A few years ago I launched a CNC version of this coin and it was an absolute hit. I was so proud…until I got a few emails telling me that I had misspelled journey. Don’t ask me how someone that grew up in the 80’s could misspell Journey but, there it was. At that point, I had already sold over half of the edition and the entire batch of 100 was in the finish stages. After I recovered from a mild coronary event, I calmly emailed everyone to let them know that we’d be running a “fixed” batch but it was going to take about a week to ship them. To my surprise, the majority of folks wanted the misspelled version! That shook me a bit because it had become painful for me to look at so I couldn’t figure for the life of me why anyone would want a coin with a mistake.
The other day, I decided to revisit this design with the laser engraver and minted blanks rather than CNC machined. I cracked open the file, made the tweaks I needed to make for the laser and ran the coin. Lovely. Love the tweaks, love the Bronze, love the…misspelled journy. DAMN! I stormed inside to fix the “mistake” when it hit me. My subconscious was telling me something. It’s not a mistake but a reminder that we make mistakes and they simply need to be learned from. A thousand mile journy is going to be full of them. If you can’t embrace the mistakes you’ll never get through the thousand miles and you’ll find yourself in a loop of starting journy’s that you never finish. Trust me…I speak from experience.
The above photos is my gramps looking quite badass circa a long time ago.
