The Mind of Jordan

Jordan Mitchell inspires many, and is inspired by many. His balanced approach to business and art has allowed him to experience building a variety of projects, from founding a clothing brand alongside YouTuber, SNEAKO, to documenting innovations within Web3, and creating his own short films. Jordan is a man of knowledge, using his introspectiveness and input from others to guide him towards purposeful solutions for humanity and the environment. Through this interview with him, we were able to learn more about how he methodizes his numerous ambitions.

Can you tell us about your upbringing?

My parents work in international schools, so growing up our family would travel a lot. I was born in Ecuador, moved to Bangladesh, spent the majority of my childhood in Shanghai, China, went to high school in Canada, moved to Florida for University, and I’ve traveled to 18 other countries in between.

I know some people who grew up like that and hated it, because you never really get the chance to settle, but we would always say home was our family, not any one place. I learned to make friends quickly, and blend in with a ton of different cultures. I’ve been spending a lot of time recently thinking about how I can connect more with that side of me and bring it out in my art.

What inspired you to start exploring visual arts as early as you did?

Growing up, I never actually saw myself as an artistic kid. I thought of art as stuff like painting, drawing, and sculpting. All of which I enjoyed, but was terrible at, and I would rather play soccer than practice it. The first artistic medium I really obsessed over was NikeID, which let you create custom shoe colorways. I would come home almost every day from school and sit at my parents’ laptop designing sneakers and cleats that I knew I would never be able to get. There were also websites that customized baseball gloves and catcher’s equipment in the same style. I spent the good majority of my youth baseball career playing catcher. In hindsight, it all started with me obsessing over the gear.

Fast forward to Grade 9, and I accidentally got placed in Grade 10 Media Arts. I knew nobody. On the first day the teacher was going over what we were going to be learning. Photoshop, filmmaking, photography, music production, etc. It sounded interesting, so I stayed in the class, and got hooked. I would obsess over YouTube tutorials, and would do all sorts of dumb projects, like edits for my IG, dance videos for friends, and hype videos for my basketball team.

Since then, it’s kind of just scaled up incrementally to running Quality, and then freelance video. I mostly saw it as a hobby, then as a business endeavor. I didn’t start to identify myself strongly with more of the art side of things until the last couple of months.

Why have you taken a break from college?

It’s extremely difficult for me to do things when I don’t find interest or utility in them. I was always the kid who would be told to do something, and I would ask why until I got a response that seemed valid. The whole time I was at university I kept asking why, and eventually it got to a point where I didn’t have a good answer for myself.

I realized half of the business classes I was taking talked about stuff I had seen on YouTube when I was running Quality. The other half of the classes was stuff that I knew I could find on Google if I needed to. Getting a corporate 9 to 5 seemed like hell. I was learning more outside of class than I was in class. I felt like I was wasting my time and my parents’ money, so I decided to take a gap year, which has turned into an indefinite break. I’m kind of betting on a couple of theses about where the world is currently and where it’s heading to:

1. The world will become more and more permissionless.
2. Trust will be built off of project-based evidence of competence, not on degrees (unless you’re in a career like law or medicine).
3. Practical experience is the most efficient way to learn.

If I change my mind and decide that I do want to go into a career that requires having a degree? Then I’ll just go back. College isn’t all bad though. I’m grateful for my time there, I matured a lot, made life changing connections, and wouldn’t be where I am without it.

What does your ultimate achievement look like?

My vision of ultimate achievement is very much process-oriented. I have aims of things I want to accomplish, but recently I have started to use those more as guiding stars than anything. They’re things I want to achieve because they mean I’ll be heading in the right direction, but they’re also arbitrary. I know once I accomplish them, I will move the goal posts of success to some other future milestone. Here are some of the bullet points of what my ultimate achievement looks like:

1. Good mental and physical health.
2. Connection to my family.
3. A career I can obsess over because it looks like work to others but feels like play to me.
4. A career that allows me to build friendships by working on creative projects with people I enjoy & respect.
5. Work that is in pursuit of solving meaningful problems.

Can you tell us more about your time developing Quality Clothing?

In the best way, Quality made me #^+- up and learn so many things about business, fashion, relationships, and myself. I remember the night we released Collection 0001. We had spent the last few months researching, designing, sourcing, and marketing. We were finally launching. I was on FaceTime with the co-founder, Vincent, all day, scrambling with last minute changes. For the last hour before we went live, I remember being so locked-in and having complete tunnel vision as I finished the website. We launched 3 minutes late, but I remember the overwhelming sense of relief that flooded over me when I finally pressed publish. Then I looked up and realized all of my friends were in my little dorm room cheering. To this day that’s one of my favorite memories ever.

To have an idea for something, work really hard at it, and then finally see the manifestation of it out in the world is probably the best feeling in the world. You asked what my ultimate achievement was earlier, and that feeling is it. That’s success to me. Quality was the first time I think I ever strongly understood that feeling. As Baby Keem said, “Success, got a taste of it, never was the same.”

What does curation mean to you?

Recently, I went to Virgil Abloh’s LV x Nike Air Force 1 exhibit at some warehouse in Brooklyn. In the center of the room he had a massive block of stone that displayed the glowing words, “Who did it first? Where did they get the idea? Is it new?” That sums it up pretty well.

You tend to pursue a lot of new roles and ideas simultaneously. How do you maintain each of them mentally?

Really good question. I don’t do it very well. I enjoy working on a ton of different fronts, but I’ve found my reliability diminishes in proportion to the amount of hats I take on. The product might still come out fire, it just might come out 3 weeks late.

Another problem with context switching so much is that you can start to build up momentum, but then if you switch focus you have to start from ground zero again. This is why I’m trying to focus my efforts towards video and filmmaking for the near future. It’s going to require a bit of discipline from me, because I naturally want to do everything. For now, if I want to do stuff in other mediums, I want it to be in service to my filmmaking.

So for roles, I want to focus a bit more. For ideas though, I enjoy switching often. To me, creativity is just the concept of mixing things in a way that they haven’t been mixed before, so having a ton of ideas and concepts going on at once makes that process easier for me. I have been super diligent by building a note-taking system that allows me to move between projects without losing a lot of time switching focus. Google “Building a Second Brain,” literally life changing for me.

Who are the role models or key figures that come to mind when you look back on older projects?

Such a good question, there are so many. Virgil Abloh, Casey Neistat, Van Neistat, Kanye West, Cole Bennet, SNEAKO, James Baldwin, Kevin Fagundes, Jaden Kidd, Vince KdB, Todun Akinyelure, random people on social media, Basquiat, Jack Butcher, Trevor Wallace, Gunner Stahl, and many, many, more.

What is one thing you wish people understood more about Web3?

It’s about so much more than NFTs, and especially so much more than NFTs in their current state. The blockchain provides the infrastructure for digital trust and legitimacy in the same way the web provides infrastructure for digital communication. I can’t understate how important I think it will be.

What should viewers expect to see from you in the future?

A lot more filmmaking. I’ve developed a bit of a crush on the medium of podcasting recently, so in the near future I’ll be recording and publishing more interviews with cool people. More narrated cinematic short films, and more long-form video essay type content. In the mid-future, some more mini-doc type behind the scenes views into the creative process of people I respect and look up to. In the more distant future, I’ve been working on some scripted short films, and also how I can use NFTs to play into all of this.