part about collections is the connections we make with others.

Making a trade with a fellow collector and admiring one another’s favorite pieces.

A parent keeping an eye out on their travels for the thing their child is missing.

The celebratory joy of finally finding that long-sought-after treasure with your spouse at the out-of-the-way antique store.

The conversation with a person elated that an important possession from a late relative is finding new life with someone who will appreciate it just as much.

The crazy stories you can tell about how you secured your rarest item.

The memories you make in sharing your collection with grandchildren.

A one-of-a-kind gift from a friend who said, “I saw this and thought of you.”

Collecting anything for the love of it is extremely anti-Adultitis behavior. 

Those stories, connections, and memories we accumulate along the way are the best collection of all.

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☕ What do you still collect?

Attention all Founding Collectors who have joined The Collector Club! Many have asked about the red binder I shared at the Ice Cream Social. I’ve included links below to it and a few other helpful tools to make the most of your collection. (We get a small commission from the links.)

I’m working on a more robust storefront, but I figured I’d share these here for now!

• Red Leather Binder
• Clear 6×6 Pages
• Black 8×8 DIY Scrapbook Photo Album
• Self-Adhesive Photo Corners for Scrapbooks
• 12×12 Black Solid Wood Frame with 6×6 White Mat
• Red Plastic 6×6 Storage Binder

How many sleeps?

The “sleep” is a standard unit of measurement in the universe of childhood.

At least it was in mine.

How many sleeps till Christmas? How many sleeps till vacation? How many sleeps till the cousins come over?

Although it’s an alternative measurement of time — most old people tend to use the term “days” — it almost always carried a spark of excitement. As the number of sleeps decreased, the level of joyful anticipation grew more abundant.

And frankly, torturous.

Remember the days when you’d use most of October to dream up and analyze myriad Halloween costume ideas before settling on the perfect one? Remember the Herculean effort it took to fall asleep on Christmas Eve, as visions of what might be in Santa’s bag made it nearly impossible? Remember fantasizing about what sort of Valentine message you’d get from the person you secretly had a crush on?

Anticipation is the electricity of childhood and a power source we adults don’t plug into nearly enough.

It’s not that anticipation doesn’t exist in adulthood. It surely does. But it mostly takes the form of worrying about bad things happening. As Aristotle noted, “Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.”

The joyful brand of anticipation, however, is in short supply.

And that’s one of the reasons Adultitis is so rampant.

As noted, anticipation often feels unbearable. (Even the good kind.) But as kids, there’s not much you can do about it. You could beg Dad to let you in on the surprise he announced was up his sleeve, but he’d never budge. So you were forced to wait, your stomach tied up in knots, certain you’d die from rising levels of giddy anticipation.

As adults, we like not knowing even less than we did as children. It makes us feel powerless and out of control. But alas, now we have the power to do something about that torturous netherworld of not knowing. 

And so we do. 

In our haste to cut to the chase and avoid the torturous space of not knowing, we discard one of the best parts of life. And we only have ourselves to blame.

Anticipation of a positive experience is at least as valuable and enjoyable as the experience itself.

The weeks leading up to vacation are just as valuable as the week you’re actually on it. Those weeks of waiting cost exactly zero dollars, effectively making them free happiness. That’s what anticipation does. It makes you happy as you live good moments in advance, through your imagination. It fills you with a sense of hope and extra excitement, making it easier to navigate the valleys of your day-to-day.

One unconventional thing Kim and I did was opt out of learning the sex of our babies before they were born. Many people elect to find out this not-so-little detail as soon as possible. That’s fine, but I find it funny how often they use a lot of responsible-sounding grown-up language to justify it, as if knowing were a necessity. There are too few surprises in the world, and we decided to keep it under wraps for the full term. Some people thought it was cool; others thought we were crazy. One woman in an airport even went so far as to say, dumbfoundedly, “Oh. I guess that can be fun too.”

To be sure, it drove me crazy not knowing. Absolutely bonkers. I was up to my eyeballs in anticipation, and you know what?

I loved every torturous minute of it.

As another, more modern-day philosopher, Willy Wonka said, “The suspense is terrible; I hope it will last.”

We introduced The Collector Club this week, and I’ve been thrilled by the response. It turns out there are lots of people who not only like my art, but also appreciate the element of surprise. Because that’s something we intentionally built in. Every month, you receive a mystery Mini*Print in the mail (and a story to go with it!), and you get to see it before anyone else. I love that I can share my art and stories in a new way, but the best part might be the opportunity to deliver surprise and delight every single month. 

Anticipation on autopilot.

As of today, there are officially twenty-six sleeps left before your opportunity to receive the first print as a Founding Collector ends.

Regardless of whether The Collector Club is for you, I encourage you to figure out ways to build more anticipation into your life. At the very least, you should always have a vacation on your calendar and something to look forward to next week.

“The idea of waiting for something makes it more exciting.”

― Andy Warhol

In adulthood, you have the power to eliminate anticipation in ways you never could as a child. But doing so creates a vacuum that fear is eager to fill.

It’s quite tempting to skip to the end, to sneak a peek, to make the magician reveal the secret to his trick. Especially when you can. Resist, my friend. Don’t rob yourself of the misunderstood and unheralded joy of anticipation.

Because it’s never much fun to unwrap a present when you already know what’s inside.

I’ll leave you with a quote from one last philosopher.

“Well,” said Pooh, “what I like best,” and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called.” (A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh)

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☕ What’s something to look forward to that you can add to your calendar today?

What are your earliest memories of receiving mail?

A few magical ones come to mind for me.

I got occasional greeting cards from great aunts and relatives who lived far away. The sentiment wasn’t as important as whether or not cash fell out when I opened the card. Still, it was always a thrill to see mail addressed specifically to me. Sometimes it would be addressed to “Master Jason Kotecki,” which always put a little extra pep in my step.

The most exciting times were when the reward showed up for sending in four UPC labels, carefully extracted from cereal boxes, along with a dollar to cover shipping & handling. That’s how I earned my Emperor Palpatine Star Wars action figure. I couldn’t have been more excited if Ed McMahon showed up at the door with one of his oversized checks. 

But there was something about the regular cadence of receiving the latest issue of Sports Illustrated. I got my subscription when I was about thirteen. I was obsessed with sports, fueled in part by the rise of Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls. 

It came once a week — I feel like it was on Thursdays? — and I remember the anticipation I felt at school, looking forward to coming home and opening the mailbox. Who would be on the cover? What would be “This Week’s Sign That The Apocalypse Is Upon Us?” (If you know, you know.) I’d leap from the school bus and run to the mailbox. And there it was, a week’s worth of sports news, photos, columns, and “Faces in the Crowd” in full-color glory. I’d shut myself up in my bedroom to pore over each page. One of the photos usually became the catalyst for my next drawing. Just as I made it through the final and least interesting articles, it was time to start anticipating the new issue on its way. 

It was my weekly escape from the stress and anxieties of adolescence. 

I’ve had several magazine subscriptions over the years, but sadly, many of them have been shuttered — including Sports Illustrated — thanks to the arrival of the Digital Age. I currently subscribe to an art magazine, and even at fifty, I still get a twinge of excitement when I see it show up in my mailbox.

Because now, of course, the mail is nowhere near as fun. It’s nothing but bills and postcards urging me to upgrade my windows. 

One thing that hasn’t changed is the magic of receiving something meaningful in the mail, especially given how rarely it occurs.

I’m happy to share that the electricity of anticipation and heartfelt human connection is making a comeback. Stay tuned for an announcement next week about a new thing we’re launching to bring a little merriment to your mailbox. (Join us for the virtual ice cream social on Tuesday to get a sneak peek!)

For now, I just want to steer your attention to the amazing opportunity at your fingertips.

My friend Jason recently wrote about the power of writing notes. Not just how wonderful they are to receive, but also how good they make the writer feel, too.

During the pandemic, Kim and I learned about “Helen Mail.” This is what the friends of a woman named Helen called the correspondence they received from her. Because it wasn’t just mail. It wasn’t just a nice handwritten note. It was an experience. The envelope and its contents were plastered with stickers and doodles and an avalanche of whimsy. 

Even though stamps don’t cost what they used to, I stand by the fact that they really are tiny miracles. I challenge you to think of one person you can send some mail to this week. It doesn’t have to outdo Helen Mail. It only has to be from the heart. 

Is there a mentor of yours who might like to hear about a recent accomplishment they deserve some credit for?

Is there a friend you haven’t seen in ages that might appreciate hearing about something that made you think of them?

Is there a young person in your life who could use a word of encouragement and ten bucks? 

Sure, you could easily do this by text or a message on social media. 

But that’s not quite the same as the impact made when you take a few moments of your day to drop something meaningful in the mail.

That delivers a different kind of message.

That, my friend, is where magic lives.

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☕ Who is someone you know that deserves a little mailbox magic this week?

What’s something you love to do?

Maybe it’s traveling with your family. Making something with your own two hands. Or a weekly meeting with a friend to discuss the ups and downs of life over a cup of coffee.

How many trips do you have left? How many projects will you finish? How many more conversations will you have?

As for me, I love making art. I’m fifty years old. Young by some standards, ancient by others. I wonder, how many paintings are left in me?

Will I get them all out?

Fifty years is more than enough time to have discovered what cards I’ve been dealt, and which ones I wasn’t. My shortcomings are too numerous to mention, but one unique gift I’ve been given is the ability to create paintings that are parables for the poor in spirit.

I consider the poor in spirit to be anyone burdened by the busyness and stresses of modern life, weighed down by darkness, discouragement, or sadness.

My paintings seem to be a ray of light that pierces that darkness. My stories are a glass of cold water for spirits thirsty for hope. They’re usually a little silly, but I’ve come to see that sometimes a smile is a most holy thing, and a laugh can heal us in a way no medicine can. The whimsy in my work serves to catch attention long enough for the story behind it to penetrate the soul.

Time and again, I return to this combination of art and story as perhaps the most important contribution I have to make to the world. 

At its best, it looks like this: I am on stage. My art is on a big screen behind me. The hearts of the audience are in my hands as I tell its story, which is also theirs. They smile, they nod, they laugh, they cry. At the end, they line up to buy a print or a book — filled with even more art and stories — as a reminder to take home to keep what happened in their heart alive. As I sign it, they tell me how much something I said mattered and made a difference. 

It’s a boon to my ego, I won’t lie. It’s much better than speaking to a room of indifferent people with their arms crossed. But the joy I feel in that moment is more than pride; it’s the feeling of being fully alive and aligned with why I was made. Like the feeling a piano must have in the hands of a virtuoso playing Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, versus being abandoned in a corner somewhere, collecting dust and growing more out of tune with each passing day.

I want to spend as many of my remaining days in that zone as I can.

We’re all running out of time. 

But that’s not our only enemy.

Hot on our heels is also frustration and fear.

I am often frustrated that I haven’t been able to reach as many people as I’d imagined when I was younger. When I have the moments described above, when everything is clicking, I wonder, why isn’t this more common? Am I doing something wrong? Missing something? Held back by my weaknesses? 

I must fight the frustration that the work is not reaching more people than I wish it could. Otherwise, that frustration eventually grows into discouragement that can keep me from making any art at all.

Then there’s the fear. I have a lingering anxiety that everything is about to come crashing down, and I’ll lose my home, my studio, and the ability to make a living doing what I love. Fear tells me that the jig is up; that none of this should have lasted as long as it already has. It’s just a matter of time before I’ll be forced to finally get what I’ve been avoiding for 26 years: a real job.

This fear works against me, too. It convinces me to spend time elsewhere, presumably on more “marketable” and “lucrative” and “responsible” things that will at least keep this ship afloat, even if it does relegate the art making to more of a hobby or side hustle.

I’m going in for a colonoscopy next week, a routine rite of passage for a guy my age. Hopefully, I will receive an all-clear. Or maybe they’ll find something that tells them I’ve got less than a year left to live.

Either way, I’m in a race against the clock. 

How many paintings do I have left in me? Fifteen? Fifty? Five hundred? 

I don’t know.

I do know that frustration and fear are conspiring to prevent me from making as many as I could.

A recent trip sparked an idea for Kim and me that has quickly grown into one of the most exciting tinker projects we’ve ever pursued. It’s a fresh way to get more of the paintings inside me out into the world and into lives that need more wonder, hope, and joy. Even better, it will give you a chance to support my work while fighting back against Adultitis in your own life. I can’t wait to share more next week.

But what about you?

It’s not just me racing against time; we all are.

What do you love to do? What are the activities that make you feel alive and in sync with the reason you were born?

How are frustration and fear keeping you from doing more of that?

The things we love to do, the ones that fire us up as they bring light to a dark world, rarely feel like work. The prospect of doing even more of that can feel too good to be true.

But as songwriter Jess Ray sings, “It may be too good to be understood, but it’s not too good to be true.”

We need to fight like hell to keep doing those things.

Because the forces of hell are fighting to keep us from doing them.

The world is dark.

Don’t fall for the lie that it’s selfish to shine your light.

Or underestimate how many places that light can reach.

Get out all your unmade paintings.

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☕ How can you spend more time this week doing the thing that most lights you up?

A young man sent me an email looking for advice. He recently graduated from the “comfort blanket of college and chucked towards the open jaws of real life.” He was hoping to receive guidance for young people in his situation to “make the world outside not seem so threatening and overwhelming.”

The first step is to understand that although the world can be very overwhelming and threatening, it is also amazing and magical and overflowing with opportunity.

The problem is that when confronted with uncertainty and overwhelm, most people hide under the false security of the status quo. A paint-by-number approach to life is tempting. We believe that if we do what we’re told, play by the rules, and color inside the lines, everything will be ok. That path seems safe, but it draws you away from living the life you were made for.

My advice to young adults is to start chasing their dream now and stay the course. You don’t need to know all the steps or exactly where it will lead. Just take the obvious next step, no matter how insignificant it appears. This path will get hard, yes, but it only gets harder later. You have the advantage of naïveté, energy, low overhead, and very little to lose. Kim and I went years living on her kindergarten teaching salary, eating Hamburger Helper, and not running the air conditioner in our dumpy apartment. It was never fun or easy, but it was easier than trying to do it with three kids and a mortgage.

Don’t wait to get established. 

Don’t wait until you have figured everything out. 

Don’t wait for the timing to be right. 

And for heaven’s sake, don’t give up.

I have a message of even greater importance for everyone else, the ones for whom graduation is a distant memory from a simpler time.

As the old saying goes, the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second-best time is today. Yes, there are certain advantages when starting young, as I outlined above. But it’s worth keeping in mind that although I didn’t have the pressure of three kids and a mortgage to contend with back then, I also didn’t have the wisdom and experience I now have, which I’m sure would have helped shorten my learning curve.

Don’t surrender the rest of your life wishing you had started sooner or lament the choices you’ve made this far.

Make new ones. 

You may not yet have everything you need to finish the race, but you have everything you need to start. 

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☕ What are you finally going to start this week?

I’m writing a new book. Or rather, I am redoing an old one. (I shared a little bit about that in this video.)

I spent six days in a very old monastery overlooking the rolling hills of Wisconsin. The kitchen was dark and creepy, but the weather and views were spectacular. I made great progress on establishing the structure and flow of the book, thanks to some help from an unusual source.

One of my favorite aspects of the Catholic faith is the great tradition of the communion of saints. A saint is any person living in Heaven with God, but the Church also designates specific individuals to serve as role models for us here on Earth. These holy men and women, despite their imperfections, give us an example to follow in our own quest to become the best version of ourselves. 

One such saint is a remarkable young woman named Thérèse who lived in France at the end of the 1800s. She died when she was just twenty-four, but left us with writings filled with wisdom beyond her years. Despite near anonymity while alive, she eventually became the most well-known, beloved, and impactful saint of the twentieth century. 

I’ve written before on Sheboygan Catholic, my other blog that goes deeper into issues of faith, about the experience of having a saint “friend” me. Well, on my writing retreat, Thérèse made her presence felt, big time. 

I suppose it should have come as no surprise. After all, she was a member of the Discalced Carmelite order, the same order that lives on and maintains the property where I was staying. And she is regarded as one of the most childlike of all the saints, which is right in line with our brand and the content of this new book.

She once wrote, “The brilliance of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not lessen the perfume of the violet or the sweet simplicity of the daisy. I believe that if all the lowly flowers wished to be roses, nature would lose her springtime beauty and the fields would no longer be enameled with lovely hues.”

While in the early stages of developing the book’s foundation, I became very overwhelmed and intimidated. Like any author, I want it to be good, useful, and ideally, life-changing for readers. I look at other books and writers I respect, and it doesn’t take long to feel ill-suited and unworthy for the task at hand. 

It’s easy for us to compare ourselves to others and feel overmatched. (I wrote a whole book about it!) Whether you are a teacher, a nurse, an engineer, an athlete, a student, a parent (or frankly, anything else!), there are probably people you look up to. People whose excellence you wish you could emulate, but compared to whom you feel so far inferior. I feel that way about many artists, authors, and speakers I admire (not to mention ALL of the saints!).

They are roses, and we are just humble little daisies.

But Thérèse reminds us that we are all beautiful and have something important to offer the world, our communities, and our families. On my retreat, she reminded me that whatever impact my book will have on the world, it will only do so to the extent that I put all of ME into it. If I try to write a version of the book that I think someone I admire would write, it will fail.

Your clients, your students, your patients, your friends, and your children will not be served by you trying to be some idealized, watered-down version of someone else. 

They need you. The best version of you.

The simple, humble version of you, doing small things with great love, is enough.

You are enough. 

Roses are lovely. But so are daisies. And daisies are the flowers my wife chose to hold on our wedding day, the 26th anniversary of which we celebrated the day after I returned from my retreat. 

I’m happy to say that I made great progress on the book. It’s far from finished, but thanks to my friend Thérèse — also known as The Little Flower — it’s going to be good. 

Because it’s back on track to being a book only I can write. 

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☕ What is an area of your life right now that could benefit from you being YOU, and not a person trying to fill someone else’s shoes?

Having lived in Wisconsin for two-and-a-half decades, the struggle is real. 

Being a Cubs and Bears fan while living behind the Cheddar Curtain is no picnic. I’ve spent the majority of my adult life suffocated by Brewers and Packers propaganda. Visiting Illinois — and especially Chicagoland — is like a breath of fresh air. Seeing all the Cubs and Bears billboards and bumper stickers feels like sweet, sweet freedom.

Even though it feels good to be around friendly fans, I’m glad I live in Wisconsin because it has helped me remember that although we root for different teams, we’re not all that different.

Many of my good friends are Brewers and Packers fans. Although we rib each other from time to time, doing life with them reinforces our similarities. We may wear different jerseys, but we love our families, our state, and our country, and share the same hopes and fears for our future.

Even the reason we root for the teams we do have remarkably similar origin stories. In most cases, you cheer for the team you learned to love as a kid. Perhaps your dad or your grandma was a fan, and you enjoyed spending time watching games with them, and because they were happy when your team won, so were you. Maybe you fell in love with a certain player as you were coming of age, and for all these reasons, the team carries a great sense of nostalgia, reminding you of happy memories from a simpler time. 

When it comes down to it, as Jerry Seinfeld says, we’re actually just rooting for clothes.

It’s one thing to talk about a trivial thing like sports, but what about the other, more important causes for division in our lives, like politics and religion?

Doesn’t matter. We’re still fundamentally the same.

Before I explain, let’s have some fun. Check out this image below, the one with the dark block on top of the white one.

Actually, the gray of both blocks is exactly the same.

Don’t believe me? Cover the middle line with your finger.

Our perception and our reality are not always aligned. Truth, like color, is impacted by what’s around us. 

The truth is that most people want to live in a peaceful, safe, just, and free society. They want to live in an environment that allows them and their loved ones to thrive.

Yes, differences remain. We disagree on the best way to achieve those things. Obviously, other people have different tastes and preferences. They enjoy different hobbies, like different kinds of music, and spend their weekend differently from you.

But on the most basic, fundamental, human level, they want the same things as you.

The problem is that, as in the image above, there are forces that come between us, creating division. It can take the form of politicians inventing enemies to earn votes, the news media sowing fear and outrage to capture attention, or even social media algorithms, designed to curate an experience that ensures we are surrounded only by people who agree with us. 

What are you letting into your life? Are you spending the majority of your time watching, listening, and conversing with people who agree with you, while lamenting how angry and divisive our world has become?

It’s easy to hate Brewer fans when I’m in a bar surrounded by Cub fans. 

But having a beer with a Brewers fan, one-on-one, talking about life and our families, is a great way to be reminded how similar we actually are.

Sometime soon, spend real time in a real conversation (not a debate!) with someone who seems super different from you. Don’t talk about the stuff that divides you; talk about life, and the place you grew up, and memories from your childhood, and who your favorite player was when you were twelve.

I’ll bet anything you’ll realize you’re not as different as you thought.

And when the game begins, may the best laundry win.

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☕ Have you ever become friends with someone who seemed extremely different from you at first? Is there someone similar in your life today that you could invite to coffee this week?