Welcome to Part III! Here’s the gist of the summary of Parts I and II:

I have tried for 7 years to create a blog-centered creative life. The reason I chose “blog-centered” was because it was the most satisfying work I had done, writing for myself and getting positive responses from the world for being myself. However, I have not been able to make it work. I acknowledged in the past two posts that I have “failed”, though I have gained important insights and come up with a few good tricks. Discipline and a re-commitment to mastery may be the keys…

I thought that this post would be about planning the new direction; that would been the expected Dave Seah Step 3. However, I’ve re-discovered the power of letting words sit while doing the “715AM 15-minute” daily ritual; reviewing the work I’ve done a day later lets the raw ideas pickle ferment into something tastier as new ideas settle into the brine.

One new idea is about the nature of passion itself. Several people both on-line and off have recommended looking at Cal Newport’s recent book So Good They Can’t Ignore You. His central premise is that the cliched slogan “follow your passion” is terrible advice and that there are alternatives. While I didn’t find the Kindle sample of his book compelling enough to buy it, this did get me thinking about passion itself. What exactly are we arguing about when we’re talking about passion? Newport’s argument is “following simplistic advice like ‘follow your passion’ is bad”, and he follows up with four good pieces of advice based on anecdotal research. However, I think the more nuanced argument—I haven’t read the book, so perhaps he addresses this—is that following any advice is bad if you don’t know how it works. Do I know how passion works? Or what following it really means? On reflection: I don’t really know for sure.

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