Explore. Learn. Build. Share. This is what should drive my everyday actions, in the pursuit of mastery and excellence with like-minded colleagues.

Last month I wrote up a detailed breakdown of generals goals and contributors to my sense of well-being. Today, as I was not looking forward to reading a lot of old thoughts on the subject, the EXPLORE – LEARN – BUILD – SHARE model became quite clear. That’s all I have to focus on.

The tricky part, perhaps, is learning how to make money doing this, but I think that the very nature of this model actually has the seeds of that baked into it. EXPLORATION that inspires you turns you into a GUIDE of sorts, which is a perfectly legitimate way to make money. LEARNING and BUILDING over many repetitions turns you into an EXPERT or a CRAFTSPERSON capable of delivering high quality goods, around which tasty services and products can be made. SHARING creates connection and community, sharpening your understanding of what you know and what you do, which turns you into a LEADER for people who want to do what you do, or a PARTNER with other people who are at your level.

A second boon this month is that for the first time, I think I have a complete set of goal and task management tools that work for me. The combination of index cards docks and Trello give me the short and long-term goal storage capabilities. Trello, in particular, solves the problem of maintaining a cloud-based vault of my big-picture dreams, priority, speculation, and detailed task sequencing on one screen, without getting any more clicky than it needs to be. I like it so much that I want to throw money at them. It’s worth reading Joel Spolsky’s observations on Trello on what makes it different. He drops this stunning insight:

The great horizontal killer applications are actually just fancy data structures.

Boom! Go read about Joel’s experience with doing user assessment when he was on the Microsoft Excel team, and prepare whack yourself square on the forehead for seeing it, but not getting it, as I did just a few days ago.

But I digress. Let me quickly look at what I said last month:

The Insight

Apparently I had the same insight last month, but didn’t remember it exactly. Quoting myself:

The overall pattern, I think, is this: The creation a cycle of discovery, assessment, making, and sharing in pursuit of personal excellence.

Perhaps I am at the end of a multi-year cycle of insight. That would be exciting!

Projects

• Web site theme update. This was done.
• More Printable CEO instructions and photospreads. I inadvertently did this today, as part of the ETP iPad Beta Testers Wanted post. It took about two hours. That’s not bad. I could have a whole bunch of them with relatively little effort.
• Need new business cards! Well, now I know what to put on it.
• Descriptions of my current skill offerings/products. Hm, didn’t do this, but I’ve added it to my Trello project board.
• Creating Bundles. Started with the XNA interactive engine, from the museum project, porting to a new technology base. So I’ve started.

I think basically I’m on track. It’s been a very busy month, kicking off new initiatives and exploring the new roles I’d like to adopt in the coming months. I’m feeling pretty positive about the machinery. If I can figure out some way of creating recurring income while pursuing this model, that would be a major achievement.