December in January: Adding good habits

Just before the end of the past year, I decided to forgo my usual habit of cramming my annual planning into the most riotously busy time of the year. Hence, “December in January,” where I spend the first month of the chronological new year planning my own, to begin in February.

My Nei Kung instructor and I have been talking a lot about the process of change, one of my favorite topics.

And to be clear, when I say "favorite," I mean something I spend a great deal of time thinking about, not necessarily something that I enjoy engaging in. I hear the change junkies talk about how all-fire fantastic it is, and remain skeptical, unless by "fantastic," they mean "other worldly and outsize," in which case I'm in 100% agreement.

Anyway.

I was late to the idea that the most efficient way of eliminating a bad habit is by replacing it with a good one, or at the very least tying it to a positive, values-based motivator. Why? I'm an idiot! Okay, I'm not an idiot, or at least, not completely. But my tendency toward impatience made me move sometimes rather more quickly than I might have prudently, and to act like an idiot. That test in the eighth grade that's 479 questions long, and whose first command, read all the way through to the end of the test before starting to answer the individual questions, is critical to the successful completion of the test? I failed that test. Leap first, look later. I'm the world's best im-patient.

Reading and working through Your Best Year Yet several years ago helped start the shift. It's so dense and chewy, you can't skip steps, so I didn't. It took me a full week-ish to slog through it, but by the end, I had a much better handle on myself, and my first taste of what life felt like when you took time to actually look at it.*

Working through the Great Hypnotherapy Project with my friend, Greg, gave me my next taste of swapping out bad for good as methodology rather than just brutalizing the bad out of yourself. The type of hypno that Greg practices involves coming up with lots of positive replacements for the habit you want to let go; before we did the session to help get me back on my Crohn's diet, we spent a long time going over the requirements of the diet, what was allowed and of that, what I liked best, and where I was getting stuck. While I was listening to the tape regularly, I felt almost no cravings for the stuff that was disallowed.

Jim, my Nei Kung instructor, who is also a licensed therapeutic hypnotherapist, confirmed that the replacement of "bad" with "good" is a straighter route than just dumping the bad. Trying to stop something is much, much harder than replacing it with something else. I think it has something to do with, to paraphrase Marshall Rosenberg in his a-ma-zing book, Nonviolent Communication**, us bucking at having choices removed, even when it's in our best interest and it's us doing the removing.

So I'm looking at framing all of my goals as additive (per Greg and Jim), as well as awesome (per Naomi, who oughta know because boy, is she ever!) Full and final list (fingers and toes crossed) next week, in time for Groundhog's Day, but here's what we've got so far:

• Read 52 books. No-brainer additive thing. If you were watching a lot of TV and wanted to stop (as I did, a few years ago), you might want to look at this as an additive replacement. I hope to read many more than 52 books, but this is a start.
• Practice Nei Kung 30 minutes daily. Additive thing to replace "stop being someone who is a brain without a body." Kidding, but not far off. Nei Kung is gentle but fairly easy for me to do, as I apparently am both built and wired for it. FINALLY. Because that running thing totally didn't work out, plus who knows when I'll have good enough health insurance again to replace my knees.
• Feng shui my place. Additive thing to replace "declutter," which I love and has helped me, but which is starting to feel a little brutal, especially as we get down to the bone. Okay, closer to it. OKAY, through the first layer of the epidermis. It's a teensy cheat, since part of feng shui-ing means removing clutter, but it's way more fun to make it a game with all the doodads of feng shui. Plus, you know, built-in feature for the blog!
• Eat SCD-compliant six days per week. Additive thing to replace "Get off Crohn's meds," plus my way of easing myself into something good for me by leaving myself some wiggle room. I don't get to go off the meds until I've been back on SCD sans flares for a minimum of one year, possibly two. But I'm not going to worry about that now.

I have a few other ideas I'm still working on, some of which will probably remain private, but others that I may be able to share once I survey the full schmear. "Music" is still floating around, and I'd like to do something that has me caring for my friendships a little more consistently than I have in the past. Never know when you'll need those darned things.

I'm still looking for additive ways to switch up some of my more destructive habits, especially procrastination and web surfery. I have a feeling that the way-in is connecting more deeply to the things I do want to do, which is going to mean yet more of this messy and painful opening-up-and-letting-go stuff.

I am, however, very open to suggestions right now...

xxx
c

*Other than the five months I spent recovering from my Crohn's onset, but that was less a choice than something thrust upon me.

**In a year of outstanding books, this is the current front-runner. I cannot thank Havi Brooks enough for tipping me over into finally reading it. (THANK YOU, HAVI.) Look for a review soon, but feel free to buy it immediately. If you have to talk to anyone, yourself included, it will make the experience better and might just save your bacon. Oh, and I've already read/loved the How to Talk So Kids Will Listen book (thank you, my shrink), so I'm guessing that third one on the page is killer, too.

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

Linchpin: An interview with Seth Godin on fear, change and the importance of making art everywhere

That Seth Godin has a new book coming out is generally a cause for celebration. Seth has a knack for teasing out one big, necessary idea and illuminating it in a way that makes it seem obvious, post-reveal, without ever coming across as obnoxious. That, my friends, is a gift.

So, too, is the way he chooses to share his gifts with the world. Seth regularly throws his weight behind people and ideas worthy of support, and has a special fondness for the Acumen Fund, an innovative, can-do nonprofit with a similarly iconoclastic chief executive, Jacqueline Novogratz. Moreover, he combines his various loves and interests in innovative ways, modeling the very behavior he describes so well in his books about marketing: for his latest book, Linchpin, he offered 3,000 early review copies to his readers willing to donate a minimum of $30 to the Acumen Fund; so eager/loyal are his readers, he hit his mark just 48 hours in, raising over $100K for Acumen.

In a further example of walking the walk, Seth reached out to a group of his regular devotees (or, in my case, an irregular one) to assist with promotion: would we read even earlier, advance portions of his book, and interview him about the material on our blogs, and post them all on one day in a big, glorious, central round-up of semi-anarchic, semi-choreographed promotion?

Uh, yeah. Yeah, we would do that.

So here is my interview with Seth on the themes of his latest book, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? The interview questions are based on the advance pages I read; I've since read the entire book, and could have a whole other interview based on the chapters about Resistance and "There Is No Map." Who knows? Maybe I will!

But don't wait: buy your copy now. Like The Dip and Tribes before it, Linchpin is one of those "must-reads" that, thankfully, doesn't read like one.

xxx
c

THE INTERVIEW

Colleen Wainwright: It seems like a central theme of your book is that we've fallen asleep: as creative beings, as free thinkers, as true individuals. Do you have any practical tips on waking the hell up? Or accurately gauging whether or not you're asleep?

Seth Godin: We haven't fallen asleep, we've been put to sleep. Actively brainwashed and hypnotized by industrialists in search of compliant factory workers and eager consumers. Of course, our genes were complicit, but please don't blame yourself.

And we're all asleep. Some are more awake than others (Spike Lee or Shepard Fairey or the guys who started the Four Seasons). Still, we stick with the status quo way more than there is any reason to. We do this because the system has persuaded us it's the only way.

As you guessed, the theme of my book is not to tell people what to do, but to identify the hypnosis and give us words and concepts we can use to wake each other up. Either that or we can keep shopping at the mall, driving an SUV and figuring out how to pay for our McMansion while we stress out doing by-the-book work at our by-the-book company that's getting its ass kicked by some startup with no overhead.

You say flat-out that one doesn't have to quit one's job to start effecting meaningful change. My own experience with trying to do that, back in advertising, was akin to banging my head against the proverbial wall. Does it only work for certain industries? For people higher up on the organizational food chain? Isn't there a point where we have to say, "Nope, not gonna happen here," cut our losses, and move on?

I think there may very well be times you need to quit, but most people never even get close to that. Most people say "my boss won't let me" and give up because they've bought into two myths: the first is that (as we saw above) the safe thing to do is play it safe, and the second is that your boss is crazy enough to take responsibility for your art. Why would she? You can't go to her and say, "I feel like doing something remarkable, if it doesn't work, will you take the blame?" Not the way it works. It turns out that if you start smallish and do remarkable stuff every day... make connections, be human, do the work, focus on things that matter, go the extra mile... then every day you'll get more chances to make things change.

Sure, it's possible that your boss will fire you. But if she does, is that the place you wanted to be anyway? Fired for delighting a customer? Fired for making a difference?

Odds are, not only won't you get fired, you'll get asked to let others in on your secret.

I love the concept of "emotional labor": that it's both mission-critical and wildly difficult. Also--and possibly even more significant--is that emotional labor is the Rodney Dangerfield of efforts, rarely garnering respect. How do we change that? Or does everyone signing onto the program have to get down with being the nutty Van Gogh of their endeavor or organization, only (if ever) appreciated after the fact?

There's not nuttiness on the table here. I'm proposing that you embrace the fact that the only thing you get paid for (unless you're a brilliant programmer, chemist or race car driver) is doing emotional labor. Bringing guts and ideas and love to work when you and others don't feel like it. That's your job. And the people who do that the best keep getting rewarded for it. Dishwashers don't get to whine about their chapped fingers, and white collar workers like us shouldn't whine about how hard it is to be generous and creative and flexible.

Speaking of "emotional labor," your statement that "Work is nothing but a platform for art and the emotional labor that goes with it" may be my favorite phrase you've ever coined (and you've coined a lot of good ones). It's basically saying that *anyone* can create art with what they do, right? But is that true? Can you be a corporate cog--a very small piece of the machinery, with a very unsexy job--and make art? What does that look like?

If you work for a company that truly prizes cog-hood... say you're an insurance actuary, or someone assembling pacemakers... I'd argue you should get out, now. Why? Because every day you spend there is a day where you give up value and a bit of your life. On the other hand, at just about every other job there's a chance to lead and make change and connect and create tiny breakthroughs. Which lead to more than tiny ones. I know people at giant famous companies that get to do this all day, every day. How'd they get that job? Because they started, and they continued and they pushed until it was their written role.

So, for example,

• Laurie Coots at Chiat Day spends most of her time causing trouble, disruptions and the creation of opportunity.
• When Robyn Waters was at Target, her job was to transform the organization from a K-Mart wannabe to Wal-mart challenger by bringing style and art and color to the inventory and mindset of the company.
• Donna Sturgess gets to do similar work at GlaxoSmithKline. She finds high bars and encourages people across the organization to jump over them. She makes art and change for a living.
• And at Starbucks, Aimee Johnson runs the group that developed both the high-end coffee maker they acquired and the new line of Via coffee.

I've met similar people at banks (!) and even General Electric.

Okay. Let's talk about fear, one of my least favorite (and most consuming) topics. If lizard brain, the thing that makes us react in the scared, small, self-preserving way, that just wants "to eat and be safe", is the source of resistance, it's pretty important to resist succumbing to it. How does one do that? It's not like you can sit down and have a heart-to-heart.

My other goal here is to scare you to your toes. To scare you NOT of standing out, but to scare you about fitting in. To scare you about your diminished role if you refuse to do emotional labor. To create a new fear, a fear that's greater than the fear of being your artistic genius self. Boo.

Giving, "free" and the honored Native American tradition of potlatch are all good, but where does it stop? We may no longer equate dying with the most toys as winning, but a gal's gotta make a living...right?

The more you give away, the more you get. This is actually a secret plan to have what you want and need and hope for, because the market (bosses, hiring companies, the market) love free stuff, and they'll stand in line for more... they'll bid for more... they'll pay for more... if you're the one who can deliver it. Be generous, make art, make connections, do work that matters and you don't have to worry about making a living. The secret of potlatch was that the big chief could give away EVERYTHING and he'd be even richer the next week.

• Read the rest of the Linchpin interviews with Seth Godin at this Squidoo page
• Buy Linchpin on Amazon.com
  

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

Yo! Disclosure! Links to the books in the post above are Amazon affiliate links. This means if you click on them and buy something, I receive an affiliate commission. Which I hope you do: it helps keep me in books to review. More on this disclosure stuff at publisher Michael Hyatt's excellent blog, from whence I lifted (and smooshed around a little) this boilerplate text.

December in January: Using constraints to free yourself

Just before the end of the past year, I decided to forgo my usual habit of cramming my annual planning into the most riotously busy time of the year. Hence, "December in January," where I spend the first month of the chronological new year planning my own, to begin in February.

I realize that logically, there must be as many people who excel at true blue-sky thinking as there are people who can only function within very narrow constraints, although I imagine it's terrifying to run across either.*

Like most people who enjoy thinking of themselves as Very Special Snowflakes, I really fall in the vast, lumpen middle: yes, I'm creative (so are you, whether you like it or not) and no, I don't do too well when that creativity is not applied to certain tasks.

On the other hand, I flourish within constraints! There are few things I enjoy more than figuring out how to maximize in a box**, whether it's moving furniture and doodads around a living space to get my feng shui'd (thank you, Karen Rauch Carter) or bending Robert's Rules of Order right up to the breaking point (a.k.a., how a nutjob-wacko-freak learned to love Toastmasters.) Rules and processes can be very soothing to the scrambled, easily stimulated brain; for the afflicted, the quickest route to making one's world a little bigger is often to make it a little smaller.

The catch, of course, is getting the mix of free-swim to drills just right, or in the ballpark. I tend towards all or nothing thinking, which is most likely rooted in some early training (and which doubtless saved my ass on more than one occasion), but which, as an adult with true autonomy, is now more of an artifact than a useful modus operandi. To paraphrase a former acting teacher , if the choices are "all" and "nothing," the answer will most often be "nothing."***

I've written a lot about the structures I've adopted to wrangle my chaos into some kind of order so I won't go over them again here, other than to say they range from simple things like calendaring writing time to multiple sources of accountability (because I yam a slippery devil!) to simply throwing out tons of crap. As I move forward, I'm looking to employ more strategies like these to free up mental and physical energy for what's feeling more and more like an intense period of creative work around the corner. Here's what I'm looking at doing:

1. Creating more structure for the blog.

When I first started blogging, I wrote about whatever struck my fancy, and mimicked whomever I was enamored of. Go back and enjoy the schizo qualities of communicatrix, circa late 2004: it will make you feel oh-so-much better about your own chances for success! I can't tell you the relief I feel these days knowing that Poetry Thursday is right around the corner, or that I have a Referral Friday feature to fall back on. I may never lock myself into a rigid floorplan, but like Gretchen, Havi, Chris and any number of friends who do this regularly, I finally see the value in some kind of publishing "schedule." They're just smarter, since they saw it way before I did (even though they all started blogging after I did, which doesn't make me feel any better about my stubborn face, but there it is.)

2. Pirahnimals.

This is the term Dave Seah, my partner in the Google Wave with Dave™ project, came up with when I said I was considering an adult version of Garanimals to help streamline my wardrobe. For years, I've resisted uniforms of any kind, probably because of the eight years (1967 - 1975!) that I chafed in one. My favorite dressing style has been "costumes," by which I mean dressing for the day's physical and/or emotional needs, not "gardener" or "slutty nurse." It was fun for a long, long time because it fed my needs for change and expression, and also my love of rag-picking (i.e., thrift/sale shopping). These days I have plenty of room to express myself via writing and speaking and performing and no end of material, I want to allocate more resources toward the creation of art than the fabrication of frame. Frames are important, L.A. Eyeworks built an iconic ad campaign around this simple, brilliant idea a couple of decades ago, and I'm expending a goodly portion of thought about suitable ones for my needs. More on that as I have it.

3. Streamlining "external" communication.

There are only so many hours in a day, and I'm finally accepting that I need to spend a certain number of them on stuff like eating, sleeping and relaxing if I want to have the life I say I want to have. I've already dramatically pulled back on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, I rarely talk on the phone and I try to restrict commenting on other blogs to conversations where I can really add value or situations where it's appropriate to show appreciation. (There should always be time to be nice, but I'm going to have to learn to be pithier about it.) I'm hoping that creating some structure around the types of things I write about here on the blog will allow me to continue writing here as often as I do (and maintain the newsletter and actors' column), but I'm (reluctantly) open to the idea that I may need to cut back if I want to write books, too. And yes, I want to write books, and yes, one of them is a collection of poetry. God help us all.

Other things I'm thinking about are:

• Creating a budget (something I've never done in my lifetime!). This is about dragging monsters into the light, to get a good look at them. Hard to start, usually not as awful as I think it's going to be once I see it.
• Moving to an even smaller/cheaper place to conserve money (and energy, it takes a long time to clean a 1BR apartment in a filthy town like L.A.).
• Taking a "real" job. This is the weirdest of all: I haven't had a job-job since I quit my Stupid Day Job (which was really a great job, and thank you, Uncle Dennis!) back in 1999. I have a lot of pride mixed up in this decision, so it's hard to see it clearly right now. The more time I spend away from consulting, the happier I am: it's exhausting work, as I performed it, and not sustainable, and definitely not compatible with my desire to write even more (writing is exhausting, too, but in a very different way). I have no idea if I'm even employable any more, or what for; I'm in the musing stages about this right now.

I'm still in a very open place about all of these things right now, weighing ideas, possibilities and (nice, informed, positively-phrased) suggestions. My multiple nodes of collaboration have also shown me how much stuff there is to me that I can't see: you are in a position to hold a (kind, helpful, positively-angled) mirror up to me, or pluck a stray hair from my jacket, that I cannot.

I'm specifically curious (yes, again) as to why you read the blog, assuming you read it with any regularity. I threw this question out a couple of years ago and received so many generous, helpful answers it was deeply moving. In the interest of giving something back as I did then, I'll donate a dollar to the relief efforts going on in Haiti for each reply (up to $500.), via comments or email, that offers some thought, feedback, illumination or idea to move me forward on any of the six areas above.

These could be anything from exercises for "writing shorter" (without adding more work) to great hacks for streamlining process to the best post you read in 2009 about x. It might be better if you shared stuff that's really helped you rather than guessing at what might help me; experiences related honestly and kindly (and with humor, if one can muster it) are my preferred method of learning. I love biography; I consider "self-help" a necessary evil when there's not a readily available biography illuminating the topic. But hey, as long as you comment with good intentions, I say "yay!" and Haiti gets another of my rapidly dwindling pool of dollars.

Thank you for providing this tremendous outlet for growth and change, for helping me feel less greedy about it by allowing me to kick in some (more) dough for a worthy cause, and for helping me take it to the next level.

Whatever the hell that is...

xxx c

*For me, spending time with fully unbridled creative thinkers is exhilarating and exhausting; doing the same with people who have nothing but rules is, well, okay, usually just exhausting, but kind of fascinating, too, like observing an alien species.

**The Chief Atheist has a great phrase for this exercise as applied to excursions which he calls "going to the Museum": anytime you have to go somewhere you might otherwise find tedious, off-putting or overwhelming, go as an anthropologist collecting data. Guaranteed to turn even the most moribund gathering into a series of excellent adventures, and helps keep you from jumping out of your skin during the occasional stumble down rabbit holes into alien worlds.

***Eight years later, I note there's no small irony in my having left his tutelage after being presented with exactly those two choices.

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

Poetry Thursday: Change is a bitch, but she's my bitch

You have likely forgotten
how wrenching
that last change you made
truly was

But it was

I have forgotten
a lifetime of changes
I chose for myself
and a second one
of those that were chosen for me.

Each time I woke up
was as jarring as the first

like an alarm you never get used to

or falling off a bicycle
the ground rushing up to greet you
and your unsuspecting elbows
with concrete reality.

Why choose change, then
when that bitch
has brought me nothing
but broken bones
and bandages
and recovery periods as painful as the pain itself?

Because
I have seen what happens
when you hit the snooze button
too many times

I sat at her table
and saw her weep
stoic, Swedish tears
for choices not made
that were no longer hers to make

I sat by his bed
and witnessed him clawing at the air
with what strength he had left:
one last call
one last meeting
one last stab at being
the kind of alive he called living

I sat from a distance
and watched her die
slowly, by degree,
clutching her choices to her chest
to the very end.

My road here
has been paved
with the choices I made
but the wilderness beyond
has been illuminated
by the ones they did not.

Which is why I must
turn off here,
where the pavement stops
and only crazy people
venture forth.

Call me crazy
if you must
wish me luck
if you can
travel alongside
if you will...

xxx
c

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

December in January: A goal is something you want to hit

Just before the end of the past year, I decided to forgo my usual habit of cramming my annual planning into the most riotously busy time of the year. Hence, “December in January,” where I spend the first month of the chronological new year planning my own, to begin in February.

My friend, Naomi, wrote a post about making unstupid goals whose central thesis has been ringing in my head for the week since I read it:

A goal is something you want to hit.

I'm paraphrasing, as is my wont, but I think it's a fair translation of Naomi's philosophy and so let's work with my version, and do some of that unpacking we spoke of yesterday:

1. A goal is something YOU want to hit. It's about the thing you want, not that your mother, the IRS, or your cardiologist wants for you.
2. A goal is something you WANT to hit. It's not something you feel obligated to do; you want it, and in the way that makes your heart beat faster with joy and anticipation and promise.

As Naomi admits, there are also things you should do to keep a roof over your kid's head and yourself out of the emergency room. I'll add that there are things you might seriously want to think about doing because you will end up alone and despised without them. These are not goals, they're responsibilities. They fall under the rubric of being a grownup, and to be a grownup, you put on your Big-Girl Pants and TCB.

Jinny Ditzler, author of my beloved and cursed Your Best Year Yet, agrees that goals should be motivating. As she says, when you're done with the process, the long and often arduous process, of corralling your data and drawing your goals from it, you should look down at that list of 10 things and want to do cartwheels. (I'm paraphrasing again, of course, but I think Jinny would approve.) You should be so fired up about these things that you can't wait to get started. Doesn't mean they won't be every bit as hard to accomplish as the responsibilities are sometimes to bear (or the #@$!( process itself is to get through), but they should be challenging in the good way.

I'd say I didn't know how I missed that these last two years that I've been carving out my goals, but I do: I ignored the obvious. I'm really good at ignoring the obvious, as it turns out; I can do it for two years (and change) and still look like a high-functioning, can-do dynamo of...something-or-other. Like anyone else, I get invested in outcome, attached to comfort and all of a sudden, another two years have gone by and I'm still in the same place.

I am still not 100% sure what My Best Groundhog Year Yet is going to look like exactly. I have a lot of time in airports and on planes and in hotel rooms over the next couple of weeks to think about it. There's a really good chance that certain things on my dining room table are going to make it onto the final list, though, because I am really excited about them.

I'm excited about reading 52 books. I am loving reading, period, I'd forgotten how much I missed an uninterrupted half-hour or hour daily to read. And while some days I get anxious before picking up my book, thinking about all the things I have to do, and how late I just slept in, and how I could really use that half-hour or hour to do some of them, thus far I've been able to gently (for the most part) set that anxiety to the side and just read. (It helps that I'm reading really good books so far!)

I'm excited about continuing to study Nei Kung. It's only been six weeks so far, but already, I'm so much better at it than any other physical activity I've tried. I wanted to be a runner and a bicyclist and a yogini, but I'm just not built for them. Apparently, I'm built like a Chinese martial arts enthusiast. Go figger.

I'm (still) excited about writing on my blog. So you can either rejoice or curse, but I'm not going anywhere. I may change the way I approach the blog, most likely, I will have to, if I want to write anything else, but write, I will.

Other things are more up in the air right now. I have several project ideas starting to shape up; they'll have to finish baking before I can decide which ones I want to roll with. I also have several concepts I've been mulling over, trying to suss out what their corresponding real-world actions are. Is the answer to "piano?" really "piano!" or is is some other manifestation of "music." I tried and abandoned the 10-minutes-of-guitar-per-day experiment just two months into '09; while part of me wants to JUST TRY IT AGAIN, another part of me feels that I'm really responding to the cheesy symmetry of 10 in '10. Once an adhole, always an adhole.

I am curious to hear how other people handle the Exciting Goal vs. Big-Girl-Pants Obligation divide. Which is in each column for you, and how many of each? And how are you carving them up? Part of the reason the 52 books/year jumped to the head of the line was because of Julien's genius-simple 40pp/day rule. Are there others of these I'm missing?

Whaddya got for me?

xxx
c

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

Book review: Outliers

Love him (I do) or hate him (many do), what most people find most vexing about Malcolm Gladwell's books are the conclusions he draws in them.

Connecting a to b to c and coming up with 9. Telling story after fascinating story only to sum them up hastily with a big, fat WTF? Because, as others have pointed out, the same interesting and facile mind that skitters across the surface from topic to interesting topic can't possibly dig deep into any one of them, much less be a schooled expert who has been soaking in the stuff since she was knee-high to a grasshopper, statistics at her fingertips and facility with fusing them into insights which are both truly new and truly supportable.* Because hey, he may be quicker and a better wordsmith, but he gets the same daily ration of 24 hours as the rest of us mere mortals.

So if the news isn't so newsy and the conclusions a bit iffy, why read Gladwell? Aren't those books over there in the business section, away from the "fun" sections, meant to edumacate ourselves with?

I say read Gladwell for two reasons. First, because he's ridiculously readable. Eminently readable. Deliciously, dazzlingly readable. You can devour his books in a sitting or two, smacking your lips all the way, because they're loaded to the gills with well-told, interesting stories. Avoid accepting anything as gospel (gospels very much included) and you can enjoy a whole lot more of everything, especially most business books.

The other reason to read Gladwell is because within the wonderfully-told stories are many, many useful nuggets you can take with you and muse on later. I may or may not buy into the broken windows theory of crime prevention, but I like that it stops me in my tracks and makes me wonder, "Well, what of this?" I like that it starts a conversation in my head.

Similarly, in Outliers, one particular exchange stuck in my head. It's a conversation between a Korean employee and his higher-up, and it's soaked in the kind of rich subtext that kept Pinter in business. I won't quote the dialogue here (too lazy to type, plus that copyright thing), but here's the salient point: what looks on the (Western, non-Korean) surface to be one thing is, in the context of the speakers' native land, something entirely different.** And, well, that makes me think quite a bit about my own, supposably rock-solid communicationz skillz, and how I should maybe-possibly watch out for the assuming and get better at the communicationz-ing.

Do not read Outliers, then, to discover the secret of success. You already know it: be lucky, be good, and work hard. Gladwell seems to be pointing to luck as the x factor, which right there is kind of a no-duh conclusion, but he is also saying (and says he's saying, so we're clear) that each of us can factor into one another's success. Done and done.***

Read it to find the stories that will inspire you to do or think the next good thing in your life.

Done. And done...

xxx
c

• Buy Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell on Amazon
• Watch a crapload of free video featuring Malcolm Gladwell (he really shines as a speaker)

*Via Gladwell's wikipedia entry, this NYT piece by Steven Pinker and this brutally cold takedown by Maureen Track for The Nation.

**The cultural anthropologists call the detangling of codes like this unpacking, which I love. My favorite unpacking story ever was related by Grant McCracken on his blog, which has been on my "read first" list for years, and which you should subscribe to right now. And if you're in business, you should also buy his latest book, Chief Culture Officer, which I'll review here at some point in the next couple of months. Go! Go!

***For example, you are my success and (hopefully), I am yours. Plus, if you click on one of these links, I get a nickel or something, which is helpful right now, I won't lie.

December in January: Halfway home

Just before the end of the past year, I decided to forgo my usual habit of cramming my annual planning into the most riotously busy time of the year. Hence December in January, where I spend the first month of the chronological new year planning my own, to begin in February. I was born in September of 1961, which means that I started the first grade at the tail end of eligibility, back in 1967, which means that while I won't be turning 50 for another year and a half, I'll be watching many, many friends do it between now and September of 2011.

While I stopped taking numbers quite so seriously somewhere around 41, when my intestines decided to go south for the winter (they still vacation there from time to time), 50 is so round and so firm and so halfway-to-100 that it's hard not to sit up and take notice of it. Maybe we feel that way about every rounded-to-ten number (I'll let you know when and if I do hit 100), but the only way I can describe thinking about 50 is that it has a way of thinking right back at you. It's objectively impressive in a way that we in our rule-obsessed culture have subjectively made 18 and 21. It's just there. FIFTY. FIFTY. FIFTY.*

I am taking careful note of what my ever-so-slightly-elders are doing during these 18 or so months rolling up to my own, personal Main Event, because that's what most of us humans do, I think: we look to each other for cues. Thankfully, I've chosen well enough that my friends aren't doing idiotic, bucket-list things like shooting themselves out of cannons or idiotic, Masters-of-the-Universe-type stuff like scheduling face lifts or destination luaus. No, mostly they're hitching up their big-boy pants and getting down to business. My friend, Kevin, took a wide view of his life via an interesting collaborative project involving the most meaningful people from his life. Other friends are putting the finishing touches on their families (because who wants to be 60 chasing babies, even if it's medically possible) or making appointments with the hypnotherapist about that little smoking thing (so hot when you're 20, so not when you're 50).

Most of them, of us, are looking at how we want to spend our time on the back nine, and where.

Will we be healthy? Nature and circumstance leave us less and less margin for error, so we step it up a bit, but not in that insane, hell-or-high-water way of our youth. We drop a bad habit, or better yet, quietly replace it with a good one, and keep our fingers crossed, just in case. I cannot work the hours I used to, nor eat the things I did, nor drink the way I did, so I make minor adjustments, then more, then more. To an outsider, my new life may look like nothing much; for me, it is nothing short of revolutionary, this sleeping for eight hours, or reading for one, or almost holding still for half of one.

This, then, is what goal-setting looks like now: not the crazy, brash, bold and hopeful lists of youth, but deep and ruthlessly non-sexy shifts: read more. Sleep more. Eat better. Slow down.

Make room.

Halfway through this December-in-January I've conjured up for myself, with "MORE ROOM" as my mantra, I have let go of an astonishing amount of stuff. More than you know, or that anyone will know, and maybe that's as it should be. The point is no more to die with the fewest toys than the most, and the point is definitely not to advertise it on a bumper sticker. The point seems to be, what do I need to really and truly live every day of my life?

Halfway through December-in-January, things are still messier and dirtier than I'd hoped they'd be at the beginning of it. You will notice that this is not a post filled with items, as was last Monday's; this is a painstaking and slightly painful admission that while I have been working assiduously at certain things, mostly, the removal of extraneous ones, and the processing of attendant grief, I don't have a big, shiny plan yet. Halfway through the month. Yet.

Instead, there is a growing field of index cards on my dining room table. The cards say things like "Read 52 books" and "Practice Nei Kung 30 min/daily." They also say things like "PIANO?" (underlined) and "DRAWING?" (not); they are messy and sprawling and not ready for personal commitment, much less public consumption. Believe me, I wish we were locked and loaded, but we're not. Change is messy, and frequently painful.**

My Nei Kung instructor, who has much finer motor control and strength and all the other things that practicing a martial art for 20 years will give you, plus the probable advantage of not being in the midst of painful change, gave me a great image at last week's session: "When one door closes, another one opens, but it's hell in the hallway." This is a thing, according to Google, but was new to me.

Halfway home, things may or may not be comfortable. But pretending they are anything other than what they are is even more foolish than it might be a quarter or a third of the way through.

xxx

c

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

*And if you ladies aren't impressed enough by FIFTY, there's always The Change ready to lend a hand. That is, if you haven't had things changed for you by nature or surgery already. Change happens around your ovaries and your middle and your brain and everything else your hormones have a hand in, which is just about everything. Those hormones, they are nature's overachievers, boy howdy.

**I will say that real change, while painful and messy, also makes you feel very, very alive. Not good, but alive.

Update: Brad Nack's 100% Reindeer Art Show

I took a quick trip up north and my friend Brad Nack took an equivalent trip down south and we met in the middle, at delicious Papa Lennon's in Meiner's Oaks, where I took possession of FOUR, count 'em, FOUR, of the 2009 reindeer he painted for his 100% Reindeer Art Show.

It was fascinating getting an up-close-and-personal tour of the paradox of choice. Which I now understand can be neatly summarized as the paralysis of choice. More is not necessarily better: more is more.

Of course, objectively, I think it's a good thing that there are lots and lots more reindeer out there for other people to adopt. Not only is each piece I saw uniquely wonderful, there's something equally wonderful about each one coming from this incredibly large and rich and diverse herd, if you will, of paintings. We are more than for being a part of, that kinda thing.

Anyway, you can see the four I'm coming home with here. And if you would like a reindeer in your family, you should visit Brad immediately. They are very affordable, and require far less maintenance than regular reindeer, or so I am told.

In the meantime, do more with less, steady on, and, as Gramps used to say, keep your pecker up!

xxx
c

• Buy a reindeer via Brad Nack's website
• Read about Brad Nack on my site

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

Poetry Thursday: On 48 years, three Cokes and six hours of sleep (A poem in two parts)

I. (The part not for the faint of heart.)

I dreamed of demons
in the night

Not the green, horned kind
but the ones that plague me
while I walk, awake,
and still asleep.

Old, dead relatives
gathering in a too-costly
too-luxurious
too-dark hotel,
all surfaces lined with plush fabrics
to dampen the sounds
that happened within.

One grandmother
sat resolute in her room
refusing to move,
no matter what

while the other
crawled the carpeted floors
on hands and knees,
searching for something
she had lost
while she wasn't paying attention.

My mother
scavenged free fruit
from the complimentary tray
in my well-appointed room,
because she was starving
in her poorish, noisy one.

(They're always that way
near the elevators,
even in the good places.)

And my father
paid for it all
but was not there
at all.

Finally, as my sister watched
from the velvet banquette
in the mirrored nook
of my sumptuous room,

I squeezed a hidden zit,
a "sneaker" zit,
tucked in at the top
of the nasolabial fold,
releasing a stream of pus
and blood
and hardened oils
so profound
it exceeded my capacity for disgust,
invoking only wonder
at my body's capacity
to harbor the unnecessary
so excessively.

Truly,
it was magnificent,
although my sister
could have been a little faster
with the Kleenex
if you ask me.

II. (The part that is nicer.)

There are angels around you
that float in and amongst the demons
and are there, at your side,
24/7,
for the asking.

Would you like to know
the secret code
that calls them to you?

Me, too.

So far,
it seems to sound
very much like walking up to a demon
and saying, "Hello, there,
my name is Colleen,
and I think it is time
we finally met."

xxx
c

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

What's up and what's gone down :: January, 2010

A mostly monthly but forever occasional round-up of what I've been up to and what I plan to be. For full credits and details, see this entry.

Colleen of the future (places I'll be)

• The LA Eastside Mixer Yes, the Westside Biznik Meetup at Jerry's Famous Deli is still going strong. Alas, it fills up faster than a starving man at an all-you-can-eat shrimp buffet. Sign up for Biznik NOW, then jump on this event while you can. Trust me, it's gonna be just as hot a ticket as its Westside cousin in no time.
• The Ojai Women's Business Social (Thursday, January 14) If you think I'm missing an event so special that one of my favorite resorts is creating a special cocktail named after it (the "Snooty Lady!"), you're insane. Also, I'm Jodi Womack's #1 fan. Get in line. At the bar.
• Cornell Alumni Leadership Conference I'll be giving a version of my How to Use Social Media to Conquer the World talk in D.C. at the end of January. This is for Cornell alumni only, but if you're going to be there, please stop by one of my sessions and say "hi," and if you're D.C.-local and want to meet up, let me know: I'm being hosted by the amazing Jared Goralnick for a couple of days before, and maybe we can plan a smallish gathering of fun folk (I hear we'll need it to stay warm).

Colleen of the Past (stuff I did you might not know about)

• Mule Nog Party audition Adam Lisagor and I did not make it to the party, but I think we made the coolest invitation.
• Forward to the Designer's Guide to Marketing & Pricing I wrote this a long time ago, but I'm not sure I ever pointed it out. Or if I did, it's time to do it again. Because if you're a designer or copywriter or any other small, creative, service-type business, this book will kick your ass in the good way. (That's an affiliate link, kids, and while I'm happy to send you to Ilise & Peleg's website, I'm even happier if you click back here and buy the book through me. Just sayin'.)
• UPDATE! I did an episode of my friend Eddie Conner's LA Talk Radio blog show thingamabobby on January 4th. The show description is available through his main page, or you can listen/download the episode here. I talk about why I do what I do, and kinda-sorta what I do. (I know, I'm working on it.)

Colleen of the Present (ongoing projects)

• communicatrix | focuses My monthly newsletter devoted to the all-important subject of increasing your unique fabulosity. One article per month (with actionable tips! and minimal bullsh*t!) about becoming a better communicator, plus the best few of the many cool things I stumble across in my travels. Plus a tiny drawing by moi. Free! (archives & sign-up)
• Act Smart! is my monthly column about marketing for actors for LA Casting, but I swear, you'll find stuff in it that's useful, too. Browse the archives, here.
• Internet flotsam And of course, I snark it up on Twitter, chit-chat on Facebook, post the odd video or quote to Tumblr, and bookmark the good stuff I find on my travels at StumbleUpon and delicious. If you like this sort of stuff, follow me in those places, I only post a fraction of what I find to Twitter and Facebook.

xxx
c

Photo of Arno J. McScruff housed on Flickr, where I also occasionally stick pixels.

Book review: Writing About Your Life

For the first 24 or so years of my life, my literary drug of choice was the novel.

I liked stories, you see, making them up, having them read to me, hearing old ones of my grandfather's over and over again. (Maybe that's the secret behind the strength of the bonds that can happen between the very old and the very young who love each other: the comfort-need to tell over and over neatly intersects with the reassurance that repetition brings with it.)

All that changed when I met Kate O'Hair, my first art director at Young & Rubicam New York. Kate was from Detroit originally, but had already lived in San Francisco and beat me to New York City by a few years. She was that good kind of worldly, accomplished and accessible, that made learning about cognac, Ry Cooder and the Hitchcock canon fun. (Believe me, a pedant could fuck up even the Cooder.)

Kate made everything seem fun and interesting and worth learning about, and it was from Kate that I learned how much fun non-fiction in general, biographies in particular, could be. She got me started with Zelda and A Moveable Feast and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas*; somewhere between Growing Up, Remembering Denny and Shock Value, I was hooked. Because while fiction can be engrossing and illuminating in its own way, non-fiction stories of the people who came before us shine that light, connect the dots and inspire into the bargain.

Memoir gets a bad rap for a whole bookful of reasons. A story is only as good as the storyteller, for one, and not too many people know how to tell a good story anymore. It's a skill, like anything else, that requires a mix of instruction and immersion, and over a varying but always extended period of time, and who has that these days? Some of the skill lies in the mastery of nuts and bolts stuff, structure, grammar and tone, but a whole lot of the magical pixie dust happens with intent: what is the story trying to do? What is it there to illuminate? What are we supposed to see after engaging with it that we couldn't see before?

For as long as I've been at this game of writing, I'm really at the beginning of learning how to tell good stories, which require a whole different level of intention and restraint. My experience crafting the Ignite piece about my hospital-bed epiphany is a great example: some 20 hours went into telling that five-minute story, and most of the hours weren't about picking out good Flickr photos for my slides. It was telling and re-telling, pushing in and moving out, plucking this and condensing that. It was biting into the bits of every thing that happened, worrying the thread of the story, until I found the five minutes' worth that would engage people's attention long enough to pass along a truth I couldn't even articulate at the outset.

This is what William Zinsser talks about in Writing About Your Life, his book devoted to teaching the generalities and particulars of teasing out the true stories of your life. The material he uses to instruct comes from his life and his experience, and his methodology of explication is brilliant: tell the story, then stop to explain how he told you the story, what he left in the story and what he took out of the story, and finally, why he told you the story. There are many fine snippets of Zinsser's stories in the book, his boyhood school, his world travels, the unusual points on his career trajectory, but they never feel like random bits. Rather, like some kind of gentle word magician, he weaves all of the stories into a unified whole whose point is not just how to tell stories, but why we might want to, why we need to.

There are not enough stars in the world to shower upon this book, and I'm not yet the kind of storyteller I must be to do it justice. If you want to tell any kind of story, on your blog, to save for your grandchildren, to make sense of your own past, buy this book immediately. It's what I plan to do as soon as I return this copy to the library. It is an instruction manual and an inspiration, and something I want by my side as I move through this next phase of my journey...

xxx
c

• Buy Writing About Your Life on Amazon
• Read wikipedia entry on William Zinsser

Image by Greene/Ellis via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

*Which turned out to be not an autobiography at all, but the best kind of sneaky auto/bio mashup, and the only thing of Gertrude Stein's I've been able to get through to date.

Yo! Disclosure! Links to the books in the post above are Amazon affiliate links. This means if you click on them and buy something, I receive an affiliate commission. Which I hope you do: it helps keep me in books to review. More on this disclosure stuff at publisher Michael Hyatt's excellent blog, from whence I lifted (and smooshed around a little) this boilerplate text.

December in January: Backwards to go forwards

Just before the end of the past year, I decided to forgo my usual habit of cramming my annual planning into the most riotously busy time of the year. Hence, December in January, where I spend the first month of the chronological new year planning my own, to begin in February.

Of all the things I've learned about creating meaningful goals, ones that I'm passionate about and that will prove the most useful to me in achieving life goals, by far the most important has been the year-in-review exercise.

Reading Jinny Ditzler's excellent book on values-centered goal planning, Your Best Year Yet, finally turned me around on the benefits of looking backwards to go forward. It seems so obvious in hindsight (ha!) that to plan for the future without surveying the past is at best wasteful and at worst, downright foolhardy: how can I know where I'm going if I don't know where I am, and why would I give up any intelligence that helped get me here?

I'll tell you why, it hurts like crazy. Or does for me, anyway. I'm sure there are reasonable and balanced souls out there who could look objectively and even kindly on their successes and failures of the past 12 months, but for a competitive, perfectionist workaholic, it's a day-long (minimum) exercise in high-level masochism. All the inevitable broken promises, brought on by overambition, hubris and a plain, old faulty lens. Autistic people can't parse social situations properly; I can't see time. Cannot cannot cannot, no matter how hard I try. And remember, I'm a perfectionist Virgo, so not only is there trying, there is assisted trying, paid and free, as well as all kinds of experiments in different ways of trying. Oh, the trying! It's a trial, I tell you.

The trying, the effortful, effortful trying, was a huge factor in my settling on EASE as a watchword or modus operandi. Or rather, the realization that I work my ass off for and at pretty much everything made it an obvious choice to say "yes" to once it bubbled up to the surface.

But whence the bubbling, right? Because that's what you're here for and really, as Dan put it in his scarily incisive comment of last week, this is what I've chosen to do here for the past few years, sort of unofficially, as well as what I did with intention from the outset with the Great Year-Long Experiment in Marketing, a.k.a. The Virgo Guide: to carefully and honestly look at the process, and as best I can, to set up metrics so I can see how well things work and where I'm really spending my time.

As best as I can tell, these are the activities that laid the groundwork for making the radical (for me) shift of "December in January" (i.e., choosing to delay my 12-month planning by one month), and the three-month sabbatical from for-hire work in the new year (to be reviewed and renegotiated at the end of March):

1. Decluttering. I've been on this path for a while now, but my big Clearing my (psychic) clutter push in the fall of 2009 really shifted things, with a huge leap when I encountered the work of Brooks Palmer. His book and workshop were a huge influence on me, and our ongoing calls have been a great assist, too. (More on that in a moment.)
2. Nei Kung. I'd stumbled on James Borrelli's site a long time ago, and was intrigued by the idea of a practice even more internal than t'ai chi or qigong (which my old acupuncturist, to her credit, kept gently pushing me towards). I've been doing Nei Kung practice daily for the past five weeks and the shifts, while not always happy, have already been surprisingly significant. Whether it's the Nei Kung, all the emotional groundwork done before, committing to a daily physical practice or some combination (most likely, I'm guessing), it's a definite keeper. Big major shoutout to fellow blogger and Nei Kung enthusiast Alan Furth, who gave me the final nudge to try it. Because it ain't cheap and I usually am.
3. Daily walks. I've been doing these since The BF first adopted Arnie, roughly two years ago. I can now recognize the sluggishness I get when I miss a day or two. I remember a similar thing happening when I first started walking during my convalescence from the Crohn's onset in 2002. Again, part of it is the physical, part is probably just the regularity of it.
4. Monthly shrinkage. Ongoing since 2001. I went weekly for a few years (oh, the good insurance days!), took a break for a bit, and came back for monthly tuneup/checkins. Again, not cheap, but the value of having a sane person to check in with when the compass you shipped with is a wonky one can't be calculated.
5. Success Team, EstroFest, Google Wave with Dave and assorted other collaborative ventures. If you don't have ongoing accountability and support, get it. No one does this alone, no one. It's good to have friends, too, with their kind, Kleenex-upholstered shoulders (and even as touchstones), but committed, ongoing peer support makes it happen.
6. Money. I've made less and less money each year since I quit acting. (I know, hilarious, right?) Which makes me even happier that I had a fat nest egg to start with. I had a goodly windfall of the bittersweet kind (father dying), but I also had a considerable amount put aside of my own. I have been a squirreler-of-funds since I had nickel #2 to rub together with nickel #1, and have invested in all kinds of crazy people-fueled ventures as well as an IRA and stocks just so I know there's always something growing, somewhere. (I'm not in a position to invest now, obviously, so don't bother asking.) Having this cushion gives me the freedom to follow my path. I cannot emphasize that enough!

The above are what I'd characterize as the "positives" that fueled this decision. There were also some negatives, and they're important, too:

1. Overcommitting in 2009. My default solution to any problem is to throw more me at it. Unfortunately, there's less me to go around as I get older (even as there's more me in certain places), so I'm having to reexamine my methodology. I was extremely burned out by the beginning of December; I could not get enough rest, it felt like. Plus I had such a crowded schedule from a combination of saying "yes" to things, wanting to try things and my natural tendency towards workaholism that there was never any time to step back and reflect. Nothing like being on a hamster wheel of your own creation. I know, I know, they're ALL of our own creation. Still. Not like I had two kids and a spouse and a boss and a mortgage. A self-employed single person in a rent-controlled apartment? Please.
2. Dissatisfaction with consulting business model. I love aspects of consulting, but the wear and tear on me is phenomenal. In addition, I know I did a bad job both of managing expectations and establishing boundaries. I had no way of knowing how much I'd suck at certain aspects of this until I tried it (nor of how much I'd enjoy others), so I'm glad I did. If/when I pick it up again, my way of doing it will be very, very different: more clearly defined, better managed and most likely, more expensive. (I'm open to any interesting ideas about this, by the way.)
3. Unsatisfied yearnings. While I did enjoy running the Biznik meetups, doing the consulting work, co-hosting Presentation Camp, etc., I found the greatest satisfaction in writing, meeting people I really clicked with and spending time with them (most of whom I found via writing and reading) and the little bit of reading I did. I also loved doing so much speaking, but the exhilaration I felt doing the Ignite presentation vs. the business-related presentations. I'm not sure what that means yet in terms of what to do moving forward, but it bears further examination.
4. Ill health. Fortunately, I had only one major health issue this year, back in the spring, when I pushed myself too hard and strayed too far off my diet. And even more fortunately, I was able to pull myself back without resorting to steroids, as I've usually done. Still, this scared the crap out of me, both literally and figuratively. (Ah, Crohn's! What a delight you are, my little barometer!) I really want to get off of the meds I'm on, and that can't happen until I've implemented much better self-care habits.

There were other indicators that I was drifting into the red zone: alcohol usage creep; laziness/anxiety-fueled poor eating habits; increased nail and cuticle biting; poor sleep; off-the-charts web surfing and viewing of comfort films. I know way too much about the habits of a certain fameball and the people who watch her, and if my copy of Play Misty for Me was an LP, it would be worn smooth. Thank whomever I gave up cable, at least.

Modesty prohibits me making an exhaustive list of what I'd consider to be my successes of the past year, but I did list them, and if I may be immodest for just the one minute, I produced a crapload of work last year, and made many, many breakthroughs. I'm most pleased with the quantity, and quality, of the writing I committed to; that it was the one goal I actually followed through on is rather telling. I fell one post short of my goal of 260, and did not miss a month of my acting column or newsletter, nor a week of posting at the Virgo Guide.

You'd think I'd look at all this and come up with the simple answer to just write my ass off, and to hell with the rest. Alas, the sum total of money I made from writing last year wouldn't keep me in expenses for more than a month. My savings, while ample enough for now, can't fund this experiment indefinitely, so I'll have to figure out how to make money writing, or to make money doing something else with a low mental load so I can reserve strength for writing. The ideal scenario workwise seems to be Gladwellian: a 90/10 or 95/5 ratio of writing to speaking, and always on what interests me. I don't need nearly the cash our boy Malcolm makes, but I need that ratio.

Is it realistic? Not in year one, and maybe never. At least I have a picture in my head of what the best future looks like, and a start with some role models...

xxx c

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

December in January: Goal-setting around the web

Just before the end of the past year, I decided to forgo my usual habit of cramming my annual planning into the most riotously busy time of the year. Hence, “December in January,” where I spend the first month of the chronological new year planning my own, to begin in February.

I'm deeply enmeshed in unpacking Dan Owen's staggeringly thought-provoking comment of a few days ago; more on that soon, possibly as soon as Monday. But for now, while the rest of the Internet has moved on and is attacking 2010 with glorious gusto, I thought it might be nice to share some of the best posts, ideas and resources I've collected for woodwork-squeaks-and-out-come-us-freaks types who said "Hell!" to all that, and are enjoying December in January. Or hey, if you're like that, you can always bookmark it for consumption later this year!

One-Word Annual Theme stuff

Christine Kane, whom I saw perform at SOBCon 2008 (and whom I can personally vouch for being the real deal), has been doing one-word themes for years now. So she's really well qualified to help other people with the process, and has done so most generously via a terrific downloadable PDF that walks you through a possible process for DIY-ing it. She suggests that you may want to get some help in the form of collaborators or support, and I heartily endorse that, too. But if you're a stubborn cuss, you can go it alone.

Jared Goralnick has been a friend for a couple of years now (we met at SOBCon 2008, as well, come to think of it, that really was a bang-up event!). While he's roughly 20 years my junior, he is waaay far ahead of me at setting and keeping and tracking goals, and he's got a post from 1999, before I was ON the damn web!, to prove it. Here is Jared's post on his theme for 2010; you can access previous years through it. Even better (to my mind) is his thoughtful review of 2009, which gives a peek into the "why" of the 2010 word.

I didn't know about Ali Edwards until I stumbled across her this year, but she's another old hand at this one-word thing. Her post on 2010's word is here; she did an interesting series of posts on how she compiles a book for each year, the last of which has lots of pictures of the finished project. I'm not a big mind-mapper or scrapper, but I do enjoy reading about other people's more tactile/visual processes, and think there's always value in discovering new methodologies, even if I don't implement them. (I need to break myself of this habit though, as regards recipe-clipping. Ugh.)

It's a little more than one word, two more, to be exact, but I always love reading about Chris Brogan's theme words for the year. He's another guy I've watched skyrocket to success over the few years I've known him, and I've known him well enough to know the methodicalness behind his mad success. In other words, it's a 1,000 little steps you don't see for every one you do. Here's Chris's post for 2010; it includes great info about how to go about the process of determination yourself, and provides links to his previous years.

Alt-goal-setting stuff

I discovered and met artist-teacher Lisa Sonora Beam in the space of several weeks late last year. It was one of those off-to-the-races relationships, facilitated by Lisa's maintaining a brief residency just over the pass. Lisa does a lot of very strategic work with collage and definitely speaks in fluent "artist." She's writing a terrific 4-part series on how to plan your year AND make your own cool planner, which should be right up your alley if you're a visual-artistic type. (Read: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4) If you're a creative business owner, you might also be interested in her book, The Creative Entrepreneur, which is the most unorthodox methodology for coming up with a business plan I've ever seen. (Which is a good thing!)

I found Lisa Sonora Beam's posts via an excellent year-end round-up by Alexia Petrakos. In it are resources from my other friends Pam Slim & Charlie Gilkey, Chris Brogan and Chris Guillebeau which I would have linked to separately, but Alexia thoughtfully did my curation for me. Yay, Alexia! Also, she stuck my 2009 "100 Things" posts there. Again, yay, Alexia!

Miscellaneous goal-type stuff

Julien Smith has been such a big influence on my reading list since I discovered him; his repeated, deliberate attempts to read a book a week are truly inspirational. So I confess, when I saw this helpful post about how he actually managed to read a book a week in 2009 (after years of trying), I jumped ahead and committed to it (reserving the right to dump it in February if it doesn't align with my final goals). So far, I'm on track, and love it. Simple but effective methodology, and actually reading these books regularly and intentionally is already having a positive effect.

I skip most "Best of" lists, as they're kind of junk-food posts, for the most part. But Rex Sorgatz's outstanding 30 best blogs of 2009 post is thoughtfully curated and very instructional for those of us who have a blog figuring greatly into our goals. In short? I would very much like to make a year-end list of such quality at some point, so it's worth it to me to pay attention to what makes the cut with the kind of reader who would write something this wise.

What else?

I've written other posts about goal-setting that link to other resources about goal-setting in that recursive way things tend to go on the Internet. The December and January columns I write for Casting Network's monthly newsletter tend to dig into reviewing and planning; there are also strategic resources for unsticking yourself throughout (actors being a necessarily self-involved lot, they tend to need a lot of regular jarring and unsticking).

UPDATES:

Here are two posts I found from publisher Michael Hyatt: one on the looking-backwards process (a great, much SHORTER, possibly more fun version than Jinny Ditzler's for the impatient); one on setting S.M.A.R.T. goals (i.e., Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Time-Bound) to make sure they have the best chance of sticking. (via Rachelle Gardner)

I'd love to know of any resources I missed, and I'm sure other people would, as well. What are your favorites? All-time and of late? Please share them with fellow travelers in the comments!

xxx
c

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

Poetry Thursday: Ben Franklin was a gardener

You can change your hair
you can change your clothes

You can even change
a lightbulb
with or without the help
of one voyeur
two economists
or three Episcopalians

But you cannot make change
any more than you can
will the sun
into rising
or yell a rose
into blooming

Change happens
when it happens
and not a second sooner

But
(and I did say "but")

You can
turn the right rows
and seed the right beds
and water
and weed
and otherwise tend
as needed
every day of every season
every month of every year
for the rest of your life

And if you start now,
if you change right now,
you may not have flowers
or novels
or bridges
or babies
tomorrow
but you will have the joy
that being a handmaiden
brings with it
for every second
of every minute
of every hour
of the rest of your days

And the world might well
enjoy the fruits of your garden
until the end of days
themselves.

xxx
c

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

December in January: More...fun?

Just before the end of the past year, I decided to forgo my usual habit of cramming my annual planning into the most riotously busy time of the year. Hence, December in January, where I spend the first month of the chronological new year planning my own, to begin in February. My shrink, a.k.a. my mental Rock of Gibraltar, has known me as long as anyone who has known me for the past eight years, and better than most. (This is, after all, what I pay her for, and what my fine, union health insurance paid her for before that.)

So when she says something, I generally find it to be both wise (because she is a well-educated smartypants) and considered (because she a thoughtful smartypants). Thus was I thrilled when I relayed my decision to make this year's theme MORE ROOM and she approved wholeheartedly.

Well, almost wholeheartedly, which I guess means "partheartedly."

Room, she said, was great. She was all for it. Given that I was a workaholic, though, and may I pause here to note that she dropped that clunker in there without so much as a howdy-do?, given that, had I perhaps thought of also making a secondary theme of MORE FUN? Because "fun" was something I generally stuck in quotes and/or onto calendars, to ensure it became a bona fide action item.

Mrs. Shrink. Please. Of course I thought of it: I'm a Virgo. I think, if not overthink, pretty much everything. This is why I continue to drive my sorry, overthinking ass 52 miles round-trip once monthly to sit on your leather love seat and cry. (Well, at Hanukkah, the G-Rock also puts out some pretty nice gelt for the customers.)

I also thought of, and rejected, MORE MUSIC. Because (woowoo alert!) when I looked at MORE MUSIC on the page, I felt sad instead of happy. Which is not to say that MORE MUSIC isn't 100% splendid in theory. Many's the time I've walked by my dusty guitar or watched a great performance on YouTube or thought fondly of the couple of songs I managed to squeeze out in early 2009 and been tempted to put MORE MUSIC on my priority list.

For that gal who makes HAVE FUN an action item, though, I figured that a MORE MUSIC would feel more like a burden and less like a joy. It would be sweaty and  effortful, not easy and joyful, some good-girl perversion of the real reason to make music, which is to open your heart and communicate (and yeah, to have fun, but not necessary as a subset of MORE FUN.)

MORE MUSIC, like MORE FUN, lacked ease. And if my signal phrase for 2010 is MORE ROOM, my watchword for it is EASE. Or perhaps, "E-A-S-E." You know: now with MORE ROOM!

If my suspicions and those of my esteemed therapist are correct, that I have a tendency to beat myself up, to toil to exhaustion, to cram 10 lbs. of work into a 5 lb. day, then a natural outgrowth of giving myself MORE ROOM should be more of all the other good things: joy, music, fun, laughter, exercise, health, and rolling around on the floor with puppies. If I keep in mind that things can be done with EASE, or that life can unfold with EASE, or that EASE exists not only as an idea, but a reality, maybe I can loosen my death grip on myself and my eleventy-seven projects. Maybe some of the eleventy-seven will naturally fall away with EASE.

And maybe monkeys will fly out of my ass. I'm still conflicted, you see. But I have worked to open my heart, and it would be foolish to deny it these things it now seems to be asking for, this MORE ROOM, this EASE.

Besides, this doesn't happen every day. The small, still voice doesn't try to out-yell the Tasmanian devil with the megaphone; it waits it out. And if you hadn't noticed, my time is less abundant than it once was. When September of this year rolls around, I'll be one year from halfway to 100, and the most generous soul in the world can't call that young.

So. Thus far, we have:

1. Theme for 2010: MORE ROOM
2. Watchword for 2010: E-e-e-a-s-e

I can't wait to see what I come up with next. No, that's not right. Of course I can.

I have all the room I need...

xxx c

Book review: Confessions of a Public Speaker

I was prepared both to like and to loathe Scott Berkun's newest book, Confessions of a Public Speaker.

"Like" because I've enjoyed reading his blog off and on for a while now. Berkun is a forthright and engaging writer who not only shares a ton of good, practical information, but does it with stylish essays on the kinds of topics, like how to detect bullshit, that make me fall in love with the web all over again every time I find one. And hey, he's successfully made the transition from corporate gig to self-employment at something he loves, right there, that's something to like.

"Loathe" because, well, between the title that hinted at dig-me grandstanding and the godawful horrorshow that pretty much everything I've read on the topic has been thus far, my hopes weren't high.

What I hadn't expected is that I'd neither like nor loathe Confessions of a Public Speaker, but absolutely love it.

The book is every bit as smart and fun (and at times, outright funny) as Berkun is when he calls bullsh*t on the social media echo chamber on his blog or gives an Ignite talk about how to give an Ignite talk. It's generous and comprehensive and most importantly, it's both of these things while remaining page-turning-ly readable, if that's a thing. (And if it isn't, it should be.)

Because while Berkun shares valuable information like the importance of feedback (and of asking for it properly), the secrets to vanquishing stage fright and the mechanics of making the room work for you, he does it from the context of his own considerable experience, using stories and examples from his successes and flop-sweat failures to illustrate what works and what doesn't, and how to do the one while (mostly) avoiding the other. In this, his method is much like Gretchen Rubin's recent The Happiness Project, which I similarly loved for its humble-but-useful first-person narrative.

High signal-to-noise ratio isn't much use to me if the content is dull, dry and plodding. This is a rich and richly researched book that reads like a house afire because Berkun has done with the book exactly what he exhorts us to in the book: put the hard work into the prep, so the user experience is enjoyable without compromising on content. His meticulous care is there at every turn, if you care to look, the mix of lists and photos, of scientific and anecdotal evidence, but you won't notice it at first glance, because he's there to do the opposite of making himself look good: he's there for us, serving up the material we need in the best possible way for us to learn it. Like great skaters or dancers, you don't see the work that goes into the work; you just enjoy the well-crafted end result. (Well, until you get to the beyond-due-diligence, double-bibliography at the end. No, really: one is a list, and the other a weighted list. Ingenious and humbling.)

If you're a speaker on the path or just someone who wants to get better at relaying information out loud, you cannot do better than this wonderful book. But you will have to get your own copy: this is one I'm keeping, decluttering project or not...

xxx
c

• Buy Confessions of a Public Speaker on Amazon
• Visit Scott Berkun's blog
• Browse my bookmarked content by Scott Berkun

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

December in January: More room

Just before the end of the past year, I decided to forgo my usual habit of cramming my annual planning into the most riotously busy time of the year. Hence, "December in January," where I spend the first month of the chronological new year planning my own, to begin in February.

Several weeks ago, I happened to see a post to Twitter from a sometime/longtime web acquaintance, Dave Seah:

(In case you're reading from a mobile device or something else that can't parse the screenshot of Dave's tweet, it reads: "This week, I will try to practice 'do not hurry. do not wait.'")

I had no idea what it meant. Okay, I had some small idea of what it meant. It was about not being rushed into things, but taking time to handle them in a sane and rational fashion. It was about procrastination, or the not-doing of it.

But further unpacked, it was about a lot of other things: the over-and-over-again nature of changing our most deeply ingrained habits. And having patience with oneself during the process. And needing both the accountability and support of one's fellow travelers to reach this mythical new land of Doing Things Differently.

I didn't take the time to unpack it in the moment, for which I'm now very grateful. The small, still voice inside me screamed, "DM him right now and say you're in." And so I did, not knowing what "in" was, nor even really knowing Dave that well. I'd known of and read and vaguely admired him for years, but hadn't thought to start following him on Twitter until Pam Slim stuck us in the same post about her current web obsessions. We communicated here and there via @-reply, but only sporadically, not enough to allow for friend traction.*

"In" did not reveal itself for another month or so, when, mulling over how I might familiarize myself Google Wave to prepare for an upcoming conference I'm speaking at, I thought that a two-person collaboration with a fellow nerd might teach me a thing or two. Dave was game, bless his heart, and we were off to the races.

We talked about Dave's tweet, and what it meant. (It meant mostly what I thought it had.) We talked about how we might use Wave, and how to use Wave (it's not especially intuitive). We talked about goals and blogging; we talked about things we were afraid of and things we were no longer as afraid of.

Basically, we talked, we're still talking, and let the agenda unfold as it needed to. And it turns out that while this is not an especially comfortable place for me to live in that it feels unnatural, it's an exceptionally comfortable place for me to live in that it feels roomy. Luxurious, even, so much space and freedom in which to play.

This, I now realize, is what I was after when I began decluttering in earnest last fall, or even when I began searching for the articulation of my purpose back in 2007: MORE ROOM. It has roots in my bloody epiphany of 2002, my out-of-body experience on a shitty Santa Monica stage years before that, my move(s) from one place to another (only to find myself repeatedly back in my own, miserable backyard), my childhood fits of inchoate longing. O, holy night, aren't we all looking for that one thing, or at least that one clearly-marked road to it, that is the fullest expression of our being?

Of course, MORE ROOM is not the ultimate thing I'm looking for. But it is the thing I've repeatedly denied myself, that I've skipped over and brushed aside because who has time for such foolishness, nor need of it when one is willing to work like an ox, to push like a mofo, to break like the wind? And MORE ROOM is the next thing I need to find my way back to the thing, or to the path that will take me there.**

MORE ROOM, then, will most likely be my theme for 2010. Not particularly sexy***, but wildly extravagant (for me), which is a kind of sexy (to me): as I said in the original December in January post, I'm taking off a minimum of three months to make more room for myself, which means a further erosion of savings. I prefer to look at it as an investment in my future, a self-directed Ph.D. program of sorts, complete with lots of writing and reading and late-night coffees off-campus to hash over the meaning of meaning. I have no dependents and a relatively small overhead, so I can afford to be especially luxurious with my time, but I suspect anyone can create some room for herself if she really wants it. There was a time when the only time I could grab for myself was a quarter-hour in the morning with my spiral notebook, and grab I did: on the closed lid of a toilet seat, before my husband awoke. We do what we must.

What must you do this year? What are you planning to give yourself, and in which direction will you walk?

Whether you're plotting out your own December in January or are the blissfully organized, fully-mapped-out mistress of time management I hope someday to be, I would love to hear about your themes and hopes and plans for these coming months...

xxx
c

Image by srp6685 via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

*Interestingly enough, I've met up in person and developed nice friendships with both Jonathan Fields and Peter Shankman, the other two people in the post, as well as Pam herself. Quite a thing when done right, the Internet.

**I can hear someone, somewhere, arguing that MORE ROOM or the giving of it to myself IS the path; I hear you and appreciate it, but this is my cocksucking boulder and my motherfucking hill, and I get to name both the signposts and the obstacles.

***And who said everything had to be sexy, anyway? The Louvre isn't sexy, it's magnificent, as is the feeling one has walking through the Louvre, looking at all those objets that represent all that human thought and all those man-hours. I'll take magnificent or luxurious or even comfortable over sexy any day of the week. Sexy is good as a spice, but lousy as base nutrition.

Poetry Thursday: More music

You will
look better with
that 32" waist
eating more
fresh fruits and vegetables
sleeping eight hours nightly
doing first things first
and getting many things done.

You might feel
righteous
and virtuous
and even gleeful
with squeaky-clean windows
and a clutter-free car
and a bright white sink
empty of contents

Your friends
and your family
and your clients
would love
a thoughtful note
with carefully chosen words
and a stamp
or the exact right perfect gift
arriving via brown-suited courier
in a timely fashion
to commemorate their special day
and your thoughtful reverence

There are a thousand
fine choices to make
at the end of a year
and the beginning of forever
any one of which will make
your lungs cleaner
your mind sharper
your wallet heavier
your pants smaller

But if you are among those of us
who step up to the buffet of possibilities
and fret over what to eat first
may I offer up this:

Your stomach
will rumble
for a thousand tasty morsels

But your heart
which asks for so little
and offers so much
will never say no
to more room

Nor your spirit
to more joy

Nor your soul
to more music

Put a tender close
to what came before
and trust
that if you create the space
and allow it to fill up with love
all the rest
will follow
for all the rest
of your days.

xxx
c

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

100 Things I Learned in 2009, Part 2

Wherein I (once again) attempt to show that one is never too old—or middle-aged, anyway—to learn. Or spout off about it. Part 1 here, in case you missed it.

xxx c

1. Making something short takes a long, long time.
2. And still provides a disproportionately large ROI.
3. To love is to serve.
4. Idiocy can inspire genius.
5. Podcasting is more fun than I thought it would be.
6. Screencasts are more fun for everyone than I thought they would be.
7. Writing for a year seems to take two.
8. Less is the new more.
9. If you don't like what's on TV, change it.
10. Never stop growing.
11. Especially when you want to.
12. The world's new-greatest radio station is YouTube.
13. Time Warner needs a good kick in the 'nads.
14. You don't have to like your teachers to learn from them.
15. In fact, you learn more if you don't.
16. I'm better at wrangling than I thought.
17. I'm smart enough to acknowledge that and move on.
18. Well, mostly.
19. When they say "stop to put on snow chains," they mean it.
20. If anyone is selling answers, run.
21. Clicking offline is the payoff for all the click-click-clicking online.
22. (And I mean click-click-clicking.)
23. Hilarity is less important than sanity.
24. Skype will be to Vonage as Vonage was to PacBell.
25. And it can't be it soon enough.
26. The best way to write about marketing might just be in verse.
27. There's a reason Einstein and Uncle Steve wear the same thing every day.
28. Consumables are the best gifts.
29. Cash is the best consumable.
30. With the possible exception of The Pears.
31. And PIE.
32. Keep your tools sharp.
33. The bear gets his days at the table, too.
34. The impulse to give away is almost never wrong.
35. The impulse to take on, not so much.
36. It is not what it cost you, but what it costs you now.
37. At a certain age, knits should be loose.
38. Their hatred is never about you.
39. And vice versa, hot stuff.
40. You cannot live well in two places.
41. The road to hell is paved with drive-thru windows.
42. Wealth really is a state of mind.
43. Wellness, on the other hand, requires peeling your ass from the couch.
44. "No, thank you" may be the most delicious phrase in the English language.
45. Followed by "delete all" and "forward to voice mail."
46. Silence is platinum.
47. $10 a month for faxing works out to $60 per fax.
48. .Me, you're next.
49. Collaboration is AWESOME.
50. So is having your 1,000th post land on New Year's Eve Eve.

New here? Or just uninspired to check the back catalog until now? I live to serve!

2009

• 100 things, Part I

2008

• 100 things, Part I
• 100 things, Part II

2007

• 100 things, Part I
• 100 things, Part II

2006

• 100 things, Part I
• 100 things, Part II

2005

• 100 things, Part I
• 100 things, Part II

2004

• 100 things, Part I
• 100 things, Part II