A Year of Going to the Gym: Recap

I started going to the gym on July 1st, 2007, so it's been a year of time and expense. Was it worth it?

In terms of weight, I am about 10-15 pounds lighter than I was before, which is still a rather hefty 210 pounds. I have also gained an inch in height, measuring 5' 8" tall. This was an unexpected development, and is perhaps due to stronger back muscles and improved posture. I attribute the lack of weight loss to a lack of control of my diet. I've shed about 3" from my waist, however, and I think some of the fat has been replaced with muscle. I have to take one of those body mass index readings on my friend Duncan's scale to find out.

In terms of cardiovascular endurance, I am vastly improved and can go almost all day moving people's houses or running around outside. It took about three months to get to the point where I can maintain regular 160-170bpm heart rate on a machine without feeling winded. This came in handy last winter when I was in downtown Boston and my friend had left their luggage in the taxi we'd just vacated. We ran as fast as we could down Newbury Street, suit coats flapping behind us as we booked down the brick-paved sidewalk on a beautiful autumn day as passers-by watched on in curiosity. I'd always wondered how FBI agents chased anyone down in their dress shoes, and apparently the secret is that they are in good shape; I was just a touch winded, and felt pretty darn good.

I haven't really focused on muscle development, but I am a little stronger. I haven't really pursued a regimen of exercise other than to work the core muscle groups, alternating between lower and upper body. I also do some abdominal things on some machines along with some isolation of the arm muscles.

Other areas such as posture, balance, and mental clarity have also improved to some degree. My biggest challenge currently is keeping the daily workout to a reasonable amount of time. If I had time to burn, I could spend about 90 minutes total. However, I tend to get sleepy afterwards, and that kills the rest of my momentum. I'm experimenting with a lighter regimen that's designed more to wake me up and get some sweat out of me, but this isn't very satisfying.

Ok, ok, enough stalling! Here are two pictures to compare "pre-gym Dave" to the current state-of-the-art.

At the left I'm at a "Chainsaw Garden Party" event I attended in 2007, a few months before I started going to the gym. I'm looking pretty hale and hearty after layin' down some manure. Definitely chubby, but I'd like to think I'm lovably so ;-)

On the right is a picture I took for an online dating profile in late June 2008. Since no one was around to take my own photo, I had to use a mirror (hopefully distortion free). I think I can detect shifts in the subcutaneous fat of my face with some improved definition, and there is an increased leanness in my torso, and my posture seems more balanced.

Long Term Lessons from the Gym

Hey, it's cheaper than having Starbucks every day, especially if you factor in your health insurance provider's willingness to reimburse you for part of the cost of joining. I paid $249 the first year to join the club, a one-time fee, plus $19/month. My health insurance required that I go 3 times a week for at least 3 months to kick in $200. The subsequent year, I am just paying the $19/month because I've already paid the joining fee. Theoretically, that works out to $240 for 12 months, minus the $200 that my health insurance provider kicks in once you show them the proof that you've been going. Grand total: $40/year. It's better than cable, and it's infinitely better for you.

If you get to like the feeling of physical exertion, sweat, and exhaustion, then the gym gives you an automatic hobby when you're too bored to go to the mall. I've done this a few times; there's always a muscle group, sport-like activity, or exercise that you can work on for a few minutes.

My gym is fairly quiet, so it's become a place of solitude for me. There are a lot of books and podcasts that you can consume while you're doing that 30 minutes of cardio on the treadmill. I sometimes just meditate or zone out. Some days I try to work through programming problems. It's a great time to be with yourself.

If you go to the gym every day, you will eventually run into people and make their acquaintance. This has happened to me three times, and in two of those cases I made some new friends.

Next Challenges

To lose another 10 pounds would be fantastic, and this will take concerted effort on my part to count calories and increase the intensity of my workouts, which are not as rigorous as some of the ones I've seen people follow. I also have become a little lazy in going to the gym every day because work is pulling me away through guilt. It might be time to put together my own targeted regimen to emphasize the areas I'd like to most improve: upper body strength and core abdominal and back muscles.

You can read about the first few weeks of going to the gym here:

• I didn't even know what to wear or do with the machines
• Learning to have a conversation with my body
• Getting past self-imposed limits and other epiphanies
• Surprise, I have a new habit!

Groundhogs, The Future, and Tanabata Too

It's 07/07, which is Groundhog Day Resolutions Review Day 5. This is one of the 10 days during the year when I review the progress of my resolutions. In 2007 , I did a fair job of keeping to task, but my zeal for process faltered this year. I've been all over the place, as you can see from my past posts on the subject. Last month's update was really just an admission that I didn't really like tracking my goals because I lacked real passion for it.

Today is the day when I reset my expectations.

From Goals to Business Outline

Here are the general goals I'd set this year. I've crossed out the ones that I've either achieved or no longer need:

• Work based on my vocation, so it's work that sustains me in spirit, mind and body.
• Figuring out how to be a full-time writer and content creator, because I like it.
• Commit to Deriving Income from Writing and Making Stuff
• Sell a Product
• Build Sustainable Social Networks ... done!
• Reduce my needs. If I can live cheaper, then I need less money, and can work less ... maybe I should focus on making MORE money instead :-)

On review, the first three items on this list are really the same thing: how to make a living doing something I love. My challenge for the past two years has been to figure out exactly what that means. The criteria for making that living is, functionally speaking:

• It's gotta be energizing, not draining.
• It's gotta be something that people can use in their daily life, and therefore be worth paying for.
• It's gotta be easy for me to do, yet relatively unique in the marketplace to maintain a leading position.
• It's gotta be appealing to people that I find appealing.

Then I have some additional criteria for satisfying work:

• It's gotta be functional and high-quality.
• It's gotta have my voice; in other words, I represent myself in plain english.
• It's gotta include your voice. If I don't hear your story, I will not be motivated to help you build you dream.
• It's gotta be bullshit-free. I reserve the right to define this in any way I see fit, within reason of course.

The rudiments of a business model came to me as I was visiting the studio of Sid Ceasar, a local photographer that is starting a local scooter club. I was quite enchanted with his studio, filled as it was with toys, posters, and other cultural artifacts that suggested an eclectic mind. Sid's studio told me the story of who he was and where he was going, and when it came time to describe what I did for a living this came out:

A the heart of everything I do, I like to share stories and experiences. All my media skills are employed in service to that.

Now, I've written about this thought before, but in the environmental context of a friend's working studio the words helped evoke a different shape. The follow-up epiphany was that my design business really aspires to the following:

I help people create stories they can live by.

This captures a lot of different impulses I have: design, storytelling, sharing experiences, and productivity. And most importantly, I realized that there was a tiny voice inside of me that was trying to say something.

Shedding the Armor

So what do I mean by "tiny voice"? Last year I posted about acting coach Susan Barton's approach to creating a "walking, talking human being" for her Oscar-award winning clients. There are three parts:

• The first is the need that is deeply planted in you by the time you're around 5 years old.
• The second is the persona you create to cover-up or protect that need.
• The third is the tragic flaw, which arises when there is conflict between the need and the persona. That's when things get interesting.

The little voice is that need, trying to express itself. As a little boy, I was pretty happy but tended toward feeling like an outsider. I spoke English and only English, and going to the Taiwanese Church where EVERYBODY EXCEPT ME spoke Taiwanese made me feel worse than stupid. It got worse when our family moved to Taiwan; again, although I went to an American/International school and could speak English every day, culturally and socially the rest of the island was a mysterious and frightening place. My need for understanding had a second dimension as well: I craved reliable and definitive references for my interests, and was often let down or put down by people who had "mastered" the subjects through some means I didn't follow. I came to the conclusion that I was probably just dumb.

To cope with the feeling of dumbness, I focused on things I liked doing: writing essays, drawing spaceships, and debugging computer programs. It was upon these competencies that I built my persona. Writing I could always do, so I went into Computer Engineering and generally did well. I went on to Art School for computer graphics design, got into the video game industry, burned out, and ended up doing Internet stuff before discovering blogging. Over this period of time, I developed a pretty sophisticated and comprehensive set of methodologies that I have come to rely on, both professionally and personally. It is my suit of armor, girded when the going gets tough.

Recently, I came to wonder if that suit of armor had become a substitute for interaction, masking something else very deep inside of me. I realized that it was "the need" again, making sad noises and emanating mild terror. These feelings had been there for so long that I no longer heard them; they were just part of my automatic reaction to the world. The armor, effective as it was with dealing with the nastiness of the world, had muffled it.

I was scared to look, visions of The Tell-Tale Heart coming to mind. What if I didn't like what I saw. But I had to look. Defining and facing your fears is just one of those things that you have to do.

I lay down on my bed, looking up at the ceiling. Then I closed my eyes and quieted every rational and analytical thought that was going through my mind. After a few minutes of this, I felt the desire to bounce around in the world without fear. The manifestation of this desire wasn't myself as a little boy. Instead, I envisioned a little bird, like the sparrows I see every morning at Starbucks. These birds had made an impression on me because they are aggressive, bold, and industrious in a cute sort of way. Now I was seeing them wrapped up and muffled by my persona, and they're clambering to get out to start talking to people without apology.

"Whoa", I breathed to myself, "I am going freakin' nuts. I should keep this to myself."

I came to the conclusion that these little birds actually were tough enough to face the world despite their small size. In other words, I didn't need to protect these innermost desires from the nasty world. They can face it. If the world gets REALLY nasty, I can strap on my armor of rational objectivity then. The armor, however, is not me. I have to lead with the little birds, which means I have to lead with what is important to me in my heart. I suspect this is one of the keys to following my bliss.

In the days following this epiphany, I've found that I've relaxed a lot more when dealing with people, and for the first time don't have trouble making eye contact. I don't even think about it anymore, as the little birds bustling inside of me will do what they want. Before, I would rationalize my behavior: "What am I saying when I look at someone? What will they think? Will I offend them?" These are old behavioral patterns that are obsolete. Now, I know when I look that I'm just looking and taking in those people in the environment that I find interesting, no big deal.

Next Month's Concrete Goals

For the coming month, I really want to work on the whole idea of a story-based design business that employs my particular powers of observation and analysis. I could write this up as a brief, but I think the form it will take is similar to my Make Your Own Museum approach on my public wiki. I think it will feel more "live". It will be fun to define what this "agency" would be like in my wildest dreams. Hint: there would be a professional kitchen :-)

Secondly, I want to start blogging more regularly. I've been letting my other project sap the energy out of me in this regard, and it's important to me to maintain momentum here because this is my main business. Shorter posts, with one idea per post, might do the trick. I'm thinking a 3-day a week schedule; we'll check on this on August 8.

Thirdly, I want to complete my online dating profile by incorporating some of the suggestions I'd received. Yes, it will be shorter, and I will keep in mind that you really just need 3 or so intriguing things listed. I'm not out to sell my entire being on the first read (which is what I was doing). I'm just trying to be interesting enough for a date...thanks for that tip, everyone :-)

Making Wishes

July 7 happens to be a Japanese holiday called Tanabata, a day when you write down your wishes on paper streamers and hang them from bamboo trees. I'm planning on deploying these wishes as goals for the rest of the year.

• Let the world directly touch my inner self (i.e. those birds) instead of impacting on the armor. And vice versa: let the inner self lead, not follow, the armor.
• Let my community grow and flourish.
• Have the guts to approach some women and ask them out.
• Stay real.
• Stay in motion.

Niche Personals

With the advent of Summer, I've been lulled into a feeling of well-being and camaraderie, and I'm feeling so good that I've been feeling like going on a few dates. Or maybe it's more accurate to say that I've been feeling like updating my OKCupid Profile to see what happens. It would be nice to share what I've got going on, such as it is, with someone remarkable.

It took a while to figure out how to approach this, as this is not the kind of writing I usually do. How do you make a positive impression, through text, on a smart and beguiling woman? The odds are stacked against us; I've heard anecdotal reports that women are bombarded with SO MUCH SPAM from ham-handed guys, not to mention the horror stories about outright lies about one's appearance and age that frankly, I don't see why anyone would want to use these sites at all. As a marketing channel, it's full of deception and noise. Still, for a lot of us the promise of real romance is a heady-enough draw that we keep going back to the well. A big online dating site has the appeal of playing the Lottery, with slightly better odds, if you're willing to plunk down your $19.99 a month and spin the wheel.

Here's what I wrote:

I run my design business from home, so a big part of my day is sitting outside at Starbucks every morning. This is important because it makes damn sure that I'm in regular contact with real live people, which I've discovered I can't live without.

Over the course of the last two years I've gotten to know the names of the barristas and other regulars, chatting outside while savoring out minutes together over hideously-overpriced beverages, taking the scenic route to friendship a few minutes at a time. It's amazing what stories you'll hear from your fellow townies, if you just bother to show up at the same time and same place every day.

Here on OKCupid, I don't have the luxury of helping you to form an impression of me over months of casual observation. You won't have seen, for example, that I'm an enthusiastic and warm person that says "thank you" after every transaction. You will not have seen the piles of books, toys, gadgets, fancy pens, and other ephemera I haul in every morning, so you will not have had the thought that I must be possessed of an eclectic and somewhat alarming range of creative interests. Your curiosity will not have been piqued at the sudden outburst of snickering erupting from my table, nor will you have been slightly shocked at the heartfelt-yet-kindly use of cusswords to properly convey the nature of a situation. Therefore, you will not have had your initial impression totally thrown off by the care and intensity with which I counsel my friends through tough times, measured tones punctuated by silent listening. I'm sorry that you weren't part of our committee to roast an entire pig for our first luau; we've got the equipment and costs down, and we just need a place to do it with 40-50 hungry friends. And you missed last week's symposium on how to take over the world, WITHOUT spending a lot of money. Because you're not here in the room with me, I'm just some Asian guy with a couple of lousy photos. You don't know me at all, not one tiny bit. You didn't even get to see my new scooter...it's really cute.

Now, you could take a chance and message me back, but I don't blame you for not wanting to try. There are TONS of guys, some of them pretty good-looking, that are vying for your attention. The preferred strategy, I've been told, is to carpet-bomb every eligible female with compliments and invitations to hook up. And some of you are buying into that, when the photo is hot enough, but I'm not writing to you anyway. Still, I know we all want to feel that tingle of sexual interest as we scan the photo galleries, and there's a good chance that my photos didn't do it for you. It's my fault that you can't imagine us together, and as a designer I should know better. If you've ever compared the photography in, say, "Vogue" with the ads in "Men's Health" or "Maxim", you'll see that Vogue's spreads tell stories about relationships. Men's magazines tell stories about power and utility. My photos are more like the latter: I'm showing you that I'm a pretty average guy, so the best my photos can do is help you rank my desirability based on apparent fitness, fashion, and hair.

Or you could look past that. I clean up pretty good, and I'm getting more toned every day at the gym. What matters is that you and I want the same thing: We want that breezy feeling of possibility, built on a foundation of trust and passion. We want to be free to pursue what we individually hold dear to us, and at the same time be strong "together". We both have a unique blend of skills and experiences, and it's going to take you more than just a bad photo to tell you the shape of our possible future.

I could try to spell it all out, but I'm just going to be straight with ya: I don't know what you're looking for. What I can tell you is that I will not change myself to match what I think your expectations are. That's something we will discover together, over a tasty ethnic dinner in a strange new city, pairing local wines with our favorite artisan blue cheese. We'll find it in the forest, dwarfed by ancient trees, as we hunt for unexpected treasure. It'll come out when you admit to liking something pretty amazingly crappy and embarrassing, and I'm sure you won't be too impressed by what just came out of my mouth either. We might find it inside one of those mini rooms at IKEA, as we try to balance a tricky space constraint against our desire for ergonomic nirvana. And we'll zoom by it on the road, the GPS ticking off the miles, as we search for the only North American distributor of that specialty product you suspect you can not live without. We'll celebrate our experiences with our friends and peers, together dreaming and scheming our way to a shared prosperity. And when we fall asleep each other's arms, groggily looking forward to synthesizing a better tomorrow, we'll know that what we're doing would have remained mere possibility in the hands of another couple, the shadow of a memory of a path not taken.

So why not say hello? It's a small word, easily said, that just may open the way to something grand.

The interesting sensation I had, after polishing up this essay, was that I could feel it because instead of writing what I thought women would respond to, I wrote what I would respond to. It's a narrow filter, I suspect, but I am hopeful that anyone who is so moved will be more likely to be compatible, at least on the level of personality. That's niche marketing, applied at the individual scale. Of course, I'm just a guy that doesn't really understand women, so if any female readers want to set me straight, that would earn you big karma points from me and any other hapless males that stumble upon this page.

Aligning My Values with My Clothes

The other day I was sitting at one of the outside tables at Starbucks, sipping my hideously-overpriced iced tea lemonade as I mused on the crisis of the hour: my wardrobe. This had never been a problem before, but I had come to realize that clothes communicate quite a lot more than I'd originally thought. Prior to this epiphany, I'd figured that dressing well was largely an exercise in conforming to certain archetypes, thus allowing people to identify you as part of their tribe or not; by dressing to a certain standard, one thus cemented their status in the social hierarchy. I dislike hierarchy in general, and dressing to the so-called "standard" was a confusing affair that drew on the hearsay of other equally-lost souls like myself--hardly a credible source--or required the intervention of an "expert" who impart a set of style rules to memorize. I am not very good at memorizing rules, but I am good at holding on to principles, which is my preferred learning style. The principle here is that I can communicate through the details of my personal grooming, which makes the idea of wearing "grown up clothes" less of an anxiety-ridden chore and more of an interesting design problem.

As some of you may know, I go to Starbucks every morning to meet friends and get my freelance ass out of bed every day on time. And because the particular Starbucks I go to is a friendly one, it's become a test-bed for some of my social experiments. So for the past few days, I've been dressing up to see if it made any difference at all in how people interacted with me.

Instead of wearing my usual cat hair-covered black t-shirt and formless jeans, the clothes I chose were made from nice material, color-coordinated, and actually sized-right because I'd chucked everything that didn't fit me well during the Great Closet Purge of June 9th, 2008. This leaves me with about 3.5 days of clothing before repetition becomes inevitable, which isn't very much but makes for a clean start.

Next, I took care of the personal details such as fingernails, which I have tended to be loose with regarding length and condition. It occurred to me that the personal grooming I was doing was very much like edgework in computer graphics design, which is my term for how well one pays attention to the pixel-level details in how they alter the entire composition. Crisply-placed pixels, as opposed to the usual blops that Photoshop generates when left to its own devices, creates a subtle impression of hand-crafted quality. I wanted no less to apply to my face; I spent more than the usual time scanning for the stray beard hairs that had escaped the hum of my razor, inspected my nasal cavities under a flashlight to seek out and destroy errant nose hairs, and even subtly leveled the edge of my haircut with the razor's heretofore unused beard trimmer attachment.

As a final step, I used the hair wax that my hair stylist, Kim, sold to me 3 years ago. Personally, I never could tell the difference with the wax on or off, so I tend not to use it since my hair is so short anyway. I was enormously surprised when my friend Erin, sitting outside at Starbucks, asked me what I'd been doing with my hair recently. I laughed and admitted that I'd combed it and used some wax; could she really tell the difference? She beamed with pride, and would have patted me on the head if that wouldn't have destroyed the magical effect. I also received a few approving glances from the women barristas, who are used to seeing me in my slobwear, and that is enough to convince me that paying attention to how I look makes a difference. By paying attention to details, I am saying that I am a detail-oriented person and have things together. By selecting clothes based on quality of material, contrast, and cut, I'm also portraying what my standards and my tastes are because I am demonstrating that I'm paying attention, and not leaving my appearance to accident. That's a principle I can get behind 100%.

So I'm totally convinced that paying attention to clothes makes a difference, and I can actually apply the same graphic design skills to the selection of clothing and accessories, manipulating proportion, line, shape, contrast, and color against the backdrop of what everyone else is wearing. It's a very very interesting design challenge. What's next is even more interesting: what do I want to say about myself and how do I say it through clothes?

In the interest of writing shorter posts, I'll leave those questions for next time.

Resolutions Checkpoint: Reevaluating the Year’s Goals

Time for yet another progress report on maintaining my new year's self-improvement goals, what I call Groundhog Day Resolutions (GHDRs) because I make them on February 2nd after I've recovered from the holiday season. I just realized that I like the name also because there is an theme of procrastination subtly underscoring my approach: Groundhogs like to sleep (as do I), I'm kind of a "low energy" person when it comes to starting projects, but I want everything I do to be awesome. Low energy and high standards usually results in procrastination instead of excellence, but GHDR has the potential to work with me rather than change me.

Motion Generates Energy

I'm really not a go-getter by nature, so the GHDR "system" is really designed to address that: it's a lazy approach, not a high-energy one. That's why a lot of New Year's Resolutions fail for people: the investment of initial energy is exciting and very high, but maintaining that sustained burn rate is all but impossible for all but the most energetic and focused of us. Those are the people who become natural coaches and productivity gurus, but sadly that is not me. I would go so far to say that the demographic I fall in is that of the low energy, passionate creative. I love the feeling of getting something done, but it's easy for me to get derailed by distractions. I am also very good at estimating the amount of work required to get anything done to completion, which tends to diminish my enthusiasm to start because I am also very impatient. It doesn't help that I'm good at seeing holes in tools, workflow, and knowledge; while this is a great skill to have when optimizing existing processes, it's a huge bummer when it's time to create a new system from scratch all by yourself. The massive weight of the endeavor is tangible, and my energy slumps in response. Result: nothing gets done.

My process for overcoming my low energy state pretty simple: I just try to start moving and not think too much about the consequences. I just did it with this blog post, which I've been putting off for a day because I wasn't sure what to write. I started by looking at what I wrote last time (always a useful crutch) and just started riffing off of that. Everything I've written so far has been pure "stream of consciousness", which I find pretty easy. Now that I'm moving, I have a sense of where this post is going and can start filling in the gaps. This is where that ability to see holes in various things becomes an appropriate supporting skill as opposed to using it as a creative one. Being creative is an entirely different skill altogether, and it has just hit me that creativity and productivity go hand-in-hand. Add motion to the mix, and you have a recipe for kicking ass. Then add focus or direction, and you have the means to really get things done.

But I am starting to digress. What I'm trying to say is that I'm passionate yet low-energy, and therefore need to focus just on motion. Any motion at all, like just spending 10 seconds writing a sentence. That's what the Groundhog Day Resolutions system, which was born out of the recognition that I'm just too damn tired on January 1st to make any goals, is more suitable to me. The GHDR System is designed to maintain momentum via natural levels of desire, whereas other systems seem to be designed to use either pressure (nagging) or structure (idealize process) to create the necessary motion. I happen to know that what works for me is just focusing on moving, and I will build structure as necessary, so it's no surprise that GHDR has evolved the way it has. I suspect what I'm describing is a subtle-enough difference that a lot of people might not "get it"; even I am wondering if I'm just imagining that it's there. However, this insight fits general principles I use when analyzing workflow:

• determine the valued result or benefit from each process...in this case, I want to be making progress toward some personal goals that will leave me more fulfilled as a person with more financial resources for minimum effort.
• determine what resources are used by each process...which for me is time, energy, and to some extent knowledge.
• determine sources of drag or suckiness...which not surprisingly is low-energy due to the procrastination factors I mentioned above.
• identify natural reservoirs of strength that can be repurposed...which for me is knowing that once I'm moving,
• make sure to optimize for root causal forces, not symptoms...and in this context the root causal force is just to maintain motion, which means to generate energy or make better use of what is available. Nagging and idealized processes are examples of treating symptoms, which brings limited or short-lived success.

Goals Reviewed

One difference between Groundhog Day Resolutions 2008 and the original trial run has been the addition of a summer break that runs from June 6 through July 7, when a goal reassessment is scheduled. I know I'm probably going to hit a slump around now due to the nice weather, and there's no sense in beating myself up about it. As important as these goals are to me, they are also longer-term goals that compete with important short-term ones. I can't make everything a high priority goal, so I focus on work, people, and health right now and assign whatever energy remains to GHDRs. Summer is that time here in New England where you get outside in what we call "sun" and play with other people. I'm taking that into account and reducing the pressure. After this mini break, it makes sense to look at one's goals and see if they still make sense. Time away brings new perspectives.

This is on my mind right now, actually, so I'm going to compare the goals from February 2nd...

• Commit to Deriving Income from Writing and Making Stuff
• Build Sustainable Social Networks
• Sell a Product

...to the goals of May 5th:

• Figuring out how to be a full-time writer and content creator, because I like it.
• Reduce my needs. If I can live cheaper, then I need less money, and can work less.
• Work based on my vocation, so it's work that sustains me in spirit, mind and body.

I also had scheduled two reflection days, to help maintain motion. Rather than assign a task, I thought it would be just as good to just think about what I'm doing and why it's important. It sounds like a cop-out, I know, but I ended up itemizing my priorities into several lists. Looking back at them now, I can see that I was just feeling a certain ennui with the way life was going. Getting some of those lingering burdens out of the way, one-by-one, seemed to unstick things. It didn't take as much dramatic action as I thought. I didn't even take the second reflection day, because I am actually feeling on-track.

As for actual review:

Figuring out a living as a full-time content creator is going to be on the backburner for the next several months as I finish some long-term projects, but in the meantime I am pondering what I can offer in terms of content creation. And I've come to realize that content creation can go beyond media and extend into consulting and relationship making. For example, part of my design process is to interview people for about an hour about their project context and motivations. I have heard over and over that this often a powerful experience, to sit with someone who listens well and can synthesize insight seemingly at will. If I frame this in the right context, it becomes an interesting service offering, one that I would actually really enjoy. This would then fulfill the work based on my vocation goal. As for reducing my needs, I at least have declared Wednesday from 10AM to 11AM as my Financial Review Hour. Knowing what I'm spending for what is the first step. A larger contextual goal is to get my shit together and clean up my house, put some more domestic processes in place, and make living pleasantly low-maintenance.

Looking back on the earlier goals:

I've actually reached a point where my local social networks are self-sustaining. Or rather I should say that I'm starting to know enough people with similar age and interest that I'm not feeling socially isolated anymore. Likewise selling a product is ongoing; I'm selling the remaining stock of pre-printed Emergent Task Planning Pads (still have quite a few to sell, so I'll probably post the direct store link soon). The intent behind selling a product is to support my real goal of making money by being a content creator.

I find it slightly surprising that progress was made without deliberately scheduled anything. You'd think that without planning and scheduling, nothing would have happened. Perhaps it works because I've aligned two forces together: my real desires and periodic reflection. This was enough to get me to do something when I had a moment or I when I was talking with friends. By knowing my real desires and reflecting on them, I may have structured my mental outlook in such a way that progress became more opportunistic and spontaneous. This is an interesting idea, more artistic than by design.

Wrapping Up

Thus begins the month-long holiday from goals. We'll resume our goal trekking on Tanabata, the Japanese "Star Festival" when you write down your wishes on streamers and hang them on trees so they might be granted by gods that live in the sky.