Episode 424 Johann Moonesinghe from inKind

- Wait, what? - Really, okay. - Okay. - What's your host, Lauren Weitzman? ♪ This is a fully licensed theme song ♪ ♪ For the show about stuff that makes you say ♪ ♪ Wait, what? - Really, okay. - Okay. - I haven't done a wait-what really okay in a while, and what I'm sharing is the most proud thing I've ever been a part of, and bypassing any album, any song, what I did as a drummer, what I did behind the scenes as a drummer, what I did as a music producer, TV, the consulting, the strategy, the communication, the speaking, all of that to me, pales in comparison to what I just put out with my daughter. My daughter and I have released a book from both of us. It's called "Alphabet Animal Adventures Across America," A-Z with friends, foods, and places to go. There is nothing I've ever created in my life before, and I'm sure nothing after that will have the meaning that this does, and the story behind it and the elements that just make it into one of the most amazing experiences that I've been able to have creatively with my daughter. Three and a half years ago, just jump right into it. Three and a half years ago, I was working in my office, and in my office I had that office, in that house, I had some posters of some of the other books, and my books on the shelf, and my daughter knew, even at that age, that I worked with other people, and I helped them with their books, as well as writing mine. She came in at one point and said, "I want to write a book," and I thought it was just the coolest thing. Then it was, "I want to write a children's book," and we talked about some of the children's books that we read together, and the stuff that we've enjoyed, and it was a fun conversation. She took off, she was doing other things, being busy, and the same day, I think it might have been an hour later, she came back in and said, "I want to write a book with you," and that was one of those tear jerking moments, just thinking, "How cool that could be," and I said, "Absolutely," and then it was unfortunate, because it was the immediate follow-up of, "Oh, we can't do that, well, this is too much, well, I can't do this, we can absolutely do this, and we can absolutely do it together." And we talked for a little bit right before I had to get on another call, and after that call, though, before she went to bed that night, I said, "We'll start the foundation of this book this weekend. We'll start it on Saturday morning." And she asked, "What's a foundation? We're just going to write." And I said, "I want to show you a little bit of what I do with other clients and what I did with my book, and we'll do that together." She was interested, so fast forward a few days, we're at a panera together, and I laid out a little this Excel sheet, and then this notepad next to it, so the Excel sheet was on the computer, and there was a notepad next to it, and I began to draw ideas and then ask her, "Okay, what's this book going to be about? What are we going to do for a theme? I wasn't trying to turn her into a client by any means, I wasn't trying to go too complex, but I wanted to give it a foundation of something that had the validity that we could create." It's not crazy proper formatting, but something I give a base to teach her how to build, how to build pieces, how to stand out, kind of just amplify the creativity, and also at the same time, not feel bound to a structure, but allow a structure that could help her to create. So we talked about different ideas, and we talked about animals, and when she was, even before she was born, I used to go to this bookstore, and at that bookstore for a number of weeks before she was born, I got a different animal there, each time, and brought it back to the crib in the room that she would eventually have, and it was A through Z, and we named all these animals, me and my ex-wife, and we named these animals, and we had them there for her, and she kept them for many years. She still has some of them, some of them are in storage, some of them, who knows where they are. But there was something about those animals, and we talked about that, and she had this sort of raised bed with, there's like a higher bunk bed, with this space underneath, and all these animals, for the animals from then, and the new ones, and so we talked about an animal theme, and we talked about naming each of the animals. Then the alphabet concept kept coming up, the concept of, okay, where do we make it? A little bit more, with an alphabet book, and we looked at some of the books that she read, and we came up with this idea together, this was not me leading her, it was her being guided with an idea of how to find the creativity that was in her. This is so much her, and I love that, and I love the creativity of it, and in some ways, while I was kind of opening ideas, or orchestrating directions, it was her who drove, it was her who created, the vision was hers, and I was along for the ride, so what she came up with, and what we decided together was that each animal, it would be the, you know, A, like, A for alligator, and we named, you know, we named Arnie the alligator, which was the first animal that I got, and it was named after my grandfather on my father's side, and then we said, okay, where's Arnie gonna go? And we looked up a map on the computer, and we started seeing this theme, and she began to say, okay, you know, let's have it. Let's have a go to different names, A to Z in this country. I thought that was cool. I was a little concerned about some of the weirder, the weirder letters, but we got through that. So our first set, and we spent probably the better part, and it was funny, it wasn't work, but we spent the better part of, I'd say, three to four hours on Arnie the alligator, and that he would end up going to Atlanta, Georgia, and where was he gonna go to? And Aquarium, and one of my favorite, no, I won't say one of my favorite, my favorite aquarium is in Atlanta, Georgia. It's just beautiful aquarium. If you haven't been in your through Atlanta, try it out, you might like it. And from there, this theme began, and then we kept adding to it. What else can be a letter? And I said, I don't know, what do you think? She came back and said, food, and again, my strategic mind was like, okay, we're gonna get kind of funny with the wise in the season, but no, let's do it. This is creative. Let's do it. So it ended up being apples for Arnie the alligator in Atlanta. And then it was a theme of different places, and I brought some of that. I said, we could find different places from museums to places for kids. And my daughter immediately picked up, oh, we can show them places where they can go, and if they're traveling, they can visit to these places. I love that concept. It was beautiful, so we began to have the template. And so that was why we spent a whole bunch of time going back and forth, figuring out what we were going to do. And then in that template, we built the whole book off of that. There was another part as we talked about the illustration part. She loved the Where's Waldo and the elements of trying to find things in pictures. Can we do something like that? Can we hide something? I said, absolutely. And we thought about it together, and I proposed to her, I said, why don't we hide the letters? So on the Arnie picture, we'll hide an A somewhere for people to find. And we did that. It ended up being a long process. A lot of things happened, a lot of stuff happened with my health. I was away for a while. I'm still dealing with certain health issues and I'm working my way back from. And during this process, we got longer and longer. And then when I was away, we were doing certain stuff by FaceTime and the phone. And there was a negativity of, we're never gonna have this book happen. And I explained to her, I said, not now, it doesn't mean not never, or it doesn't mean never. And I told her that the smallest seeds that we plant, the smallest elements that we do each day can add up, can compound, can bring us to this next level. So that we're there, we don't know the date, we don't know how we're gonna do this quite yet. But we can do it one step at a time. And these little steps occurred. And then on some visits, we said, okay, what's the location gonna be? What's gonna be the background? What are gonna be some elements that maybe the characters would wear? What should be happening in the background in some of the places that are a little bit more surreal or challenging or okay, we can't find, we had a little trouble with why. And as opposed to a particular location, it ended up being Yvonne, the youthful Yak, spoon, yummy yogurt, yapping away in Yuma, Arizona. So Yuma became the point. It was hilarious at times and going back and forth and finding the different elements of what we could create, and then what we switched around. You know, getting into some of those back pages and the end of the alphabet, it became a little bit challenging and figuring out going, okay, what, you know, it was Z, okay, well, zucchini, that'll be kind of easy. But X was a challenge for a bit and we were both looking up things of what would be X or V, and not in trying to get to, okay, we need to check this off the list. But this one day when we spent a whole bunch of time with the letter V, and eventually the vulture that we had and naming the vulture and where the vulture was going to be, it was time spent together that was amazing, it was time spent together that was loving, it was time spent together that engaged us and connected us. And it wasn't for the end result and the end all be all. It was an experience in the moment for that moment, for many moments to come, as well as for a goal to be completed down the line. And that made it even more fun. As we got to the point where everything was written, and the way that it was written, we picked words. I helped to put together the final sentences, but we would pick words of how we would structure the sentences of feelings. So for example, Bertram a bashful bear bit into breathtaking blueberries. And it was everything from words that kids would recognize to words they might not have heard of before, words that would challenge them, and words that could offer them something that go, okay, I've never heard that word. To then listing these real places and following the legal parameters of how we could list them and what we could show in the background and what we couldn't, to some words to no. We added words like nimble, opulent, polite, quirky, remarkable, selfless, just to name a few for a younger child to potentially connect with as they ask, and they can see it in the back of the book. We hit some other items besides letters. My daughter liked the letter concept, but she wanted to have some other things back there. And then in the last stage, it was creating what we wanted for an illustrator. And for that illustrator, it was the descriptions of colors, of tones, of what we wanted to do and how we wanted to do it, what we wanted in the backgrounds, what we wanted in the foreground. And what ended up happening, the one part of this book that was AI, but to me is honorable AI. He's one that we mentioned it on the front, on the back and everywhere. My story bought us something we used for the illustrations. I tried throughout a two to three month period to try to find an illustrator for this. And I didn't have that much luck. There was one illustrator, there was a lot of talk, there was a lot of excitement, there was a lot of this. And then handing off the idea going, this is what we came up with, this is what we're thinking. And then being handed something back that was just, they hadn't read the page at all that we sent them. And they just chose to do whatever they wanted to do. I realized that where things were at, what it would potentially cost to get it done the right way and hand off the 26 pages of illustrations called 27 with the front cover and the back, original concept, it would have been a small fortune. So I looked at AI and I'm not anti-AI, my viewpoint and I've shared it on the website, I've shared it in other episodes is using AI in an organic, authentic, honest way that's transparent. So taking, I found my story bought. And what I found that I really liked about my story bought is that I could upload every page of every illustration concept from the characters of what we wanted from them. And we were very specific and Olivia was very, my daughter was very specific about it. I think I can say her name here. I'm saying her name. I'm not editing that out. My daughter was very specific. Oh, look at that. You can see it on the cover of the book. She was very specific about it because it was very close to the image of a little of a little bear that we got or zebra that we got. It built a bear. And so it had to have certain attributes. I changed some of those attributes. So, you know, for licensing and imagery and all the legal beagle, it was correct. But we had the nuances of what we wanted to see, of what we didn't want to see. And in uploading these to my story bought, I was immensely impressed that it wasn't, again, one of those, one of those books and there's so many of them with children's books and adult books. They, they said in a prompt and sent me this and boom and done. When we first got back what my story bought did with the main 26 pages, it was incredible for me to see that it was what we had envisioned. But it was now, it was there and it was shaped there. And there were small nuances on every page and we adjusted them. And my sport, my story bought allowed that. As we went to my storybond, so okay, this needs to pull here. This is a little bit of an issue here. This is a little bright here. I can't see the letter I'm trying to hide here. It's just too hidden. This element here, I'd like to change the expression here. The, the, the juicy jelly beans in Jamestown, Virginia. Jerry, the jolly jellyfish was juggling them. And the background was great. And the image of the jellyfish, and I know that they probably aren't really jellyfish in Jamestown, Virginia. But there was something off in the juggling and it was my daughter that caught it. And we caught it. We added in saying we'd like to see this. We'd like to see that. And we really were able to not only see something that was well received from AI and brought back in the best way possible, but in those small edits, it was the meticulous stuff that hit right to where we envisioned it and right to what we wanted to see. And in that and in having, I mean, the total page upload at the time of all the notes that we did. And some of the stuff that I didn't show my daughter, because I didn't want to overwhelm her. Well, a lot of times when I was taking certain notes, I was taking notes in one folder and not to go, okay, because I remember at one point, she's like, how is this a 70 page book? I said, Olivia, it's not a 70 page book. It's 70 pages of how we make sure it's our book. And every element sits exactly as it needs to to show that it was us. She even began asking about AI. Well, so we're just doing AI. AI is doing it for us. And I wasn't deceiving her. I was saying, we've done too much to say, AI is doing it for us. These are the exact instructions we would be sending to a real person. And on these edits, these are the exact instructions we would be sending to somebody to edit these things. AI did the job. We created the concept AI delivered the illustration. We edited that. It's ours. And she began to understand that. So it was, to me, it's the use of it with transparency. And I state that in the book and online. We use my storybot. This is how we used it. This is how we created it together. This is how long it took us. From there on the completion on a special day after a couple of day visit that we had together, I asked her if she wanted to publish it. And I walked her through, she sat with me and very, very determined, very committed. I kind of expected her to get bored and be done. But she was right there next to the computer looking at every single thing happening. And I walked her through the aspect of this is what the copyright is. And this is how we file for what's called an ISBN. And this is how we get a library of Congress control number. And all the pieces and some of the stuff for the filings where I began to set up, I would do a little bit later when I wasn't with her. But I walked her through all the pieces of the publishing. And I used the publishing model that I used. And I've used in the past and I've shared with some of the people that I work with. And we had it up and being checked and being review that day. A week later, it was correctly and fully published. As of right now, it's on Amazon, as a Kindle. You can get it as a paperback, eight and a half by eight and a half book. It's glossy, it's a nicer paper. And because it's the Amazon thing, the price is a little higher than what I'd like. But anything lower, it would have actually been a negative point coming back. And it would have been a little bit problematic. It was sent through also the Ingram Spark system. So it'll be available on Barnes & Noble, both online and people can order it in stores, books of million, many other places, many distributors, many library systems. I'm looking forward to getting it into the county library and even into her own elementary school. And following a great format. And again, beyond that, it's not this thing of You know, some kind of incredible massive selling system or some kind of profit system. This is something of a dad and a daughter and idea that we stuck with. It wasn't a not now and it was not a never. It just took time. And as we did this over time and pieced it together the right way, the last phase, the last lap was much faster than many of the middle ones and to be a part of this with her, to watch her be excited, to watch her grow, to watch her in the final stages of the little edits that she wanted shifted, the things that she added. And then the memories that I have going back and I have pictures of her in different places. And that's most of our thank yous is where we worked on it. We added impanera, Starbucks, different locations, culverts, places that we worked on the concept or laid it out or scratched it out or wrote into the massive excel sheet that I ended up building. And I look back on this as just one of the best and greatest ways to connect and something that I hope that other fathers and daughters or mothers and daughters or fathers and sons could consider trying. It's not for popularity. It's to showcase what's possible and what can be connected to and what can be promised and what can be delivered. That's what this means much more as I look at the book and I hold it in my hand. I see promises made. I see creativity. I see struggle with times, I see doubt and I see this end result and the pride when she said I'm a published author and I was welling up because she is and she did this and we did this and we got to be creative together and we got to create together. And we said she started this off in that day in the office saying this is what she wants to do and we did it. And it took time but we did it and I am so proud of her work. I'm so proud of this process, this book and where it goes from here. I want to record an audiobook with her so that people can read along or kids can read along. I want to see inside of this dad dog publishing imprint that I created, short for daddy daughter that for other books she might want to create by herself or with friends she's talked about wanting to write a book with friends that now here's a model and here's a place for her to create. I'm looking forward to her getting her first copy which is going to arrive to her tomorrow afternoon. Even more so when she gets that copyright notice. And the other element that expands this and extends this book is each of these places and this is a not right now but it's not never of us to get to go there with that book and go to each of these places where we sent each of these animals and the foods that they tried to open up my daughter to try new foods and try new places. I also think about the idea of some book signings for her. She's seen pictures of me, she's seen things I've done with book signings because I want to do one of those we can absolutely do that for you. She said you wanted to practice her signature a little bit. Now the book is out, I think that's really cute. And again to give her an experience and see what this draws and what this ignites for the follow through and for the next steps of her creativity and what she'll commit to and see that certain things are going to take a little longer but that when you plant the right seed in the right soil when you lay the right foundation and you build with patience, perseverance and love so much more as possible. I think beyond this being a children's book that's out but this is one more step on her journey for her to see that dreams are reachable and while this was a small dream and a small promise as she grows bigger dreams that she understands the small steps that she can take to reach toward them and just how much she is capable of. She is such an amazing, beautiful, intelligent, creative, caring girl and I love to see her amplified, excited and inspired to bring all those elements and all those pieces out into the world for herself and to share with others. I'll leave it there and my wish or prayer. If you have a child, what's something that you could do? What's something you could do to connect and it might take a minute. Is it a book? Is it a song? Is it some art? What could you create? What could you talk about creating and put out there? It doesn't have to go on the biggest scale by any means but what's something that you could create together and in that allow it to amplify and ignite so many other things, so many other possibilities and a new drive and determination in that child to see not just that anything is possible but that everything that they put their mind to, that they commit to, that they follow through with, that they learn, can set up a road, can set up an opportunity, can set up a possibility and allow their light to shine. That's all I got. That's this episode of "Wait What Really Okay?" Looking about my daughter and alphabet animal adventures across America, have a good day. [BLANK_AUDIO]