Viewing Category: Being Positive
A bit of unexpected wisdom from Miss J. Alexander, a runway model coach that is best known for his appearances on America's Next Top Model, on why you should be nice to people on the job:
The worst habit a model could have is not being polite to the people that they’re working with, and not respecting them or the job.
Some girls come into the job and don’t have a nice attitude towards the people that they’re working with. When you create great harmony at work, everyone gets the job done. I think a model should be able to come in and feel comfortable and make people feel comfortable around her.
** HEADSLAP **
I have never once thought about trying to create great harmony at work. I've tried to be nice to balance my tendency to be scarily analytical, but the scope of my ambition was merely to put individuals at ease. A greater harmony, though, is what I think we all seek on the job, which is the precursor of the flow state where everything's going great and humming along. Must reflect on this more.
SUMMARY: Isn’t happiness, once you figure it out what “it” is, supposed to be natural and easy? This expectation may be what’s leading me around in circles. This is part 1 in a series exploring some of the counter-intuitive insights I’ve had about re-tuning my expectations toward productivity.
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I have a mere eight minutes to post this, but the thoughts have been with me all weekend. I will expand on this later.
The ideas I have been writing about the past few weeks have been around extracting improved performance out of my existing set of capabilities. I'm a person, flawed in many ways, with a few good properties that might work really well if I knew how to manage them. The analogy I made was that I was a kind of go kart that (assuming good maintenance) would be able to perform at my best when driven intelligently. The analogy is a little flawed...I should really think of myself as a horse, not a vehicle.
Why a horse? Everything I know about horses comes from reading my sister's horse books when I was a kid. What I understand is that they are rather high-strung, fearful, and jittery unless they have a good rapport with their rider. As a team, the rider and the horse can win races if they learn how to focus together.
The other day I was talking to my friend Angela, and she pointed out that maybe I lacked the guts to do a lot of the things I dream of doing. And on reflection, I realized she was right. As accomplished and competent as I am, I nevertheless have let my life be shaped by avoidance and by fear. In the areas that I have grown the most, I had identified and faced those fears. However, it's easy to forget that my "preferences" for doing things certain ways are really a way to avoid feeling under scrutiny, out-of-place, lost, stupid, trapped, or incompetent. And what is interesting is that I can divide my skillset into ones that were developed primarily as a reaction to those fears. What is even MORE interesting is that there are also some skills I have that were developed as a reaction to joy. I'd never made that distinction before, and I think this might give me a way of determining with a little more certainty which skills should be adopted into my main line of work.
But I'm out of time. I'll expand on this later.
Sunday, on review, was a pretty productive day. It wasn't super intense, yet it was not slack. I got a bunch of things started, even finished a few. I didn't stress out over the projects yet to come or the tasks that I left unfinished for another day. This morning, I feel the anticipation of a new day, and with that some of the good feeling had started to slip away until I remembered the key principle from Getting Things Done: relax. This is the whole point of all those systems. David Allen's particular approach is to target that which causes the most stress in the lives of "busy people": the mountain of things that they're responsible for getting done.
I suspect that part of the appeal of GTD is that it has just enough insight presented in combination with a malleable set of working principles. They lend themselves to endless customization and adaptation, which appeals to self-empowered tinkerers and tool-builders. And why do we tinker? Because we believe that somewhere, somehow, there is the right tool that is shaped to fit me, the magic tool that converts the meager stores of ability I have into pure energy. So far, that ain't happened, and today I was starting to feel the old stress come back.
However, I've gained some new insight since last week through old friend Senia and new friend Ashish, and what they told me dovetails nicely.
First, Senia had tweeted about 5 main contributors to happiness which had caught my eye--they are as follows:
- sleep
- exercise
- nutrition
- incremental actions
- alone vs. social time balance
Senia is one of the smartest and most buoyantly awesome people I know, with degrees in Mathematics, Business, and Positive Psychology from all the right places, so I tend to take what she says at face value. I do, however, have the annoying habit of analyzing everything that piques my curiosity, so I ran the list through my personal experience filter anyway for about half a second until I remembered I had blogged about experiments in all these areas over the past few years and had found them to be true. Items #4 and #5, "incremental action" and "alone vs. social time balance", had been on my mind a lot in recent days, because I'm a bit stressed about all the things I want to get done versus having the human connections that inspire me. Knowing that these five things have been found to be top contributors to happiness puts me at ease. I relaxed, just a little bit.
A few days ago Ashish and I were having a good conversation about productivity and personal challenges. We were both have been looking at our lack of superhuman achievement as some kind of failing, even though we both know better. Ashish brought up a book he'd read called The Four Agreements that he said were things we already knew, but presented them in a way I might find interesting. We were in Barnes and Noble, so he hunted it down; The Four Agreements are as follows:
- Be Impeccable with your Word
- Don't Take Anything Personally
- Don't Make Assumptions
- Always Do Your Best
They are called agreements because they are made with yourself. The interesting spin that the book provides is to present the world as an illusion stemming from the set of beliefs ("agreements") we hold. The first agreement, "Be Impeccable with your Word", recognizes us that words have the power to shape belief, and when wielded poorly they have terrible consequences to ourselves and to others. The author, Don Miguel Ruiz, tells a story about a little girl with a beautiful voice who was bouncing up and down on her bed singing. Her mother, ordinarily a kind person but exhausted and stressed by a tough day at work, snapped harshly at her to stop her ugly singing. The little girl took this to heart, stricken, and from that day on believed her voice was horrible and ugly, and never sang again...I find this story incredibly sad. We constantly do this to ourselves too, by using negative language and subtly putting ourselves down...we call this "being realistic". I do this all the time, casting the same spell of limitation on myself over and over. I also liked Ruiz's take on "Always Do Your Best", which is such a tired old chestnut I couldn't possibly imagine what he could say on the subject, but he added an important qualifier: one should always do their best given the circumstances of the moment. If you are tired, your best is not going to be the same as it is when you are well-rested, so don't beat yourself up over it. But do do your best. This modification has subtle ramifications with regards to pursuing excellence, and I appreciated its subtlety as I relaxed a little more. The book reminded me a bit of The Alchemist and One Hundred Years of Solitude in its spiritual tone; curiously, both of these other books are by South American writers. Maybe I need to go there and see what's going on.
Between Western-researched approach to happiness and South American Toltec wisdom, I find that the net result is a sense of relaxation. I'm relaxed because I've gotten some outside affirmation that there's some things I can do to achieve a base level of happiness, and that there's a simple set of philosophical principles that are compatible with the way I prefer to see the world. And with relaxation comes a lowered threshold of energy-blocking inhibitions and doubt, which will allow (I am hoping) my productivity to flow. I'm thinking the combination of relaxation and expectation management might be the key to a kick-butt life.
I started my productivity reboot by just stating the desire to get back into the groove, and it ended up becoming a declaration of belief. Here's the abridged version of what happened last week:
Starting with momentum and goals
At first, I started with simple process goals to maintain momentum. If I maintain momentum, so my reasoning went, I will eventually get out of the doldrums. Over the past several years I've experimented with a few techniques: getting up early, using my various scheduler tools, and timer-based pacing tricks. Each of these tools failed within the first two days of the reboot, leaving me to acknowledge that there were deeper issues with my work now and the work I think I should be doing.
Here's what I want:
- I want to achieve the financial freedom so I can meet awesome people, then write and design from the resulting inspiration.
- In the meantime, I need to finish my current long term project commitments and not be distracted by the future.
- I need to develop products and other services that bring me into alignment with my writing and design goals.
- I want to be a major participant in a community of positive, self-empowered people who are of a similar mind.
On the surface, there are clear actions one can take based on principles of maintaining focus and momentum. They just take discipline to implement:
- Productivity is a byproduct of focused momentum. Maintain focus and momentum, and the right things will get done.
- Remove environmental distractions that rob focus. Without focus, momentum is harder to maintain.
- Create momentum-building habits like waking up at a regular time, using planning tools that emphasize timeliness, and delivery tangible intermediate results.
Facing the internal demons
However, as the week ground on it became clear that it was the motivation-related challenges that were the real issues.
- I was unmotivated by the future, therefore the work felt pointless.
- I was feeling unsettled and off balance, therefore it was difficult to push forward with conviction and strength.
Diagnostically, I needed to dive deeper into myself to find the root causes undermining my dedication. After some reflection, I came to believe that these were the major underlying issues and desires that were throwing me off balance.
- I was way too serious about being productive, and beat myself up about it. I needed to remember to laugh at it as well.
- I needed to look deeper into myself to find the bad feelings and irrational feelings that were the source of my unease.
- I needed to define and face those fears and uncertainties to see what I was facing.
- I needed to rediscover what I believed, and why it was important so I could work toward the future with certainty.
An unblinking look at myself, to see the shape of my despair:
- There is a child-like part of me that is feeling sad, scared, and alone with regards to the future.
- It needed to be acknowledged and accepted. And so I did.
Affirming myself
Having defined what was bothering me, I was able to make a reaffirmation of what I believe about myself with regards to the future. What followed was a declaration of secular faith, reproduced here in slightly shortened form:
The boat I’m rowing toward my grand vision is empty except for me, and it’s been empty for a long time. It is lonely and filled with uncertainty, and there is no indication that the situation will change. My first response was the desire to indulge my sadness, like a frightened child. The optimistic response, however, is to recognize that even though I don’t know the future, there is no reason not to believe in something better. And unlike a child, I have the means and the experience to actually do something and change my situation.
All I need is the courage to choose, for myself and my people. Even if those choices ultimately fail, even if I'm sad and demoralized, it’s of utmost importance that I choose to act. To give up, throw in the towel, escape in personal indulgences, and otherwise refuse to face these fears is to choose failure. That is not the kind of person I imagine my best self to be. The stories we are writing about ourselves should not end this way.
Since then, I've felt a kind of steady calmness descend upon me, because I've defined a role for myself. In the absence of an organizational structure, with people at my side every day, I'd become disconnected from the strengthening hand of shared destiny. I have essentially manufactured my own structure out of thin air, establishing a tribe of one. The unspoken hope is that I find others in my tribe, so that we might all prosper together. And most importantly, I need to remember to laugh about this, to maintain mirthfulness and joy.
I think with this, I can return to my regularly-scheduled productivity writing. Every once in a while, I just need to remind myself why I do it at all. If you are interested in the articles leading up to this epiphany, here are the links:
Yesterday’s post about sucking it up ended with a declaration of intent: I would wake up no matter what and start the day! And when I woke up, the alarm clock read 6:30AM, which was a little later than my target, but still early! Encouraged, I closed my eyes in contentment and then reconfirmed that it was indeed…1130AM? Apparently my body had a different idea about how much sleep I was to have, hijacked my motivation, and did me in. Bummer. But the day ended up taking a hopeful path.
Serial task switching
I had a 1PM appointment with my music teacher, Angela, for a mutual “project regrouping” session. We met at Bonhoeffer’s, a local coffee shop, where I was planning to work for the rest of the day. What was on her mind was her upcoming professional website, a distillation of her public identity as a music teacher to the most impactful essentials. What was on my mind was maintaining weekly continuity with my music education, despite my piano practice being shoved aside due to my project work.
I suggested that we ping-pong between our individual project discussion in 3-minute chunks, based on my thoughts yesterday regarding merciless time-blocking. In other words, she would get to talk about her immediate web site goals for 3 minutes, and then I would get to talk about my music lesson challenges. To maintain context between switches of topic, we each had a small whiteboard to write on.
Three minutes, as it turns out, is just about enough time to get a thought going and draw it to a tentative conclusion. It’s not enough time, though, to really go off on a tangent because you feel the time pressure. The resulting meeting ended up being rather exciting and dynamic, with excellent momentum and lots of passion. What was surprising, in retrospect, was that the discussion was not disjointed in the least; I would have thought that the “hard context switch” would prevent natural continuity from developing. Angela and I have similar conversational styles, jumping from thought to thought, so this kind of serial task switching may not work for everyone. I could see this working very well, however, in a group brainstorming session. Having the whiteboard to record where we left off was critical, and the dissimilarity of topics may have laid a foundation for creative random juxtaposition. It rocked.
Personal versus impersonal inspiration
When I mentioned to Angela that I believed I needed to close personal connections with people so I could focus on work, she suggested that I find inspiration elsewhere by going to a concert. This would be an intermediate form of human connection; I realized that merely seeing inspiration etched across people’s faces would likely uplift me as well. And there’s another advantage: time-consuming personal conversations are not required. Now, I love having long conversations with people about their lives and their aspirations, but it’s a big time commitment that occupies a lot of my mental reserves. It hadn’t occurred to me that I could draw energy from inspiring public events, and this reminds me of my good friend S, who once told me that she likes to go to noisy public events to “be alone”. It totally makes sense to me in this context; sometimes you need the external source of energy to feel what you need to feel, without having the commitment of a one-on-one human connection. In my case, I am energized by expressive energy, passion, imagination, and inspiration. In the past I’ve gotten that primarily by maintaining very close relationships with multiple people, but as I said there is a time cost.
Counseling the inner child
After Angela left, I settled down to do some programming. The problem was that I was hugely inspired by the quality of the previous communication, but rather less inspired by the world of Visual Studio and C#. I caught myself checking my email, Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr accounts—the automatic impulse to reach out for personal connections—and then stopped myself. The coding mindset requires an unusual clarity and singularity of purpose, and my mind was not cooperating.
I recalled what I had written in my last Groundhog Day Resolutions post about shedding my armor, which had involved a mind-clearing technique I’d made up. The technique had given me a significant bit of insight about myself…maybe it would help clear my mind so I could write the GUI base classes I needed to implement. I jotted down an impromptu process to follow:
- Close my eyes.
- Identify each surface thought, and then respectfully tell each thought to fade away for now.
- Find what feels like the center of my consciousness.
- Note pains, tensions, and other discomforts. If they are not 911-level emergencies, tell them to fade away.
- Try to count up to 33 after getting to this state. This was an arbitrary number I picked.
- See if anything interesting happens.
The experience was like peeling away the layers of an onion. The end result of identifying each thought was that I drew into myself. Once I’d tagged and cleared those thoughts, I was in my own mental space, and could then hear the little discomforts, pangs, and things going on in my body that I usually ignore. I determined whether these discomforts were life-threatening (which they were not), and dismissed them. I never did count up to 33, because I became aware of feelings and impulses that were unnamed and unknown. Strange denizens of the emotional deep, I imagined them, that usually do not see the light of consciousness. I listened.
The foremost emotion, I am almost embarrassed to say, was a desire to cry from an ambiguous feeling of loneliness and abandonment. The second underlying emotion was an unspecific fear of failure, a feeling I was not “measuring up” to anyone and everyone. There they were, wreaking havoc with my sense of self.
A couple of years ago I had the epiphany that I could split myself into a parent and a child. As adults, we’re used to thinking we know how to deal with the complexities of life in a responsible matter. We also crave being in comfort zones of competence and security; this is one measure of how “together” we feel our lives are. When faced with a challenge, we can cope by either telling ourselves a “look on the bright side” story or plan a “this is how I’ll get out of this” escapade. I have a good adult coping mechanism, but yesterday I came to believe that coping treats symptoms, not causes. To treat the cause is to treat all the symptoms with finality. The process starts by finding the root cause of the problem, calling it out, and dealing with it directly. In my case, merely naming these fears was enough. Once named, I could acknowledge that they existed, understand what they indicated, and move onward.
It’s difficult to admit to yourself that you feel like crying because you’re lonely and unconfident about the future. The common wisdom is that this makes you weak, but that’s only the case if you are whining like a victim. This is my situation, as clearly as I can express it:
The boat I’m rowing toward my grand vision is empty except for me, and it sucks because I realize that it’s been empty for a long time and I have no idea if and when the situation will change. My first response was the raw emotional one: the desire to hide and be sad. The optimistic response, however, is to recognize that even though I don’t know the future, that is no reason not to believe in something better. And unlike a child, I have the means and the experience to actually do something about it. All I need is the courage to choose, for myself and for people I can connect with in the future. Even if those steps ultimately fail, even if I'm sad and demoralized, it’s of utmost importance to me that I choose to act. To give up, throw in the towel, escape in personal indulgences, and so forth is to choose failure, and that is not the kind of person I imagine my best self to be. The stories we are all writing about ourselves should not end this way.
I closed all my browser windows and started writing code.
I wasn't even going to write this, because I went to bed at 9PM so I could be at the polls by 6AM. By my official schedule, I should be sound asleep to establish an inspiring personal track record of productive discipline. What I didn't count on was a sudden blast of insight that jolted me wide awake about two hours ago. After I heard my Timex beep the hour twice, I gave up and decided to do some writing. The day started strong and ended haphazardly. However, failure has led to a series of epiphanies regarding productivity and mirthfulness.
Starting strong
The first day of any habit usually goes pretty well, because I'm motivated and ready to go. And indeed, my morning started out great. I woke up at 530AM, dressed in real clothes, and got over to Starbucks by 6:40AM to start planning on an Emergent Task Planner sheet (see photo). This being the first ETP sheet in some time, it's fairly choked with things to do. I had no illusion about getting them all done, however, so I just kept adding to it to rollover to tomorrow's sheet. By 700AM, I pretty confident about what I needed to do overall for the day, and wrote down first steps for the day's programming tasks in a separate notebook. By 715AM, I was ready to head to the gym for an hour, planning to follow-up with a quick trip to pick up a room divider screen plus adequate protein for the day.
I also decided on a day's personal challenge of sharing positive energy with strangers on the street. I found that I was unable to really muster the ability to power through other people's default mood, which was that of casual preoccupation and indifference. I had never noticed this before, probably because I'm in the same place. The best I could do was mirror people's mood in a reactive way. When people smiled, I could smile back. If they didn't smile, I just moved my gaze onward. This was a disturbing realization, as this indicated a lack of positive energy on my part. And that's a problem; if you want to be around positive people, you had better be positive yourself. Like attracts like, ya know.
Getting back to the gym in the morning was nice. It had been quite some time (3 months) since I'd done an early-morning gym routine, and it felt good to just work through the muscle groups and sweat. I didn't push myself too hard, as I wanted to be "clear headed" without the tiredness. Mission accomplished, I zooped back home to read my email. Several readers provided some very helpful comments regarding the productivity reboot, offering empathetic advice. "Clyde" noted that although cleaning up my space was one way to improve motivation, the real change has to happen in the mind. He suggested a particularly vivid mental trick, imagining that one is sucked into the task to create joy and openness. This would prove to be an important observation for later in the day...thanks Clyde! As much as I like to think myself the master of mind trickery, it's good to be reminded that others have their own master collection of insights.
Blowing my momentum
The day started to go awry when I made some poor choices about the use of my time. First, I decided to go buy the room divider screen I'd seen at a store last week. It was no where to be seen, so I went to another store, then another, then another. I spent the next couple hours going to six stores where I thought I'd seen screens like this, only to find that they seem to have been completely erased from the face of the Earth. I knew the entire time that I was being obsessive about it, and decided to end my trip by at least buying some low sodium soy sauce from Trader Joe's (my favorite for taste and cooking) to salvage the rest of the day. It being close to lunch time, I made my second mistake: I went to KFC and got a chicken breast meal with potato wedges. The combination of KFC plus the tiredness that had accumulated over the extended shopping after working out at the gym completely knocked me out. I would have slept longer if it wasn't for the incessant calling and doorbell ringing from Obama supporters throughout the day.
It being 2PM, the day wasn't completely screwed, but I knew that by 5PM I would not be able to maintain any work momentum. That is when I made several more erroneous judgment calls. Three good friends of mine happened to contact me one after the other, and I chose to spend time visiting with them rather than telling them that I wanted to work. The first friend, A, is going through a similar bout of motivational reconfiguring, so I rationalized that this might pay off in the long run. We talked for two hours, outlining possible issues and strategies regarding motivation, all the while acknowledging the irony that we were also procrastinating. At 5PM, I went to meet my best friend E at Starbucks to restock on general cheerfulness, which is important to have stocked in New England during the cold months. Finally, at 615PM I met friend number three at Lowe's to pick up some stuff, and offered to help him unload a new snowblower at home because it was a two-man job. And then, the day was gone. Poof!
Reflecting upon this massive failure to stick to the plan, I recognized two mechanisms in action:
Succumbing to the Easy Fix: I'd somehow had it in my mind that getting this room divider was really important to establish the right atmosphere to work. I really just wanted one. I think it will actually help the office for other reasons, but in terms of functional productivity it provided false positive feedback. Buying stuff feels like change. If you like what you got, and can rationalize the utility of your purchase, you feel like you've done something. It feels like you've added more potential to the system. Well, that's not true. When my attempt to purchase to screen failed, I went into a backup reward recovery mode and indulged in a greasy treat from KFC. I knew all the time that I probably shouldn't spend so much time looking for the screen, but there is always just one more store, and it's just a few minutes away. And I knew that the KFC would probably make me sleepy, but I convinced myself that maybe this time it wouldn't. But it did...my desire for immediate reward overrode the modicum of discipline I had mustered up for the day. Bah.
Shortcutting to the False End Goal: If it wasn't clear yesterday, I'm feeling the need to break out of my rut of isolation. However, I have to get my projects completed and out the door, and I need to build a support enterprise that gives me the freedom to operate the way I want. This freedom will allow me, theoretically, to travel more and work on interesting projects that are based around human interaction. I crave this. And because I crave it so much, it was easy to succumb to my desire to be around more people. I gained a lot of insight about myself and my current process, mind you, and I feel good for having spent the time with my friends...but I didn't get what I wanted done. It will take discipline to limit my social activities during normal working hours (and this includes shopping trips). This is one of the perks of freelancing in the first place, but for this productivity push I will need to maintain a firmer hand on my time.
Discovering mirth
Despite the drawbacks of the day, they did lead me to an important personal observation:
I'm silly and unrealistic.
Ok, I already knew this, but instead of depressing me, this made me laugh at myself. My propensity toward silliness was evident while talking to my motivationally-challenged perfectionist friend. I worked myself up to a comedic fervor, vividly guessing an over-the-top version of his probably dreams. My friend pointed out that this was a kind of vision, and this struck me. The truth is this: I like being silly, and I like making up stuff that is improbable but awesome. This is one of my passions.
For someone who likes silly things, I have nevertheless tended to chose to be serious about life. I've known that I needed to lighten up about life for a long time, and recently I've felt I need to project positive energy to have any hope of being productively happy in a self-sustaining manner.
In retrospect, the approach I took to address my squareness was to address these three areas of discomfort:
- To try not to care about details I can't influence or control, because that accomplishes nothing.
- To look on the bright side of everything, because life lessons are learned through hard knocks.
- To not feel judged by other people, because they are not experts about me and my world.
These are all good mental stances to have, but here's the drawback: they are all reactionary methodologies! After all:
- I do care about the details and get stressed out, and then I calm myself down.
- I acknowledge the dark sides before I extract the positive lesson.
- I do feel judged by people and feel uncomfortable, then I shrug it off.
These are coping mechanisms. And because they are reactionary methods, I am reactionary. My experiment earlier in the day to spread positive energy fizzled because I didn't have the energy to begin with; I only had the ability to reactively shape what is already was in the world. It would be far better to be able to create such energy from scratch.
Cultivating silliness and mirth may change the equation, because it unlocks my sense of joy, which I think is inherently creative. My particular brand of mirth recognizes that there are a lot of crazy, obsessive, unique, and off-kilter people in the world who are completely inspiring. Their uniqueness is a source of excitement and change, and I like to amplify and share it wherever I find it. I also believe the the world is inherently sorta improbable to being with, and we exist AT ALL is a cosmic wonder. In my search for greater meaning, I've forgotten this. Maybe finding my bliss is as easy as finding something to laugh with to see where that goes. Is there anything more positive and joyful to share than a good laugh? If I can cultivate my natural silliness as a source of demonstrable mirthfulness, that might give me what I need to make more changes in myself and the world around me.
Tomorrow's plan
Day 2 is usually harder, but armed with today's insights I am hopeful of maintaining discipline. The challenge is likely to be more physical: I'm going to be tired. I need to make sure I don't eat anything that makes me sleepy, which means avoiding sugar and carbohydrates. It is also Election Day here in the US, so it will be awfully tempting to spend the day watching the progress of the vote. We'll see how it goes. I need more data to see where my patterns are breaking down.
As I wind down to sleep, I'm struck by the Christian phrase, "God is Love". Perhaps God is Laughter too?
I've never really had a problem sitting down and spewing out a bunch of words. My process is pretty simple:
- Start somewhere, see where it goes, then try to make some sense of it in a closing paragraph or statement.
- If I have the energy, proof read and tweak the text. Otherwise, let 'er loose!
- Hope no one notices that I'm a hack ;-)
I think think the process works for me because I tend to present in terms of conversational narrative. I write as if I'm talking to my friends, and I am constantly thinking of the best way to sequence a bit of information so it can be comprehended correctly. This actually doesn't play as well in real-life; in the process of establishing the context, iterating the supporting facts, and drawing my brilliant conclusion, attention spans tend to wander. This is good, because it forces me to try to be more visceral and succinct.
But I digress.
>> CONTINUE READING
I'm still holed up with work, but here's a quick link: Practical Personal Development blogger Alex Shalman interviewed me via email a while ago for his Happiness Project, in which he lined up an impressive list of other bloggers to ask them a few questions about what made them happy. This was an interesting question to me, because I hadn't been thinking if I was happy or not; you can find my interview here.
I don't know if this is common around the world, but after Christmas Day there is a frenzy of returns at retail outlets across the United States, as people trade-in/trade-up their gifts to something they like better. To make exchanges easier, stores issue gift receipts to gift purchasers with the price omitted to maintain some semblance of propriety. Call me sentimental, but when someone gives me a present, I find it difficult to treat it as just another material asset to be cashed in. It just doesn't jibe with what I think of as The Spirit of Giving. Why not leave warm cups of "Drano" out for Santa instead of milk while we're at it, or have a nice reindeer venison stew for Christmas Dinner as we throw rocks at elves? But that's just my moral outrage masking the true issue at hand: sometimes I get terrible presents and I'm not sure what to do with them. The barbarian materialists exchange their presents and are materially happier afterwards. Traditionalists like me get principles stuck in their craw, muttering bitterly as their houses fill with junk they can't just throw away because "they were gifts."
There is another gift-related practice here in the States called the Yankee Swap, associated with office Christmas parties, where you can potentially bring all your unwanted junk and gift it away to some poor sucker. Each person brings a present, and gets one in return. The trick is that each person draws their present based on a number, and they have the option of exchanging whatever they got with whatever someone before them got. It's deliciously balances the Spirit of Giving with the Spirit of Taking Away, just the sort of spirit one needs to survive the modern corporate environment. We are what we are.
While this year I received no bad presents (in fact, they were all awesome), there was an interesting moment at one of these events when someone recognized a "real" gift from a Christmas many years in the past re-gifted to someone else. This created some awkwardness on the part of the re-gifter, though the original gift giver didn't mind at all. This got me to thinking: we already have gift receipts. Why not take it a step further and include a re-gift receipt that establishes once and for all that once you are given a present, it's yours to do with what you want?
Design of the Re-Gift Receipt
To create the Re-Gift Receipt, I used my Stockwell Rubber Stamp Kit (I'll have to write about this sometime later) to create the RE-GIFT RECEIPT: YOUR GUILT-FREE PASS lettering at top. I scanned this in, colored it to resemble the purplish ink on old-style receipts, and laid out some text using an 8-point monospaced font (Bitstream Vera Sans Mono if you are curious...it's one of my favorite console fonts).
Since I wanted to reproduce the length of the typical gift receipt---they are often filled with legal mumbo jumbo---I had to write some filler. I figured it wouldn't hurt to cover some of the basic scenarios that lead to "poor gifting". Here's what it says:
RE-GIFT RECEIPT POLICY
This present has been given to you by your (CIRCLE ONE):
CO-WORKER(S)
CASUAL BUDDY
REALLY BUSY BEST FRIEND
SIGNIFICANT OTHER
OTHER ACQUAINTANCE
If you like it, great! However, in the event that dismay and polite confusion ensued rather than joy, please allow that (CIRCLE ALL THAT APPLY):
I DON'T REALLY KNOW YOU THAT WELL SO I JUST WINGED IT
IT LOOKED MUCH BETTER ONLINE / IN THE STORE
I'M A CLUELESS GUY/GAL WHAT DO I KNOW ABOUT PRESENTS
I GENUINELY THOUGHT YOU LIKED THIS KIND OF STUPID CRAP
I DID ALL MY SHOPPING AT THE SAME STORE THIS IS WHAT THEY HAD
I THOUGHT YOU COULD USE IT FOR HOBBY/WORK BUT WHAT DO I REALLY KNOW ABOUT IT
MOM SAID "IT IS THE THOUGHT THAT COUNTS" AND I BELIEVED HERE
In the True Spirit of American Giving, this RE-GIFT RECEIPT entitles you to pass this item guilt-free to a third party, no questions asked.
AUTHORIZING GIFT GIVER:
RECIPIENT:
by re-gifting this present, you agree that there is no reason to ever mention this again
I think this covers about 80% of all bad-gifting scenarios, and having it in an easy "circle your excuse" format really captures the Spirit of Exchanging Gifts For Better Ones: convenient, cheerfully impersonal, with no hard feelings at all.
After I got this text laid out in Illustrator, I noticed that the overly-crisp quality of the text was at-odds with my scanned rubber-stamp letterings. I applied a 1-pixel gaussian blur over all the text using a raster-based effect. It's cool that you can do this stuff now; back in the old days, I'd have had to convert the whole file to a high-resolution TIFF file and that would have been a pain in the butt. Blurring the text slightly made everything fit together visually. I was pleased that the file size didn't get too large either. At about 250KB for the PDF it's about 100K larger than the non-blurred version, but that's acceptable I think for the visual result. On the minus side, there's a good chance that non-Adobe PDF readers will render the file incorrectly; let me know in the comments if you come across this problem. I'm curious.
Download the Re-Gift Receipt Forms
There's three Re-Gift Receipts per 8.5"x11" sheet. Just trim along the print marks and you'll be ready to start disavowing any intended thoughtfulness to your gift giving. You could also use these forms to legitimately (sigh) let your friends know that you did your best, but there is no obligation to hold on to it...just don't give it BACK. :-)
You will need a Portable Document Format (PDF) viewer installed such as Adobe Acrobat Reader to view and print. If you can't install Acrobat or are having trouble viewing the PDF, you can try these alternate downloads and "adjust size to fit to page" when you print:
PC users can right-click and choose "Save-As..." from the pop-up menu to download the file to your computer. Mac users can option-click and do the same, I believe.
Other Silly Things
If you appreciated the dubious value of this download, you might also like my Chain Letter Nullification Certificate, Arm-Mounted Task Nagger, Procrastinator's Clock, and Social Yardstick designs. Enjoy! :-)
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