We were lucky to catch up with John Bumstead recently and have shared our conversation below.

John, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

The biggest risk I’ve taken was dumping the corporate world after 14 years and deciding the start my business. At the time I felt I had everything to lose and very little to gain, but I later realized I had nothing to lose and everything to gain. My business became the foundation out of which so many other opportunities and interests grew — opportunities that would never have come to light had I stayed in a place that was not open to them.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

After a career in IT I was burnt out and realized I needed to escape, so I quit my job. Having always bought and sold electronics for fun, I started buying computers on Craigslist and selling them on eBay. Soon I was buying thousands of broken computers from electronics recyclers, repairing them, and selling them wholesale, which is the current basis of my business of 14 years.

A few years in I noticed that some of the broken screens I was finding caused images to be distorted in an abstract manner. Additionally some computers had graphics processor defects which caused images to fragment and present themselves in a way I found compelling. I started collecting broken laptops which had specific abilities in this regard. Having always photographed flowers and trees for fun, I began loading my photography onto these laptops and re-photographing them on the screens, using the defects as filters.

This has become the basis of my art. I will often load the re-photographed images onto yet other computers and photograph them again, in a series of layers. Most recently I have begun disassembling and re-assembling LCD screens in creative ways in order to make use of their polarized qualities.

Can you share your view on NFTs? (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)

NFTs offer artists a real business model. The fact that they permanently give artists a set commission for sales in perpetuity is revolutionary — it forever solves the problem of the artist being robbed early in their career and then not benefiting as they gain momentum.

Something important to note is that NFTs and crypto are in the infant stages. A smart contract is code, and code iterates. Too many people are locked into the idea that NFTs are simply what they are right now, and judge them too harshly. But we need to view this new world with more imagination — what can we turn NFTs into? What ideas can we code into reality? The possibilities are infinite.

How did you build your audience on social media?

The most valuable lesson is this: Incremental progress eventually goes exponential. Do the things that are important to you every single day. A person who has done what they need to do in a day does not need to worry about the future because the future is taken care of.

One way of illustrating this is my relationship with my piano. I haven’t played it a year. That might seem odd, since it’s right there in my living room, so why shouldn’t I play it? But the fact is that for me to sit down and play would require me to confront the reality that I am a year out of practice, and that my abilities have declined. I am too intimidated. I would have to face my own harsh judgment, and the session would not be filled with enjoyment, but rather criticism from my ego.

However, if I managed to play the piano daily for a week, even 5 minutes a day, I would overcome the knowledge that my abilities aren’t polished. On the 7th day, the ego would take a backseat, and I would allow myself to be creative and slowly build. It’s that daily purging of the ego that allows an artist to be truly creative, and to drop right into daily work at a moment’s notice. Even 5 minutes of work is more than a year of nothingness, so imagine the exponential power of being creative for an hour!

There are also purely practical reasons to do work daily — the algorithm rewards repetitiveness. But beyond that, the daily drumbeat of published content keeps you in touch with your followers, and keeps you on the minds of those in your community. It’s the difference between taking part in an ongoing conversation and not being present at all.

Contact Info:

• Website: rdklinc.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/rdklinc
• Twitter: twitter.com/rdklinc
• Youtube: youtube.com/rdklinc

Image Credits
All by me, John Bumstead and Nate Beaty