SP Year Six, Assistants — Roden Newsletter Archive
Roden
Issue 100
February 5, 2025
Celebrating six years of running SPECIAL PROJECTS
Roden Readers —
Me again (Craig Mod), back with another (short-ish?) Roden. Issue 100 of this thing! Started in December 2012, twelve years and change. Whoosh. So it goes. (Time.) In honor of this milestone, I dug up issue 001 and put it online. (Not quite as embarrassing as I expected.)
Thank you to everyone who responded to the TBOT Book Tour Poll! VERY instructive / helpful. More on that, soon.
#Rules of Membershipping
I just hit publish on my look-back at Year Six of SPECIAL PROJECTS. It’s a list of “rules” for running the membership program. Here are the first five:
- Have clear creative goals (mine are: make books, “educate”)
- Staple those goals to your walls, your mirrors, your forehead; if you ever have a decision to make, ask yourself: Does it help me achieve these goals?
- All membership activities are in support of these goals
- The program exists for the goals, not the members
- That may sound cold, but if you frame it properly, the members understand and enthusiastically support this!
… on and on for 14 more rules.
Andbecause the current political / global configuration cannot be ignored (and yet I don’t have any useful guidance or notes to add to the larger discourse), this small acknowledgement / theological position:
As I stated way back up at the top, the goal is books, books, and more books; durable, everlasting nuggets of experience condensed. I have (and have started on) the next five books. And I know that in doing them, I’ll find other unexpected tendrils of life to explore. More books await. Constellations of books. Galaxies of books. Books are one of the greatest bulwarks against kleptocracy and authoritarianism because they hone focus, attention, and can imbue a mind with the calm required to take clear action: Qualities required by a society to “win.” To be reductive (and somewhat alarmist): The feed, the doomscroll, the hyperventilation, is the heartbeat of political and social death. It is not life. It is a false heartbeat. BEWARE the feed and what it makes you do and think; cultivate the clear mind. (Please, for all of us, cultivate the clear mind.)
And what I’m not trying to do with the program:
I’m not trying to grow this program to a hundred-thousand paying members. I like doing things that aren’t “cool.” That don’t “align with the algorithm.” I know I’m “limiting my reach” by not becoming a “Japan influencer” with a YouTube channel showing you “the real Japan,” but the whole point of this program is to never, ever have to become that. Shtick is death. Shtick is fundamentally “inauthentic” (that fraught word).
For those of you following me these very many years, none of this should be surprising. But it’s good to reiterate, to revisit, and to reaffirm these guiding principles. Thanks for your support in continuing to do this work. Joining SPECIAL PROJECTS is the clearest way to grant me permission to do more.
#Assistant?
I am in dire need of an assistant. My current assistant has been absolutely fabulousbut she recently acquired two other full-time jobs (because I don’t have enough work for a full-time position). So I brainstormed with a couple friends, and we’d like to hire someone, full-time, to be all of our assistants.
The Tokyo-based crew you’d be assisting:
We all need some help. But not full-time help. These are all great guys (kind, empathetic), doing interesting and beautiful and important work with interesting and important (and sometimes beautiful; just kidding always beautiful) clients. We think you’d learn a ton helping us. (And be compensated at an above-market rate.) So the idea is that together (like creativity Voltron) we can be worthy of a full-time assistant.
What we’re looking for:
- Japan-based
- Someone fully (or mostly) bilingual (Japanese necessary as mother tongue; English at a high-proficiency level)
- Fluent in onerous Japanese email etiquette
- Someone interested in / excited by our work
- Mostly remote (although Mike / Luis / Adrian might have some office space you could sometimes roll up to and work out of)
- But able to be on location as needed (i.e., if I have a TV shoot, ideally you’d join me for the shoot and handle communication with the crew, saving me from an early grave)
- Someone who can fill downtime with productive research / proactive outreach
- Bonus points if you yourself are creative / well-versed in design or literature
- Ideally you’d have several years of experience doing executive assisting for a C-level role at a big company
What would you be doing?
For me, for example, the role would entail:
- Interfacing with Japanese media
- Dealing with customer support inquiries on book sales, etc
- Dealing with communication with my distribution center in Osaka
- Helping me plan walks (booking hotels, calling inns, etc)
- Being CC’d in on Random House email chains, making sure I’m responding to critical emails
- Updating my schedule with interview times, zoom links, etc
- Following up with printers, and possibly going on press check
- If you have design experience / can use InDesign — possibly laying out small book projects, etc
Sometimes there’d be more work, sometimes less. It’s a bit cyclical (which is why it’s hard for me to hire someone full-time).
The idea is that the four of us would pool together a full-time base salary, securing two hours a day per person to start, and billing extra at the end of the month for any time over that.
Is this a good idea? Four people sharing one assistant? I don’t know. But what I do know is that much of what I was able to accomplish in 2024 was enabled by my assistant — her tenacity and focus and no-bullshit style of dealing with things. She changed the way I thought about support (I realized I had never had anyone support me like this before, with such competency and passion.) There is no way I could have done what I did without her. And now that her presence is diminished, I feel the creaking of my gears, them crawling back to a pre-assistant speed. (And the various stresses mounting.)
So, if you’d like to work with us four goofs here in Tokyo, just reply to this email with a CV / notes. Or forward this email to someone you think might be a great fit. (I’ve never hired anyone before in my life so I’m sure I’m getting a lot wrong.)
OK! Going to wrap here today since the SPECIAL PROJECTS Year Six rules essay is its own big homework assignment.
Thank you again to everyone who renewed their memberships in the past few weeks. I’ll be doing a bunch of members-only projects during the book tour in May / June (with possibly some members-only dinners in the cities I’m touring to). Also, if all goes well (ha ha), I may have a new photo book (SP 3) publishing in parallel with the Random House TBOT release. Members, of course, will get a big discount.
More soon. Stay sane. Don’t suckle the feed too hard.
To 100 more of these things,
C
