First day of a new week.

First (business) day of the new year.

First day of the rest of your life. (Okay…sorry. It’s a ’60s thing. You had to be there.)

I figure this is as good a day as any to put the FIRST EVER video on communicatrix-dot-com. (No, that Southwest Blog-O-Crap Contest thingy doesn’t count: that was a still frame linking to a video; this is the video, uh, also linking to the video.)

WARNING: There are VERY naughty words contained herein. Three of them (I think), two of which are used multiple times, and with vigor. Because something about songwriting brings out the filth in me, I guess. Also, this song covers an important subject that demands underlining! But if you’re a sensitive motherfucker, you should probably just ignore this and come back tomorrow.

Ready? I give you…

The Boulder: A New Song for a New Year

Happy new year! Now, let’s get to work!

xxx
c

TOPICS: 21 day salutes, humor, new year, original songs.

It’s D-Day tomorrow, as most people count the new year.

Personally, I come from the Chris Guillebeau School of Time and Goal Management: I like to get a jump on the new year as far as possible in advance of the Actual New Year.

This time around, I kind of astounded myself by how frickety-freak-frack* organized I was about the whole affair. I started my annual Best Year Yet review a full month early, before Thanksgiving, and did. I dug into my contacts weeks ago to start the clean-and-sort process, which is great, because otherwise, I’d be starting off behind with the Virgo Guide project. And I’m under the gun enough as it is, even with the head start.

PLEASE NOTE: I am doing all of this incredibly imperfectly, and plan on continuing in that fashion. Perfection is a sucker’s game.

The thing is, I could have started in January of last year and still not have been ready to hit the ground running. There’s always more to do, and one thing I learned last year (although I don’t think it made either list) is that the old saw about overestimating what you can get done in a day is too, too true. Especially if you suffer from acute Eyes Bigger Than Stomach Syndrome, which I do—and how.

I’m trying to become more aware of what I can get done in a day, so I can reduce the self-flagellation when I inevitably don’t. For a while, I tried a system that Mark LeRoy, a smart friend of mine who runs a very successful design business, has been using for years. It involved one of those gigundous Franklin-Covey calendars and scheduling in every fifteen-minute pod of the day. It worked every bit as well as it was supposed to and I hated it even more than I expected I would. I got everything on the list done and felt like I was breathing down my own neck the whole time.

There is something to be said for planning things out and having things captured. Surprises are going to happen anyway; if you’re fairly organized to start with, but not too tightly scheduled, there’s some wiggle room. And wiggling is fun. Just ask a baby—they’re constantly with the wiggling.

So I’ve done the grownup equivalent of laying out my school clothes and packing my lunch for tomorrow: I made a list. It is a list with one or two fixed givens, as my old acting teacher used to call them, and a few items I hope to accomplish. I put the estimated times next to the hopeful-item checkboxes; we shall see what we shall see.

But the biggest part of my Start the New Year Right plan is to shut down the computer now, at 6:50 Pacific. I have some personal obligations to tend to, then a little light reading, then bed. EARLY bed. For EARLY rising. And dog walking, and bed-making, and the whole day-to-day, wax-on/wax-off that makes things happen.

I’m pretty ding-dang-dong** excited about 2009, aren’t you?

xxx
c

*I did a lot of swearing earlier today, and will be doing a lot more tomorrow, so I figured I’d balance it out by getting all Church Lady on you in between.

**Ibid. Or whatever the hell the Latin is for “same as above.”

Image by star27 via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

TOPICS: 21 day salutes, new year.

Anyone who has been (a) paying attention and (b) reading this outside of a feed reader knows that the tagline of this conglomeration of oddities is, and has been from Day One, “A Virgo’s Guide to the Universe.”

And, in a master stroke of irony, anyone who has not is not a Virgo.

I am asked sometimes what the extent of my belief in the woo-woo is. Not as frequently nor with such pointed annoyance as happened during my years with The Chief Atheist, but still—enough to warrant a policy disclosure. And said disclosure goes something like, “I believe in horoscopes, fortunes and other non-scientifically-based predictors of the future when they portend great things, and woo-woo stuff in general when it provides an interesting framework with which to puzzle out a problem.

The Virgo thing is just such a framework.

As I say in the “about” page of the new marketing project blog thingy, Virgos are “all about the order-from-chaos, the meticulous noting of things: we’re, like, the Information Butlers of the world.” We’re the ones who ask for (and get) bright yellow filing cabinets for our 13th birthdays, which sometimes fall on Friday, the 13th, which doesn’t freak us out in the least but which we think is really rather cool and orderly.

We’re the ones who don’t just create doll villages, but come up with full names, back stories and family trees for the 80-odd (very odd) residents. And type up a town newspaper. With columns. On a typewriter. A manual typewriter.

We’re the ones who not only compile to-do lists but add any items we’ve already done to the lists, so that a complete record is in place.

We’re the ones constantly coming up with better systems—when we’re not stubbornly clinging to old, outmoded ones—because promise of perfection is constantly just there, one elusive, perfect system/hack/hashtag away.

There is a saying that “the perfect is the enemy of the good.” Actually, it is a quote from Voltaire, and thus originally in French (“Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien”), and, it could be argued (and is, quite persuasively, here) that the actual translation is “The best is the enemy of the good.” This thin-slicing of hairs is not my point; my point is this:

If you go after perfect, you lose. Because it will never be perfect. And I’m a Virgo, and I know from this shit, because I wrassle that particular bear almost every day. I’ve gotten into fights over the placement of a preposition in a headline. I’ve lost tens of thousands of dollars of income fretting over a tenth of an em-space in kerning. That’s an imprecise example, but hey, I write this blog the way I do—all at once, very little editing, unlike other bits of writing like my columns and my newsletter—because this blog is about letting go of the perfect to get at more of the good.

Like everything else I talk about here, I bring this up now because I’m working on no less than three projects which will kill me—KILL ME DEAD—if I do not submit to the truth that the perfect is the enemy of the good. That blog project thingy I mentioned earlier. An upcoming (god help me) webinar on pricing that I’m co-presenting with my marketing coach, Ilise. And a new song that has to come out this week, or not at all, because it’s got a whole new year’s theme thing to it. (Well, okay—it could come out NEXT year, I guess, but that would suck all the more.)

Let us swear an oath, you and I: let us make 2009 the year we stopped letting the perfect be the enemy of the good more of the time than not. Or even, if you like, more of the time than we have before.

Or—hell, why not go for the whole ball of wax—the year we at least introduced the thought into our working vocabularies.

This post? Not perfect.

And I’m not going back to fix anything, save to add a picture.

Your comments? THROW THEM THE HELL OUT THERE. Don’t edit! Go crazy! This one time, I will not judge you! Or myself!

And in return, when I put up the half-baked, not-as-perfect-as-I’d-like song, I hope you will be supportive. Because I’m only human, and it’s going to be rough, taking the slings and arrows from the Great General YouTube Coliseum Community.

Even if you don’t, though—even if you snicker a little at this or at that, when it comes out, I’m hanging tough.

Because friends, this is one advanced-syllabus lesson I’m learning. And at the end of 2009, I want it learned.

Well, as much as I can do, anyway…

xxx
c

P.S. I’m not even CHECKING this in PREVIEW mode. Look at me go!

Image by Jo Jakeman via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

TOPICS: 21 day salutes, change, new year.

Someday, I will have to write an entire essay about my first-shrink-(slash)-astrologer.

I’ve written about her in passing, usually when I need to back something up with particularly good wisdom in a particularly pithy way. My first-shrink-(slash)-astrologer—let’s call her “Zifka,” which is the name I gave her in the Young Adult novel I was supposed to write and, for various reasons, blew off—was full of both wisdom and pith. Which meant, from a practical application standpoint, that she was both able to point out why and how my head was stuck up my ass, and make excellent suggestions for the extraction of it, when (or if) I was sufficiently fed up with my condition to actually do something about it.

Which is to say, she called me on my shit in the best of all possible ways.

Anyway, Zifka and I hooked up again on my big trip to the PacNW this past fall. We’d spoken on the phone, here and there, over the years: sometimes as a “tune-up”, for which I happily paid her; sometimes just to shoot the breeze. A lot of breeze accumulates when you really vibe with someone but only get the chance to do it directly every five years or so, and we did us a lot of breeze-shootin’ (and fois-gras profiteroles eatin’, as she’s such a foodie, I’ll even eat lamb hearts and other “dare food” when I’m with her). And it’s cool—I don’t want to be a pig, sniffing around for truffly bits of worldly wisdom when she’s not on the clock. Although, you know, I hoped for them, all the same.

So she talked about being a mom, about living in the PacNW, about being an aging dyke mom to a black kid in the PacNW. We talked about heirloom beans, or somesuch—fifty bucks a pound!! (I told you: foodie.) We talked about wine and Chicago (where we’re both from) and California (where she used to live, and I still do) and how it sucks that thinning hair dictates cut as you get old. We talked a lot about the then-upcoming elections.

And finally, we talked about my trip to the PacNW and what I was trying to accomplish with it. Which I had problems articulating to the rank and file, but which I knew had little to do with my bullshit cover (writing second draft of submission chapters for aforementioned Young Adult novel) and everything to do with (god help me, I’m a walking Somerset Maugham cliché, 64 years later) finding myself. Ugh.

I knew it was borderline shrink territory, but hey, she’s Zifka—Zifka will tell you to GFY in a South Side minute, and make you laugh as you move on to the next subject. But she didn’t: she brought up the concept of Most Beneficent Outcome, or MBO, for short. And it’s so important a concept, I’m giving it its own header*, so future legions of Internet searchers can benefit from Zifka’s wisdom, too, even if Oprah insists on inviting that well-meaning yawner of a self-help dude, Eckhart TOO-lah**.

The “Most Beneficent Outcome” Concept, by Zifka

Instead of focusing on getting a particular thing, put out to the universe that you would like the most beneficent outcome. Point being, the universe is infinitely wiser and more complex than you, and you’re probably asking for something in PARTICULAR because you can’t imagine a fraction of the infinite possible outcomes.

Taking my Seattle trip as an example, I told a lot of people I was going there to write the book, because it was easier than saying I was going to see what would happen.

But the truth was I knew I was a stuck and needed some help processing info and figuring out how to get to the next level. I hadn’t a clue about what I was actually “processing” or what the next level looked like; I didn’t come up there thinking “I need to meet a lot of interesting people, dammit!” Or, “Seattle! That’ll be just the thing for kickstarting a series of workshops teaching people about how to market themselves and finally putting to good use all those wasted years writing ads and fucking around on Twitter!”

Instead, I did Most Beneficent Outcome (not calling it that) and lo, I got these chances to speak, met a slew of interesting new people, and came away with an Actual Clue as to what the hell I was supposed to be doing with the next few years of my life.

It’s really easy to get attached to outcome. Trust me—it’s how I operated the first 41 years of my life. I functioned at a pretty high level, considering, but who knows what I might have achieved had worked my ass of AND held an intention, rather than thinking I was making a downpayment on a very particular outcome.

As you move forward with your goals, you may want to think about the brilliant Zifka and the brilliant Most Beneficent Outcome.

Is it scary? Hells, yeah! At first. And always. But really, what worthwhile new thing isn’t?

Speaking of new things, if there’s a concept floating around out there that’s the same thing as MBO, only called something different, could you please bring it to my attention, preferably in the comments? I like knowing the long and noble history of ideas.

Even if they originate with Eckhart TOO-lah…

xxx
c

Image by _neona_ via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

*Adam Kayce! Monk at Work! This is one of those things we need to fix on my blog, right? I should have an h-2  header for internal entry callouts, right? Or am I nuts?

**Okay, he’s a really smart, nice guy. Great ideas. But come on, I can’t be the only one who drifts off like Ralph Kramden watching the Late Late Late Show when the guy starts talking.

TOPICS: 21 day salutes, MBO, Most Beneficent Outcome, new year, self-development.

The blah-o-sphere is rife with earnest, can-do, decisive (if mildly hungover) good will and wishfulness today, and probably will be until at least tomorrow.

Here’s the thing: If you really want to change a habit, you know what’s involved. It’s no mystery, and you’re certainly not going to find the miracle solution in any book, blog post or bag the Wizard has handy.

To change a habit, you…

• do it in tiny pieces
• do it for the right (i.e. values-aligned) reasons
• do it with the aid of external accountability of some kind

Like I said, you doubtless know this already. But if you don’t—if you’re 12 or have been living under a rock through the Age of Self-Help or are just plain obtuse, please—trust the lady with 747 blog posts, 28 acting columns and a 1500-word monthly newsletter she’s been publishing since May of 2007. It’s not magic; it’s one stupid goddamned motherfucking foot in front of the other. Period.

I have big, big plans for 2009. Crazy-big. I’m going to be a writing, speaking, teaching, consulting, marketing sumbitch over the next 12 months, and that’s on top of the design work I’ll probably be doing at least through the end of summer to keep the money flowing in sufficient amounts. (And yes, there will be more amusing songs. Yes, soon. No, you won’t be able to share this one with your children, either, although thankfully, there’s no butter involved like there was in the filthy, filthy previous one.)

Hence, the Salute. I’ve been doing these little (HA!) 21-Day Salutes™ since May of 2006, when The BF, generally the most patient and tolerant soul in my immediate sphere, told me I might want to consider cheering the hell up. I thought it over; I decided I did, in fact, want to Cheer the Hell Up, and that part of the reason I hadn’t been cheery recently was because I’d plain and simply gotten out of the habit.

There are various schools of thought on how long it takes to change a habit. Their estimates range from 21 to 30 to 90 days, depending on personality type and exactly how bad that heroin habit of yours is, missy. I’m an optimist—also, wildly impatient—so I went with the low number. You could do the same and renegotiate at 21, if you trust yourself to do that.

This particular exercise is to get me in the habit of writing daily. I only committed to 5x/week on the blog, but I know myself: if I don’t seed the habit with a kickstart, it’s going to be really rough come Monday.

Another little hack I’m using to get a jump on my year-long resolutions is joining Leo Babauta’s 10-minutes/30-days Power of Less project. You sign up, commit to whatever it is you’re going to do for 10 minutes each day for 30 days. There are some nifty freebie support documents, if you like that sort of thing, and a big, fat forum (probably literally, in parts, given it’s the start of a new year) to keep you honest, or at least to offer you the opportunity. I’m using it to stay on track with my 10 minutes per day of guitar playing. God help you all. And my neighbors.

So join me there! I’m “communicatrix”, like I am pretty much everywhere these days.

There are also some non-sucky posts I’ve found that cover looking backward and forward (the only way to goal-set, believe me):

• Jared Goralnick, overachieving punk that he is, has an excellent one that points to some goodies, too
• I loved my other new-in-’08 friend Chris Guillebeau’s post, too; it’s thorough, with a very good how-to plan
• Not strictly a look back, but a great 2009 thoughtstarter for business blogger types is Mark Hayward’s inaugural post on his new blog
• New-year-hater Seth Godin has a typically interesting take on things, too, of course
• And just because he’s hilarious, a brilliant writer you should all be reading (check out his Amazon MP3 Advent Calendar series if you don’t believe me) and, well, also because I love technology doo-dads that actually live up to their promises of making the world a happier, better place, I’m throwing in Andy Ihnatko’s “Best of Tech” column from the Sun-Times

Now, SPILL IT, kids! What’s your 2009 plan? How are you sticking to it? If you’ve made it public, say so and put in a link. If you haven’t, consider it.

I’m not fool enough to expect everyone to play along with a Salute™. But an effort…right?

Happy brand spankin’ new 2009, everyone!

xxx
c

TOPICS: 21 day salutes, new year.