Ground Hog Day Resolutions Review Day 7

Yes, it's that time again: Groundhog Day Resolutions Review Day. I almost forgot about it, but fortunately I had entered all the days into Google Calendar and I got the reminder last night.

The quick recap for those unfamiliar with the Groundhog Day Resolutions Concept: Forget January 1st, and set your resolutions on February 2nd. Then follow through and check every month and a day until December 12. This is the first year I've tried this, and it's kind of gratifying to look back and see what progress has been made.

Rather than go into a long-winded explanation of what's been going on, I'll just recap each statement; you can read about the original ideas in the original post and various followups (there is an index of posts at the bottom of this article).

1. Make Money from Writing and Making Stuff

The general idea is to shift from pure services and become an original content creator, deriving the bulk of my income from my own work. This ties into a new goal I established this month: to be completely mobile by 2010, so I can go to where the interesting projects and people are in the world. There's so much world to experience, it drives me nuts. I've also been inspired again by Tim Ferriss' continuing adventures, which you can follow on his mind-bogglingly excellent tip blog.

The "whiffed" (missed) goals I have decided probably weren't as important as I thought. I still do need to transition to Expression Engine, because my current blog structure feels very constraining, and I think EE's system will be a welcome improvement.

I actually have been booked for the remainder of the year, and probably a good chunk of next year, so my big challenge will be actually time management. The nature of the projects are steeped in writing (essentially, analysis) and making stuff (software, basically). It's kind of what I was doing before, but more challenging and therefore interesting. I will be learning a lot that I can proceduralize and redevelop into new things.

2. Build a Sustainable Social Network

It feels like I've finally stabilzed a few social structures over the past month, though I am uncertain about my level of commitment to them. This uncertainty arises from the amount of energy that I receive back. I actually feel a little "overdrawn" in terms of my social energy and time, so I need to hole up and regenerate. Also on my mind is the continuing search for suitable partners, in terms both of romance and in working mission. In an ideal world, it would be the same person, but I am not sure how to go about finding this. I may write about some of the challenges I'm facing in the coming months, as I haven't yet come across a really good explanation of the process.

I do need to get off my ass and resurrect the May goal of creating the co-schemer / freelancer list...this is pretty important to me, and is related to my overall search strategy of being able to connect people. I'd like to be connected too, of course, and I've come to believe that all it will take is someone standing up and taking names. I guess that will be me. Watch for a post in the near future.

3. Sell a Product This Year

It's taken a while, but the Emergent Task Planner Pads have finally gone to press. Related tasks: forming an LLC, figuring out the design-to-fulfillment chain, and starting to think like an actual business entity instead of some guy working out of his basement office in New Hampshire.

This goal relates closely to #1, and there are actually some new deadlines in place. If last year was any indication, the last months of the year are when people start thinking about planning for next year, so having pre-printed versions of the Compact Calendar, perhaps a full-year planner product, and goodness knows what else could be nice product to have. Now that some of the design-to-fulfillment workflow is in place, I can start to automate the process and shorten the cycle. While I was at the printer, it struck me that there's quite a lot of custom print work I can do beyond pads, and working with a local printer could be a lot of fun. Apparently there is a thing that paper manufacturers create called a paper library, which is a sampler of all the paper stock with printing examples. I was so excited I thought I would faint. This might sound crazy, but I have the ability to touch any material and instantly envision something I could make from it that "respects" it. Putting that into practice would kick ass.

For Next Month

We're in the home stretch, with only 3 more review periods before the GHD year comes to an end.

• The biggest goal on my mind is shipping those ETP pads and getting feedback from the brave souls who have taken a chance on the product. The second goal is to establish the LLC (I'm thinking of calling it "The David Seah Group", which scares the crap out of me because I would have to grow into that) and getting the online ordering and fulfillment automated.

• I'm not so concerned about #1, as the printing goal sort of takes care of that.

• Regarding #2, I do need to gather a group of like-minded people with skills, just so we know who we are. I've done some of this already privately, but there are so many cool people I've been contacted by that I feel the need to organize them into some kind of directory of awesomeness. Everyone has a skill and a story that they can contribute to the pool.

• A bonus goal that wasn't even on my list was going to the gym...I've been going for two months now, and am likely to continue doing so because I have been feeling stronger and---I admit this doesn't make much sense, but it's true---breathing more enthusiastically...maybe it's a result of the improved cardiovascular endurance. The next challenge that isn't part of my GHDRs is to systematically lose weight.

So that's it for this month...now, back to work! Time for dreaming will have to come later.

PAST POSTS ON GROUNDHOG DAY RESOLUTIONS AND REVIEW

• Original Post and Rationalization - February 2nd
• GHDRRD #1 - March 3
• GHDRRD #2 - April 4
• GHDRRD #3 - May 5
• GHDRRD #4 - June 6
• GHDRRD #5 - July 7
• GHDRRD #6 - August 8

Circumnavigation of My Arrogance

I have noticed a disturbing trend in myself in the past few weeks: I've been losing patience and I've been kind of a jerk to my friends and coworkers.

What's new is that I've been under a bit more project load than usual. This is fantastic because I have been wanting to sink my teeth into something nice and meaty for some time. However, I've found some bad old habits resurfacing from the white-hotness of the old 2001 Internet Bubble. I have been arrogant and self-serving under the mistaken belief that I was just being proactive and responsible. I'm lucky that the people that I work with are understanding and strong enough to stand up to me, so I can see what I've been doing wrong. I just feel awful about it, though.

ARROGANCE

First, the positive: my default mental stance is to believe that everyone has a knack. That is, everyone has some kind of incredible potential that, if we can but unlock it, will result in an explosion of empowering happiness.

When I am in the position that I can help someone come into that potential, that makes me feel incredibly happy. This is a mission that I've recently accepted as being one of my primary life goals. Because of this, I am a patient and nurturing teacher, free with my knowledge and my time. I can trace this tendency back to when I was trying to learn the BASIC programming language in the 7th grade, and this older kid named Donald Dimitrios took the time to show me the ropes. He put up with my blank-eyed questions and endless confusion when it came to understanding PEEKS, POKES, and the mysterious FOR-NEXT loop. This generosity of knowledge was particularly notable because in junior high school, there is such stratification between grade levels that even TALKING to a 7th grader was grounds for ruthless taunting. He didn't give a crap though, and as a result I had a positive introduction to computing that not only helped set the course of my career, but imprinted me with the values that lay the foundation for a strong community of practitioners. I am forever grateful.

That said, you might find it surprising that this patient gratefulness dries right up when I am working with someone who is already an equal. The reserve of patience and understanding gets put away for the next student, because I'm excited to gird on the armor and the sword. I'm not exactly Leeroy Jenkins when it comes to group projects, but I must admit there is a certain LET'S GO OUT AND KICK ASS! YEAH!!!!! vibe. I want to drink the blood from conquered skulls of bad interactive media, reveling in the lamentations of the corporate tools who inflicted such point-and-click monkeyware upon the world in the first place! Ok, I am exaggerating a little here, but I really do feel that it's a moral imperative that must be followed through.

I believe that this is arrogance masquerading as the belief that quality and skill are most important for a professional project. That's not to say that quality and skill are not the point; it is the basis of business trust after all. What is arrogant is my belief that valuing quality and skill entitles me to say and do whatever I think. I never fully calculated the human cost in terms of lingering hurt feelings, lowered morale, and confusion. I think for the first time, I am ready to concede that this cost is unacceptable when it is exacted for my own standards. It is only worthwhile when everyone benefits for their own reasons, and they want to be in the room.

WHAT'S OLD IS NEW AGAIN

The last time I experienced this form of personal hubris was in 2001. I believed I knew exactly what should be done, how it could be done, and was incredibly blunt about it. The net result was that I drove away a lot of good people, and it took four years to rebuild both myself and real relationships with people. I learned that I did have this dichotomy of expectation between my mentoring and collaboration modes. My solution? Go freelance...obviously, I had trouble working with others in a company context, so maybe the freedom to put up or shut up on process was my destiny. Problem solved! This path resulted in the start of this blog and the freedom to build many new relationships with people. I have never been happier or more excited in my life by the possibilities before me.

There's just one problem: I really do want to work with people. So for the past year, I've been slowly building up to the point where I can start working with people more closely.

What's different now is that I'm aware that it's much easier to attract similar people than it is to find them, if you are brave enough to put the vibe out there. One reason that I write so broadly on my blog is that I like eclectic people; I figure that if someone is intrigued by the types of topics I write about, they are probably more likely to be someone I'd like to work with. If they like the way I write, that is an even closer potential match! I think this is a good example of finding your niche; it's more important, particularly at first, to find a few people who deeply connect and enrich you than thousands who you superficially encounter but form no bond whatsoever. The reason I think this is important is that when we're getting started, we all need additional sources of energy to push through our fears, uncertainties, and doubts. Having even one person who really believes in you can make all the difference.

I've also thought that maybe it was the style of collaboration or scheming that was the crucial relationship element, which is just a special case of attracting similar people. People that have similar values and interests are more likely to have a harmonious relationship. In general I've found it to be true...for establishing friendships. Extending this principle to a working relationship has so far eluded me. My weird arrogance regarding competency and process rears its ugly head, and drives away the people I want to work with.

DIAGNOSIS

I hurt a few people today who are important to me, which is why I'm trying to work through this and fix it because I apparently did not achieve closure before. I think there are probably others out there who have gone through---or ARE going through---a similar cycle. Here's a few warning signs, based on feelings that I've had before:

• You believe that people around you just aren't willing to understand the value of what you're doing.

• You believe that you are doing more than you are supposed to with regard to your job or role.

• You believe that there is a lack of definition and direction in the workplace, with no apparent end in sight.

• You believe that if you take responsibility for conveying the importance of these issues, matters will improve if people are willing to listen. Through education and persistence, you can effect a change.

There are two responses to this that I've tried in the past:

1. Step up and lead until someone makes you stop: When you don't have authority to make changes directly granted to you, you can apply personal leadership to the situation. Though it's not strictly part of your job description, bringing clarity and vision to the people around you is often appreciated if it's not perceived as a power trip. Being willing to take punches, go the extra mile for your peers, and create recognized excellence within the organization can be the beginning of a new era of solidarity. However, this approach requires a lot of energy with no guarantee of recognition or reward. It can pay off big, or you will burn out in about a year.

2. Withdraw and cut your losses: Situations in which you do not have the authority to change culture and process are difficult to win overnight. After you assess the amount of effort and luck required to remedy matters, you determine it is too much work. You can stop caring and restrict your role to the smallest unit of responsibility that won't get you fired. Or, you can leave.

I've practiced both responses half a dozen times with various companies. The typical patterns is to lead with "stepping up" and try to last long enough to achieve whatever goal was set before me. Very draining, but rewarding when we pulled off something kick ass. Eventually, though, my energy stores are drained so thoroughly that I become very moody and depressed. I ask myself am I really going to be happy doing this forever and come to the conclusion that it's time to move on. So I close off things as cleanly as I can, and enter a new phase of my life.

The current phase of my life, which is this blogging/design thing, has been sustainable because I'm generally working on shorter projects. With shorter projects, I can work hard to get the thing out, and then count on some downtime to replenish my store of energy. Shorter projects also tend to be very well-defined or limited in some way that makes them much easier to tackle comprehensively.

It's the longer-term projects that require more of a marathoner's approach to energy management: the pace is necessarily slower, because you need to maintain energy for the entire project track. And it's these projects that are the ones with the most need for collaboration between peers. I also think it's these projects that are the most rewarding due to the larger scale of the accomplishment. I need to develop a third option that doesn't involve total withdrawal or total sacrifice.

IDENTIFYING THAT THIRD OPTION

What I need to confront is my ego and sense of entitlement. I thought I'd dealt with this years ago, but they both live on. I also need to resolve that sense of responsibility that tends to exert itself when I think I can help clarify things. Here are my thoughts on the matter:

1. I should acknowledge that I'm really good at some things. And that's as noteworthy as someone having hair because everyone is really good at something. Even exceptional skill, I think, is just a tiny aspect of a person's place in the universe, no sense in kicking up a fuss about it. Also, embracing one's talents without feeling embarrassed is a necessary step to performing on the broader world stage; if I really want to do cool stuff on a bigger scale, I need to get comfortable with offering what I can offer.

2. There's no need to "awaken" or "educate" people all the time. What's funny is that I believe that I already believe that expressing ideas in tangible form is most effective in creating positive change; so me merely telling people things and expecting them to follow without some kind of concrete example is just foolish. I'm amazed that I did not see this before.

3. Forgot job boundaries, assigned responsibilities, and appropriateness of action. Just pitch in and help. It's the right thing to do. And this is the path through which quality may be attained with much less friction. I've just realized that assigning distinct responsibilities to people is a form of zero sum thinking; the implication is that if people don't do what they are "supposed to do", the project will go horribly awry. Well...maybe not!

So that's my amended course of action, and I am hopeful that this means that I'll finally get the hang of collaborating with people more closely. I don't think clients will necessarily notice a difference (it's quality and skill that they're paying for). However, I think these new guidelines will help me come to a more comfortable work-life balance that includes everyone, not just me. It's a moral imperative!

Groundhog Day Resolutions Review Day 6

Yes, it's that time again: Groundhog Day Resolution Review Day! This is the extended format version of new year's resolutions, diddled a bit to make them a little more workable with my oh-so-modern life. You can read about the idea's genesis in detail if you like, but the basic idea is this:

• January 1st is a terrible day to do New Years Resolutions. We're all hungover, and got a whole month of catching up to do. February 2nd, now there's a day that needs a boost.

• New Years Resolutions fail because we don't follow up on them. So why not designate regular easy-to-remember days like 2/2, 3/3, 4/4, and so forth?

I've been putting myself through the process this year to get a feel for what works and what doesn't. I haven't yet made a nifty download for this, but fellow form productivista Corrie Haffly has her awesome Monthly Goal Trackers. There are a few people scattered across the Internet who are also trying this out, so ROCK ON.

Anyway, it's time to catch up and figure out how badly I've been blowing my resolutions.

BLOWN ACTIONS

I've been noticing that as the months go by, I've been adhering less and less to the specific goals, but overall I've been following the spirit of my GHD resolutions. I had deliberately picked (I think) just three overall goals in February:

1. Make Money from Writing and Making Stuff
2. Build a Sustainable Social Network
3. Sell a Product This Year

In May I started to realize that I was not making deliberate progress toward fulfilling these goals, so I started setting action items. Here's the chain of them:

1. Make Money from Writing and Making Stuff

2. Build a Sustainable Social Network

3. Sell a Product This Year

I can see that many tasks just didn't get done, so that's not too good. However, overall I've incrementally moved just a little closer to fulfilling my resolutions. That's something to feel good about, though I probably wouldn't be that LOUD about it :-)

GENERAL TRENDS

I've noticed that while my planned actions didn't necessarily get done, I think just having these thoughts on my mind has helps fit other opportunities to my needs.

• The Emergent Task Planner sheets are going to get printed, and they'll be sold. That's going to happen. I've just been slowly plugging away at it.

• The Social Networking actually has been going well for me personally. However, as I privately suspected it might, the World of Warcraft Business Networking started out strong, but has dwindled. I haven't been putting the energy into running the guild as a "primary leisure activity". However, I have made a few new friends through it, which is great! I've also discovered that my personal social network has expanded to include the coffee shop as a kind of spiritual anchor. I would never have guessed this would happen, but I am getting to know the people that are there every day, and they are real people with interesting lives, troubles, challenges...just workin' to get by, working for a better life the best they know how. Getting back in touch with that has been important to me. It gives me perspective.

  I've also come to realize that I am both craving responsibility while pushing it away. I like being responsible for things, but I hate being drained of my energy. I'm also afraid of wasting people's time (including mine) by trying new relationships and not seeing them work. This is a poor attitude...best to wade in and make what sense you can. You can't let the possibility of something being disappointing prevent you from trying. I tend to try to think of ways to maximize success before starting something, but all that seems to ever get me is a fine coating of cat hair across the back of my pants, impressed upon my backside by the couch.

• As far as Making Money from Writing and Making Things, this has been reframed as a growing sureness of my identity as a designer. The more things I've written and made, the more easily it is to see what's made me happy and what keeps me fulfilled. My challenge is to keep chipping away at the mountain of tasks and stay energized.

SPECIFIC ACTIONS

I'll keep this short and sweet:

• Print Pads! Ship Them!
• One New Statement on the Website that Clarifies My Design Work!
• Start a bunch of New Working and Personal Relationships. See What Happens.

If you'd like to read about the past Groundhog Day Resolution Review Days, click below!

• Original Post and Rationalization
• GHDRRD #1
• GHDRRD #2
• GHDRRD #3
• GHDRRD #4
• GHDRRD #5

A Printable Certificate for Breaking Chain Letters

The other day I was checking my email, and was surprised to receive a mass email---you know, the kind where all the recipients are listed in the "to" field---from an acquaintance I barely knew. The photos attached were that of a recently-born child in their family, which seemed nice enough. However, soon afterwards I received a mass email reply from someone I didn't know at all, with a CHAIN LETTER attached to it. The enterprising recipient, seeing an opportunity to foist the chain letter onto people she didn't even know, bundled the chain letter as a forwarded email envelope, and artfully neglected to indicate its non-baby related payload.

Some people may say I'm getting upset over nothing, but what really burns me is that this MISCREANT took advantage of a bunch of strangers for her own salvation. She applied SPAMMY TECHNIQUES to hoodwink a bunch of baby picture recipients into taking the fall for her own crappy email superstition. I was livid at this treatment.

I hate chain letters because they're thinly-disguised attempts to create something large on the backs of hundreds of strangers. There is, however, something magical about them; it's interesting to think that a single person can send a letter to 10 people threatening them with misfortune...and be practically guaranteed that the chain will continue. This is particularly easy with email, a fine-but-trivial example of the psycho-mathematical forces behind pyramid schemes. Usually I just break the chain and forget about them, but this particular instance was particularly onerous in its callous disregard of my right to pursue happiness free of other people's baggage. GRR.

INVOKING THE MAGIC

I got to thinking: If a chain letter can promise misfortune, what would be the most credible countermeasure? If people were making up their own chainletters, I figured that this gave me license to create my own magic certificate to draw on the power of like-minded people. And thus, the Chain Breaker was born. I call it the Certificate of Chain Letter Nullification. Here's what it looks like:

It's basically some stock Illustrator CS2 borders and some clip art from the Historical Ornaments and Designs clip art book I have. The anti-chain letter mojo comes from the following declaration:

There are times when the forces of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt conspire to coerce Good People to aid the propogation of Certain Letters of Ambiguous Benefit or Misfortune. Such Letters are conceived to Frighten people into serving the Ego of a Master Jerk. We can not, as free men and women, allow such Threats to bound our Happiness.

By signing and dating this certificate, you declare that you are a Creator of Positive Energies. Together, we break the Tyranny of the Chain. We declare that we are defined by our Actions, not our Fears.

Then you sign the document, and have a witness sign it too, and the unbinding magic should take effect if you, in your heart of hearts, agree with the statement. Since there are many of us who believe this, I'm figuring that this is some pretty strong magic. Failing that, I suppose we could always sic the Libertarian Party on the next chain-letter sendin' yutz to cross our paths.

In any case, I feel a little better. Perhaps some of you out there will find this certificate equally calming. Next time you get a chain letter, print out this certificate, sign it, and help drive back the FUD.

» Download Certificate of Chain Letter Nullification (PDF, 360K)

Enjoy! :-)

Tanabata, Plus Groundhog Day Resolutions Review Day 5

Today is Tanabata, a Japanese Star Festival that falls on the 7th day of the 7th lunarsolar month. That's actually 2007-08-19 this year according to wikipedia, but 7/7 also corresponds to the fifth Groundhog Day Resolutions Review Day, on which I review my Groundhog Day's Resolutions and figure out how things have been going. It's particularly nice to celebrate Tanabata because the festival has a tradition in which you write down wishes related to bettering yourself. Afterwards you hang them in a bamboo tree, where presumably some universal force will notice and help bring them to fruition. This is very compatible with GHD Resolutions...we can all use a boost.

Last year I made some printable streamers, which I again printed out and wrote wishes upon. I didn't choose specific wishes, but wrote down forces that I would like to have more of right now; I'm trusting the "universal wish-granting force" to handle the implementation details for me---how's that for effective executive delegation? The wishes themselves were just single words describing what I'm in the mood for:

• Camaraderie
• Silliness
• Receptiveness
• Delight
• Resolution

Then I hung them on the tree. I'll burn the wishes at midnight on my grill, as I understand the tradition to be.

PICKING OFF FROM LAST MONTH

The basic premise behind Groundhog Day's Resolutions is this: Make resolutions on February 2nd instead of January 1st when we're caught up. Check your progress every "month plus one day" (3/3, 4/4, 5/5, and so forth).

My three main 2007 resolutions:

1. Make Money from Writing and Making Stuff
2. Build a Sustainable Social Network
3. Sell a Product This Year

Last month I had stumbled slightly and not gotten my action items done. This month, the same thing happened: I completely blew off my action items, which were as follows:

• June 13: Get the ETP Printed, Dang It!
• June 20: Put the HUB statement on the website.
• June 27: Create some original content, like a booklet or number of thoughts, and sticking it up on Lulu.com or Blurb.

I had forgotten to schedule these on my Google Calendar. It was a pretty busy month from both a business and personal perspective, and I dropped the ball. Although a lot did get done, the whole point of having a resolution is to really make a change, deliberately.

Here's the current status:

1. Getting the ETP Printed!

This is the new pre-printed emergent task planner sheet I had designed, for selling as an actual product. Convenient, beautiful, affordable...that's the idea! And, this is a way to dip my toe into productive development without risking too much.

I did draw up an initial plan on how to get this launched, and talked to my friend Scott to get it priced out at various area printers. It's been taking longer than expected with my busy schedule. My next action item, once we have the pricing figured out, is to put up some kind of order page for "pre orders", so we can arrange to have exactly that number printed. After that, it's figuring out payment, packaging, and shipping. Because we're looking at using an offset press instead of print-on-demand, after the initial run our incremental cost will much lower.

2. Put the HUB statement on the Website! A HUB statement is a form of elevator pitch that emphasizes your "hottest undeniable benefit" to a very specific target audience. By having a HUB statement, you can really effectively communicate what you do to people who actually would be interested in working with you. By putting this statement on my website, it would likely improve the chances of people figuring out they want to work with me.

I have been slowly getting clear about what it is that I do well and is worth paying for:

• critical analysis, architecture, and planning
• information graphic design
• experience design

and how I do it:

• investigative design
• scientific creative methodologies
• using media to create stories that unfold in real life

All this information, in addition to how people can initiate the process of working with me, has to go on the website. It's been driving me nuts for the past few weeks, because I feel the website structure and navigation is somehow holding me back.

There has been some movement though: I've decided that I'm going to use Expression Engine for the base of my next website path, because it has the features I need in one fairly inexpensive integrated package. I have slowly been figuring out how to transition the features of my existing WordPress installation into an Expression Engine equivalent.

3. Create Original Content and Stick it on Lulu.com!

I originally thought of rewriting some of the Printable CEO materials into book form, but this didn't happen. If I'd scheduled it into my google calendar maybe I would have remembered. There were a couple of book-related activities, however:

• Last month I had worked on my first print piece, a perfect-bound printed book of glossy photos. I got to use InDesign for this project, and found that it was actually a rather pleasant environment to work in.

• I was talking to a friend of mine about writing children's books, so I decided to use what I'd learned while using InDesign for the print piece to try laying out A Bee Story, the writing experiment I did last August.

It took a while to figure the best way to import the text---I copied the HTML from the browser and pasted it into InDesign. You can take a peek at the Bee Story PDF, formatted for a 6x9 Lulu run. I'm not planning on printing it; for one thing, it hasn't been proofread or reworked in any way. Each story segment was written in one sitting, four periods for 4 days, without any planning. It's at best structured stream-of-consciousness writing. However, I picked up some knowledge of how I would lay out an actual book: this likely will be some kind of PCEO-related booklet. In the meantime, it's just convenient to see the entire bee story in one document.

ACTION ITEMS

Since the website is so much on my mind, I'm scheduling a two-hour block of time tomorrow to try to resolve the remaining issues. These are largely related to just learning EE's template langauge, though I also need to redesign the large photo header at the top of the page to visually define each distinct content area. July 8.

Getting the ETP printed is a big deal, so I'm hoping to have a good idea of the pricing required on a good piece of paper. After that, it's time to figure out how to create some kind of pre-ordering system, and it's time to formally think about customer service. July 12.

Finally, creating some of the new original content for printing: I have a lot of content that can be repurposed and clarified; it's just outgrown the simple blog-journal / category model of information hierarchy; I need to start making this site look like a real website while retaining the community model of the blogosphere. I think that will be a huge relief. Until then, I can at least start creating review PDFs that describe every system on the website, and move them to the Wiki. I've scheduled some time to do this. July 19.

Guest Post: Inspiration is Everywhere

One day I was browsing a list of recent additions to 9rules, the blog network I'm a part of that's organized around the idea of "creating community through quality content". After reading the first couple dozen sites, I was growing quite exhausted. I guess there IS such thing as "too much good content"; those of you with humongous RSS feeds know what I'm talking about.

Anyway, by the time I got to Equivocality, I was pretty fried, but in just the first few paragraphs of my visit I was rejuvenated. I was again reminded that writing can be more than just a vehicle for ideas...it can be an experience. My ear for language was delighted by every artfully-voiced turn of phrase, and my mind appreciated the masterful-yet-light choice of wording. For a couple hours, I was enchanted by the lyricism of the writing, equally impressed the candor with which the author, Jeff, presents himself to the world.

I was very honored to be asked to participate in an cross-posting experiment between our blogs, as a way of expanding the kind of writing we usually do. We picked INSPIRATION IS EVERYWHERE as the topic, no limits attached. I'm very pleased to present Jeff's post on the topic here. You can read my take on the subject at Jeff's site: Equivocality.

[Dave Note: I just looked at Jeff's post, and wow...he says so much more so much less verbiage...it's just fantastic. I feel like I can write up the equivalent of a good chicken-fried steak, but Jeff...Jeff knows how to make sushi...]

Inspiration is Everywhere

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
—Jack London

Inspiration is everywhere. It's true.

The difficult part is finding it. It doesn't matter if you're a chef, an athlete, a student, or a barber; you just need to look. Sometimes we get too caught up in our daily routines to recognize it, but there are a couple of things you can do to open your mind.

Buy a camera

You'll start to see the world in a different way. The positioning of objects in a composition. The play of light in a scene. The subject of focus in the foreground.

It doesn't have to be a fancy SLR. Many beautiful "happy accidents" have been taken with a Lomo. If you do have an SLR, acquire a macro lens. With a lens that lets you focus so closely, you'll see things that wouldn't normally appear, like patterns, materials, and textures. There's an entire world to be explored that you never knew about, right beneath our fingers. Soon you'll question what else you've been missing, and you'll be more open to finding it.

Never stop dreaming

Dreaming is what gives us hope. It lets us see things that never were, and helps us think outside of the box. Some of the best ideas come from unconventional dreams.

Sometimes it's also important to dream of things that can never be accomplished. You'll be amazed at how far you can get when you strive for that which is just out of reach.

Step out of your comfort zone

You'll learn things about yourself that you never knew. You'll discover your strengths and weaknesses. By placing yourself in an uncomfortable situation, you're forcing yourself to confront that which makes you uncomfortable. If you can grow from this, you'll be surprised at what you can accomplish, and you'll wonder what was ever holding you back.

As humans, we need inspiration. It's as fundamental as our curiosity. Curiosity is what drives us to explore, but inspiration is what drives us to create.

Take classical composers for example. In a sonata form, the structure comes from one or two ideas. The exposition introduces the motif. With this piece as inspiration, he brings it to a climax in the development, then relieves the tension in the recapitulation. Beautiful, complex, dulcet pieces are created simply by using variations of a couple of notes, building on the foundation of a single musical idea.

You can expand this example to any creative application. A beautiful design may start with something as abstract as a colour. The taste of a meal may come from a memory. With inspiration, our creativity grows. Just remember to keep an open mind.

Inspiration is everywhere, and most often in places you'd never expect.

-- Guest post by Jeff at Equivocality.

Groundhog Day Resolutions Review Day 4

It's that time of the year again, Groundhog Day Resolutions Review Day! For those of you just tuning in, this is one of my odd schemes to fix the tired old New Year's Resolutions that never really seem to get done. The basic premise: Make resolutions on February 2nd instead of January 1st (we're all too tired anyway), and then check in every month plus one day (3/3, 4/4, 5/5, and so forth).

To recap, here are my three main 2007 resolutions:

1. Make Money from Writing and Making Stuff
2. Build a Sustainable Social Network
3. Sell a Product This Year

HOW DID PLANNED ACTIONS GO?

In last month's report, I had noticed that I wasn't making good progress on number 1 and 3. I attributed this to the lack of concrete deadlines, so I scheduled three tasks 7-14 days out. These were:

• Write a HUB statement (a form of marketing writing) and put it on my website, by May 14.
• Create a potential co-schemer list and call one person on it on May 16.
• Select and package the Emergent Task Planner for a printer on May 12.

There's one task for each of the three resolutions. I only got one done: preparing the Emergent Task Planner for print. It's ready, and now I am waiting on getting some information from a friend of mine on printing and fulfillment. I need to schedule a meeting and really start pushing on this. Again, the momentum has waned.

Why didn't I get the HUB statement and or co-schemer list done? Well, work happened, and I think scheduling all three tasks in one week was actually too much. This time, I'm going to schedule just one at a time. What's funny is that although these yearly resolutions are important to me, I apparently don't want to think about them all the time. This makes me wonder if I have my priorities straight in the first place.

WHAT ABOUT UNPLANNED ACTIONS?

Although I only made minor progress on-purpose, a lot of rather interesting things did happen this month:

1. Deriving Income from Writing and Making Stuff

• I picked up some project work doing some research to clearly compare Adobe Flex to other environments like ASP.NET and PHP. Although we weren't supposed to actually write the final copy, we DID have to do a lot of the thinking that leads up to it. This is very close to being paid for the writing itself. In fact, it's better...it's being paid to make sense out of complicated product lines, and that's the kind of task I actually enjoy.

• On a semi-related note, I was asked to consider making a presentation in Canada on information graphic and design. Although this isn't writing, it IS different from straight production work. I think the common factor is that it's creating content that's at the core of this activity.

It increasingly feels that I'm on the verge of redefining my work identity, and that once I do this a lot of things will fall into place. I also think that I can rephrase this goal as create original content.

2. Build Sustaining Social Networks

• It has been an exhausting yet invigorating month. There was more speed dating, and more meeting of interesting people. There was more hanging out with people, including lessons in personal networking that seemed to indicate a turning point for me socially. I can't remember a lot of what's happened at the moment, but I do know that I'm more social now than I have ever been. I guess I'm getting used to it.

• Also completely unplanned was the establishment of a World of Warcraft Business Networking Guild, or more accurately this was the excuse I had for getting back into the game. I've already met a few people through this, and the quality of interaction both in-game and in the forums is pretty cool. I'm looking forward to seeing how this develops further.

• I'm continuing to be active in our local Friend's Meetup, creating more local activity by being the person to suggest it. It's surprisingly easy once I got over the expectation that I had to please everyone and settle for my 2%. By that I mean I expect a lower percentage of people to be really interested in what I'm doing. If I meet just one person who I am inspired or energized by, that is an enormous win.

I think I can say that at this point, I'm tied in with enough activities that I'm not in immediate danger of losing momentum. So long as I keep meeting people and making the effort to create positive community energy, something wonderful is increasingly likely to happen. The great thing is that the energy has already been set free, and is doing good things in the world. It's a very pleasant thought.

3. Sell a Product

• I did get the Emergent Task Planner for Print designed and ready to deploy. I now have to push through the part I don't know anything about.

• Many people sent in ideas for how to make more money selling things, and I've lost track of a lot of them. One drawback of the increased social activity is that I've been losing track of who I've been talking to about which projects. I'm going to need to pull back and figure out a way to just focus on a few things at one time while keeping people in the loop. This blogs helps a bit with that, but I am starting to feel like I need a second layer of automation.

• I did some print work for a company out in California related to their "Golden Ticket" recruiting campaign. I wasn't doing any of the work related to their actual campaign, but I helped them out by converting their word document into something that looked a little more dynamic. It's the first time I've actually used InDesign to lay out a book for print of any kind. And you know what? It's a lot of fun. And now that I've had a taste of creating books and holding the result in my hand...wow. The mind boggles at the possibilities.

IT'S ALL RELATED

As I write up this month's report, I'm struck by how intertwined all my resolutions seem to be. This is not surprising because they reflect important values in my life: creating original content, making things, learning how to be self-sufficient, and creating a feeling of community that's important to me.

As I push on each of these things and reflect on them each month, I'm starting to feel a sense of satisfaction that I am making headway. The more headway I make, the clearer the path becomes, because I have the benefit of hindsight to see where I've come from. And as my experiences accumulate, I am starting to have faith that I will continue to have positive ones. This is not a feeling I anticipated I would have: I expected that the sense of accomplishment would arise from having done very concrete and countable things. I know that they will happen, because they're within my ability to do so, but for the first time I think I am starting to understand what people mean by "The Journey is the Reward." Before I understood this phrase as "deriving a benefit from the journey by maintaining a broad appreciation and perspective on the universe". Now, I understand journey as a "state of being"...always moving, finding a rhythm within yourself and a connection with the people around you. It is about maintaining a dynamic equilibrium.

ACTION ITEMS

I'm going to choose three specific things to get done for the next three weeks, one task per week, each with a tangible result that can be seen or held in the hand.

• Get the ETP Printed, Dang It! June 13 is the day around which I will plan something.
• Put the HUB statement on the website. June 20th is the day to allocate time toward.
• Create some original content, like a booklet or number of thoughts, and sticking it up on Lulu.com or Blurb. June 27th is the allocated date.

As I've been fond of saying lately, getting the world to change is a lot easier if you're doing something in it that leaves a mark or impression. At the stage I'm at now, the hardest part is just making a mark in the first place.

Groundhog Day Resolutions Review Day 3

Recap: I've been testing a system that I call Groundhog Day Resolutions. The basic premise is that everyone's too stressed out to take the time to craft decent resolutions on January 1st, so you should take a break and wait until February 2nd. This is of course also Groundhog's Day, one of my favorite holidays and favorite movies. The second point of Groundhog Day Resolutions (GHDR) is that you revisit them on 3/3, 4/4, 5/5, etc., for periodic review.

There's been a few other people who are following through with their GHDRs today; here are mine:

1. Commit to Deriving Income from Writing and Making Stuff
2. Build Sustainable Social Networks
3. Sell a Product This Year

This is one of the more interesting reviews so far, at least for me. Read onward!

1. DERIVE INCOME FROM WRITING AND MAKING STUFF

STATUS: OK

This resolution, when I first made it, was about shifting my career focus to areas I am strong in: writing and ideation. The challenge has been how to sell that, because the market tends to emphasize tangible goods and commodity services.

In the past, I have derived income primarily from a service perspective: interactive design, management, and programming for hire, at either a package or hourly rate, to implement someone else's scheme. This resolution represents more than just an expansion of my service offerings; it is actually a directive to put original Dave Seah thinking on the market. Another way of putting this: let my own personality color my work unabashedly. If I don't let my personality into my work, I'm not going to succeed in the way I want to.

A second insight has been that my writing is not a service offering. It's my process. Whether I'm doing design or programming, the writing is my way of packaging my thinking before starting the work. Writing is just another delivery medium, like my design and programming work, for my thinking.

To sell packaged thinking, I need to know who actually needs it. My friend Senia turned me onto a concept called the "Hottest Undeniable Benefit" (HUB), which is a clear targeted statement about what you specifically do for a very specific market. My HUB statement is currently this:

I work with decision makers to express critical business insights through clear writing and outstanding visual design.

This past month I've picked up a few jobs that are in alignment with this, and am feeling my way through them. This is not bad progress, considering I finalized the statement only a few days ago. I can see what kinds of supporting material I need to create to further define my market niche.

A second change has been to print cards with the title investigative designer on them. I've handed out two of them, and it's too early to say whether it's a move in the right direction or not.

2. BUILD SUSTAINING SOCIAL NETWORKS

STATUS: OK

I've been actually fairly social lately, which isn't bad for someone who tends to be more introverted. I think the secret has been to realize that my shyness came from being unsure about myself and what I wanted. Now that this is clearing up, I tend to be more outgoing. Here's what I did:

• I ran a local Meetup after-work sushi dinner. I'd say it was pretty successful judging from the feedback rating and what people said to me afterwards.

• I did Speed Dating for the first time. I met several interesting women, and discovered that I now can hold a conversation with people I've never met. I've made a few friends in the process, and introduced a number of people to the local Meetup group.

• I know the staff at the local coffee shop a little better, as I've continued to go there in the morning to do my daily planning after my 2 week experiment in waking up early (albeit at 10AM now instead of 7AM...I'm no Pavlina when it comes to sticking to stuff :)

  I find it fascinating that one can create rapport by just showing up at the same place everyday and having a daily interaction. Very cool.

• I took up an offer to work off-site at buddy Scott's company, Mediastream, up in Manchester, NH. He has some unused office space, and I've found the change in scenery to have positive effects on my perspective. To expand the network, you must hang out with different people over a period of time. It's that easy.

Commentary: Maintainable versus Sustaining Social Networks

Working off-site has forced me to commute, and it's put some repeating structure back into my day. Having repetition, I think, helps maintain social networks. However, I just realized I'm not really looking for "sustainable" networks: I want the sustaining kind, so I am re-energized.

I've had two important insights this month regarding the creation of a sustaining network:

• I am looking for co-schemers first, collaborators second. A schemer is passionate about shared motivations. In comparison, a collaborator is passionate about the project. To catalyze myself into action, I need more co-scheming in my life. Or Collaborative Scheming. Or to be in a Scheming Collaborative.

• I know where to find the right people. Dane Petersen, an energetic and very awesome fellow I met at SXSW for all of 5 minutes, called me out of the blue and we chatted about some project work he was starting and wanted some extra perspective on it. So we had a great conversation, and I thought holy cow, it's this easy. I never think of actually calling other people because I used to be afraid of it when I was a kid (long story). There are dozens and dozens of cool people out there to contact, and all I need to do is say, "Hey, I'd love to chat about something. Do you have some time?" I'm so dumb.

3. SELL A PRODUCT THIS YEAR

STATUS: NO PROGRESS

This has been my greatest mis-step for the month. Theoretically, it was the easiest thing to do: create something and sell it on the Internet. Heck, I've already got things created, yet I have slacked and slacked on this project:

A short PCEO pamphlet for the Concrete Goals Tracker that distills the best parts into a single process. I’m guessing this will be about 24 pages. I may offer it immediately on Lulu.com or something like that, and I’ll also have something that can be shown to various small presses that might be interested in running it themselves.

I haven't written it. I've thought about writing it, starting it, or getting moving on it many times. There is absolutely nothing in my way. Instead, there was always something more pressing to do. Or I was too tired after a long day of work and felt the need to veg out in front of the TV.

FAILURE ANALYSIS: Too much time allocated, too-abstract a goal chosen.

One month and one day is a long time. It's appropriate for GHD Resolutions because it's just long enough to allow you to dream freely without being too worried about how you're going to get it done. It seems possible because you (1) said it out loud and (2) you gave yourself enough time; such is the allure of resolution making. Of course, this lack of specificity is also the great weakness of resolutions, because the discipline to actually get things done is not part of the framework.

So here is the change I am making to my GHDRR Process Framwork:

• On Review Day, you must schedule at least one action with a tangible deliverable that will occur in the next week.
• Make it doable in one sitting, and make sure that it produces a result that you can either see, hold, or show to someone else.
• Schedule a specific work date and time into your regular work week.
• Do it.
• Reassess, and optionally do it again.

Incidentally, Corrie Haffly made a monthly goaltracker with a picture of a little groundhog on it that might be suitable for your review day tracking needs. It's very cute. I'm probably just going to use Google Calendar for now, since it sends me alerts.

ACTION ACTION ACTION

Having made this correction, I don't feel so bad about having blown my last month. So what happened?

I did not make a distinction between "internalized" and "new behavior" resolutions.

• Habit resolutions are the ones that seek long-term behavior change, and they can remain pretty nebulous if the imprinting has already been done. My resolutions #1 and #2 have already been internalized, so all I need to do is just say I'm doing them. Resolution #3, however, requires discipline, effort, and measurement like any project; failing to take that into account ensured that nothing got done. My other resolutions might have failed too, if they were not internalized.

The solution: create habit-enforcing reminders and define progress deliverables.

• The interval of scheduling that feels about right to me is one week away, or between 7-12 days from the GHD Resolution Review day.

Why not make it an immediate action?

• My rationale is that I want to go through the anxiety of anticipating the looming date to weigh on my brain, so it sticks. If I did it right now, then it would be done and I'd forget.
• By inserting that 7-10 day waiting period, the brain will steep in its own anticipatory juices and be perhaps changed. Mind you, this is just another one of my unsupported hare-brained theories. The particular hare I'm thinking of, though, is Bugs Bunny.

Why not two weeks?

• I can't really visualize what's going to happen in two weeks, because there are too many variables in my life with clients, projects, and random life encounters.
• It's important that I set a date that I can hold in my mind and weigh with immediate life factors, because I want to be mindful of my resolutions.
• If I set a date way out in the future, I will just forget about it and let whatever external notification system interrupt me when it's time to switch gears. Responsible? Yes! Mindful? Not so much.

THE PLAN

Here are my one-week-out goals, chosen between 7-12 days from now. If I was really busy, I might schedule only one resolution-related goal per week, but for now I want to just see how it works with all three resolutions running in parallel:

1. Make Money from Writing and Making Stuff - Put the HUB statement on my current website, on a design services page, on Monday, May 14.

2. Build A Sustainable Social Network - Create a "Potential Co-Schemer List" of people I have never talked to. Talk to one person on that list on Wednesday, May 16.

3. Sell a Product This Year - Select and "package" the Emergent Task Planner for a printer on Saturday, May 12.

I just put these into my google calendar, and already I am feeling a huge wave of anxiety and anticipation...excellent! :-)

Vent Through Haiku!

I was following up on Twitter friend Corrie Haffly and came across her Bad Day? Vent with Haiku post. The idea is that when you're having a bad day, express your pain through the soothing verbal tea that is Haiku. It combines just the right blend of tension with authentic expression, tinged with a responsible amount of subversiveness. And yet...venting through haiku is somehow not mean. Incredible!

Here is a haiku-ization of a client's email, from her former workplace:

I am quite upset
At your stupid, sucky, lame
Mickey Mouse product.

It's just one of several examples. Check it out!

Procrastinating Alone

I was feeling very positive on Friday; Never before has my path seemed so clear, with so many things within my grasp. It was thus with great confidence I predicted a landmark productive weekend. The power I felt on Friday, however, began to resemble more a rolling blackout by Saturday, followed by grid failure as I slipped into total couch potato mode. What happened?

Review

When I am doing a self-diagnostic of this kind, I try to remember other times in my life when similar things had happened. While I don't entirely trust my memory to recall specific details and sequences of events, I do have a pretty good memory for emotional tone. In other words, I can remember what situations made me feel a certain way. This is sometimes useful when doing graphic design. Anyway, I mentally ticked-off the specific sensations I had felt over the weekend:

• inertia
• boredom
• restlessness
• isolation
• disconnectedness
• sadness
• tiredness
• wanting to be distracted

It's a familiar feeling that I associate with not knowing what to do. I have a pretty clear plan, though, of what it is I can be doing to move things forward with my life. There's all the cool Printable CEO things: new forms, books, and software! There's the awesome people who are out there doing cool things that I can partner up with that make me happy. Plus there's stories to create! New ideas to outline! Principles to share! As I'm typing this, I'm absolutely amazed at the wealth of options I have available to me from a creative perspective. They are all things that I know I would enjoy doing, and I would even be good at doing them.

"Meh", says some part of my brain, lurking somewhere in the darkness and oozing ambivalence like a leaky nuclear reactor. It's toxic, and it's lodged somewhere in my system.

Depression?

On a whim I looked up depression (mood) and clinical depression in Wikipedia to see if this was what I was going through; I had caught a piece of a show on NPR that was talking about an instrument called the Beck Depression Inventory, which is a self-administered test that determines just how depressed you are in (I guess) medical terms. A lot of the symptoms sounded familiar---I had just listed them above---so I probably should keep this in mind next time I see a doctor. On the other hand, I don't want to take any drugs to correct any "deficiencies" in my mood. I don't even know what I should feel like, so maybe it would be worthwhile to define what I think that is.

Happy?

If I were happy, I would think it would be something like this:

• contented and fulfillment
• appreciated
• strong
• loved
• warm
• generous
• connected
• meaningful

Hm, that's interested...these are largely words that are related to being connected to other people. As I read through the list, there is a kind of intimacy that I feel is part of the definition. So my feeling of "meh" might be explained by a feeling that I'm only doing all these interesting things for myself, because I should. I know that they're all very good things to be doing because they'll make me stronger, but in examining my happy list I end up asking myself: but for what? It's like doing it for myself isn't enough. Interesting...very interesting.

I'd read recently an interesting definition of happiness: happiness is not being bored; it's being excited by what you're doing. I'm clearly not excited by all the things that I'm doing, because I'm having some difficulty really feeling that it's worthwhile.

Dichotomy

The reason I started freelancing in the first place was to gain my independence so I could do things that I thought were important and worthwhile to me. What I seem to have discovered is that I apparently don't have an important tangible goal, and have metaphorically missed my exit off the self-reflection highway. As a result, I've ended up in a place named after a dead philosopher's theory of existence. Or I'm somewhere near Buffalo, New York. Part of my brain is saying, "I told you there was nothing out here, we should have gotten off at Tonawanda", while another part of my brain insists, "No, there is something good just up ahead. We have to keep driving."

I used to go to grad school in (you guessed it) upstate New York, and have driven solo from Rochester to Boston a few times. It's not a particularly long drive, maybe 7-8 hours. The feeling of being on the road by yourself, unsure of what you're going to be doing with your life, but knowing at least that you're heading east down the I-90, is a lot how I feel now. I've grown used to the solitude of traveling by myself toward a destination, and I think I'm at that point where I'm just really sick of it. I think I really want to be on a road trip with someone else in the passenger seat, maybe taking turns driving, and so on.

I guess I'm saying I'm becoming increasingly aware of being alone. I've been alone for great swaths of time during my life, being always out of place or not quite understood by the people around me, and I've grown quite used to the solitude. It's only in the past few years that I've deepened new relationships and had a taste of what it's like to be around people who vastly improve the quality of the day-to-day existence. I've enjoyed visits from my sister and her cat on holidays, and Dad came to spend several months with me. I became re-acquainted with the human element. I've also met women who made me smile, and gave me something to look forward to beyond myself for a time. As I've grown more comfortable with myself, I've been able to see the value of close human relationships, and now that I've tasted that...I've been spoiled. It's like when I tasted my first really excellent chocolate croissant, or had a really fine piece of aged cheese: I could not go back to the supermarket stuff. In fact, the supermarket stuff makes me kind of angry.

"Why bother? It's not worth it." whispers that dark part of my brain.

Redirection

So I am pretty sure that one of my major bottlenecks right now is due to this feeling of loneliness. There's not much I can do about it overnight, but at least I know what the challenge is, and can put it out of my mind for a time.

I can also redefine my game plan. It had gone something like this:

• make myself stronger financially...
• so I can fund the things I think are really worthwhile.

The raw assets I have are my ideas, my writing, and my design work. I had thought the challenge was creating a product that I could sell and feel good about in exchange for income, but I can see that this is too narrow a definition: I need to also consider the creation of strong face-to-face human relationships as an integral part of the game plan.

Now, I've talked in the past about finding people to collaborate and so forth, but I have probably held myself back because I didn't want to get burned by the possibility of a bad project relationship. I've been spending a lot of time thinking about the right guidelines or set of principles that would ensure a "quality working relationship" based on metrics like similar level of skill, compatible background experiences, shared ethical standards for work, imagination, and so forth. These are all pretty useful metrics, and I still plan to use them, but what it comes down to is this: both parties are equally committed to making the relationship work above everything else. That's really it. If you don't have that, all you have is a social contract. I have been using these skill criteria as a shield against forming relationships intimate working relationship, because I was afraid of getting hurt.

Now, I'm not saying one shouldn't be prudent in choosing their working partners. There are moments when recognizing a discrepancy between intention and action will prevent you from really getting taken advantage of. However, if you want to form a close relationship of any kind, you're going to have to make yourself vulnerable to the other person. In a way I've started to do that on this blog, by writing about things that could be considered rather personal. However, my comfort zone with writing what I think and feel tends to be rather broad. Where I have difficulty is expressing my deepest fears: that I'll be alone and misunderstood, and everything I've tried to do will be for naught.

Practically speaking, I know I'm not alone, and that there are plenty of people who do understand and appreciate what I say. I'm blessed with excellent, excellent friends that I trust deeply and implicitly. I am a lucky, lucky person that happens to be going through another wave of self-doubt and loneliness. The thought that goes through my mind is that I really have not learned to trust my own assessment of the situation, or that I haven't stopped to appreciate my blessings in quite some time. And I know that everyone's gone through this misery at one point or another.

And with this insight, I can finally visualize the miniature version of myself exploring the nooks and crannies of my brain, shining a flashlight into the most ancient and darkest corners. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the little boy version of myself, confused and sad and feeling like an outsider, huddled next to a particularly nasty-looking knot of fears and anxieties.

"Yo", I say.

The little boy version of myself stares back, the hollow look on his face telling me he's not quite aware of his surroundings, but I can also see that he's expecting nothing useful to come out of my mouth. I know that there's nothing I can say that will make any sense at all because the boy has not yet experienced what is to come, and that it will be mostly good. But I can't say that...it means nothing in the moment. So I offer my hand and say, "C'mon, let's go up where it's not so dark" with all the warmth I can muster. It's not an answer, but it's a start.

Summary

To sum up:

1. I've been feeling down because, I think, I'm feeling lonely and isolated from people. This is despite all the dozens of people who I've met or have written to over the past couple of years. There's an additional element of relationship that I am looking for, and while I believe I've been pretty open, I have probably been putting entirely too much emphasis on criteria than commitment.

2. My "master plan" to date has focused on what I can build to bring in revenue, because revenue will give me both the resources and freedom to effect further positive change. The resources I have now are my abilities to think, write, and create media to convey ideas and processes. However, it never occurred to me that I could use the same skills and opportunities to also build deeper relationships; I've tended to see the work more in terms of revenue and/or barter. In the past I've taken on projects because I've wanted to "help" people out, but this hasn't always worked out. My revised approach will be to take on project because I want to create stronger personal relationships; this is more mutual in intent.