have imagined himself spending his days staring at a
computer screen.^18
Martyn’s story is not one of long-term preparation for
some big moment, but rather a testimony of how powerful a
spark of inspiration can be at just the right time, and how
practice can happen even without our even knowing it.
A homeschool kid growing up in the home of a Baptist
minister, Martyn didn’t have much access to the one
computer in the Chamberlin house. So he spent his free time
painting and playing guitar. When his brother William left
their hometown of Bixby, Oklahoma, to attend the
University of Tulsa in 2008, he left the family computer
open for his younger brother to use. “Before then,” Martyn
recalled in a phone conversation, “I rarely touched a
computer because he was always on it.” Just before William
left, Martyn told his brother he wanted to build websites for
people, so William gave him a book on the subject.
When I asked him where the desire to build websites
came from, he said it probably came from watching his
brother. “A case of younger brother syndrome, I guess,”
Martyn said. “William was smart, going to college. I was a
starving artist who wasn’t living in reality. I realized I
needed to make a name for myself if I was ever going to
attract the kinds of people I wanted to spend my life with.
Plus, I loved design.” Still, he was unsure of the future.
When he was eighteen, Martyn took a trip from
Oklahoma to California to attend a painting workshop,
where he created an eleven-by-fourteen-inch “oil on linen”