There are certain things that are fundamental to human fulfillment. If these basic needs aren’t met, we feel empty, incomplete. We may try to fill the void through urgency addiction. Or we may become complacent, temporarily satisfied with partial fulfillment. … The essence of these needs is captured in the phrase “to live, to love, to learn, to leave a legacy.”
~Stephen Covey First Things First.

In last week’s post on things to consider when starting your business I mentioned in passing this thing called the “legacy project.” This week I’ll elaborate on what I mean by the term “legacy project” and why I think it’s important.

What is a Legacy Project

A common journaling exercise is to imagine your funeral (I know, morbid) and what you’d love people to say about you. Maybe it’s that you were the best parent to your kids or that your work helped change people’s lives for the better or that you always made people feel welcome. Your answer to this exercise is a clue as to what your legacy project should be.

A similar exercise is to imagine you’re nearing the end of your life and you’re looking back on what you’ve done. What things would leave you feeling satisfied. It could be that no one else values your rock collection, but if you made that rock collection as awesome as possible you’d consider that a life worth living. Again another clue as to what your legacy project.

Your legacy project is the project you work on to create your legacy–the things you’re remembered for–be it being the best parent you can be or creating the best rock collection you can.

How Legacy Applies to Business

When I started thinking about business, I didn’t make it a priority to figure out what my legacy should be. I just wanted a way to make money that wouldn’t make me feel sick. That’s it. So I picked ideas that seemed good (Great Lakes Early Music, Music Teaching, Small Business Web Marketing, etc.) only to find I’d get stuck. Sure some of the stuckness was from the specifics of that business (not wanting to be tied to a store, not wanting to be tied to Ann Arbor, etc.) but some of it was because of a deeper, fundamental problem. The businesses weren’t making the kind of impact I wanted to make.

If I had thought of Dragon Dormant 3 years ago, I would have dropped it. Sewing on its own isn’t enough of a motivator for me.

What I hadn’t realized was that I needed to have an outlet for creating my legacy. And not just that, I needed to feel content that I was spending enough time and energy on it before I could feel comfortable seriously pursuing other less-important-to-me projects… even if those “less important” projects were the ones bringing in the cash. I know, that sounds a bit crazy, but it was true for me.

The point here is that if you haven’t figured out what your legacy is or aren’t spending enough time on it to feel satisfied, you run the risk of major distraction during the start-up phase of your business and/or stuckness. Not good.

When you do have an outlet for creating your legacy, and feel content about how much time and energy you’re putting in, you’ll be able to put your all into your business and more business options will be open to you. Now that I have an outlet for my legacy project–this blog–I can pursue other money making avenues (Dragon Dormant, music teaching, tutoring) that wouldn’t have felt like “enough” before.

Signs You Need to Figure Out What Your Legacy Project Is

You may be thinking, “*Psh* Legacy? I’m too [young/worried about paying bills/whatever] to be thinking about that. It’s not an issue for me”. I say, hear me out. See if you’ve experienced any of these signs.

• You’re deeply unhappy with your career/major. People call you cynical. You feel like there are better ways for you to be spending your time than at the office or working on school work. There are things worth your time that you’d rather be doing.
• You feel guilty doing things that matter to you. Let’s say you love reading. If you guilty for the time you spend on it, that could be an indication that you aren’t spending enough energy on your legacy project. (“I should be working on my Project, not reading Dresden Files.”) It could also mean you have some belief that reading is a waste of time. Either way, if you’re feeling guilty you should try to determine where it’s coming from.
• You rarely/never experience flow. Flow is the state of intense focus where time passes differently and you get tons of stuff done. It’s an incredible feeling, and if you aren’t getting into it it could be because you don’t feel satisfied with how much energy you’re putting into your legacy project. (“I can’t afford to lose myself in music practice because I won’t have time for Project”)

If any of these characteristics apply to you, take a few minutes to do the following exercise. It won’t hurt, and you might learn something.

How to Find your Legacy Project

Let me start by saying that you won’t know what your legacy project is after one exercise. Finding your legacy project is an iterative process. Play with one idea for a while. After a few days/weeks ask yourself if it’s enough. If not, what is it missing? If it is enough, give it another few days/weeks and ask again. One exercise can’t tell you how you’ll feel about your idea two weeks from now. What it can do is give you some ideas to try.

Here’s an exercise to start with:

Answer these questions

• If you could only work on one project today, which one would leave you feeling the most satisfied?
• What’s important to you? Why? Think things like “being a good parent” or “creating the greatest rock collection”. Dig deep. No one has to see this but you.
• When’s the last time you experienced the flow state…. and felt like it was the most satisfying use of your time?
• What would you like to be remembered for?
• When you’re old and looking back on your life, what kind of life would like to see?

The answers to these questions will give you a glimpse of what your legacy should like like.

This isn’t the end, though because your answers will undoubtedly be too vague.

The next step,then, is to come up with some projects that are open enough to feel fulfilling and specific enough so that it’s not hard to see what the next steps are.

Example: Let’s say one of your answers was to be a great parent. That’s too vague. Being a great parent could mean lots of thing. What does that mean to you? What characteristics do you want your kids to have? Perhaps you want them to be really creative. That’s a project. It feels fulfilling and the next actions are clear. You could enroll them in an art class or schedule unstructured creative time at home or read books on how to inspire kids’ creativity. You get the idea.

Next, take the most exciting project you’ve come up with, and start working on it… or at least think about how you can start working on it. What can you cut from your schedule to make time for it? What mental blocks to you have to address?

Now you can start the iterative process, and I’ll get into that topic next week.

How This Would Have Helped My Younger Self

My 21-year-old self felt very uncomfortable contemplating her “legacy project”. She’d been told before that thinking about such things was a waste of time, and some part of her was afraid that that was true.

If she knew what I know now, she wouldn’t have listened to those people. She’d have tried more ideas, and thus would have stumbled on the right legacy project more quickly. All that angst was totally unnecessary.

At the same time, I’ve been writing in TPLT for the past two years, my posts have on the whole been useful and interesting (I think), but I still only have a handful of readers and a trickle of traffic. Some would say that constitutes a ‘bad business idea’, and in any case, something ought to be written about why TPLT is still in the beginning stages two years after it got started. That’s this post.

If I could only use two words to describe why TPLT hasn’t seen success it’d be these: Mental Blocks.

The “Who Am I To Talk” Mental block.

A year or two ago, right around the time I was graduating from college, I got asked by one of the adults I know what I was planning to do when I graduated. The first thought that came to my head was “I should talk about my blog” but then I got this overwhelming sick feeling. How could I say, “I’m working on my blog about living consciously”? How presumptuous of me to think I have the authority to write about such a mature topic. I have no qualifications to write about that. I haven’t accomplished anything. Who was I to talk? So I told him I was going into web design…

It’s not too hard to see why this mental block–that I’m not mature/experienced/qualified/special/whatever enough to have my writing on living consciously taken seriously–kept me from growing TPLT. I didn’t feel comfortable talking to people about what I was doing, which meant no on knew about what I was doing, which meant word about my blog wasn’t being spread.

Two years later, I’ve realized that what I needed was a better angle. Writing about ‘Living Consciously’ was too big for me. That’s the kind of thing a ‘guru’ writes about, and I don’t feel comfortable with that role. (And from what I’ve read, neither do many modern day gurus.)

My angle today is this: I write about my experience building my small online sewing business and… other hopefully helpful stuff. Much more comfortable. Maybe one day it’ll feel natural to claim I do some lofty thing like, “help people live better lives”, but right now that’s not me… and that’s OK.

The “I Don’t Talk About This Stuff In Real Life” Mental Block

This one is related to the “Who Am I To Talk” mental block. I didn’t talk about this stuff in real life because I felt insecure about it. I felt insecure about it because I wasn’t used to letting this side of me talk in real life. Ah cycles.

This has slowly been changing.

As I’ve read more and more books on personal development, I’ve found myself naturally talking about the topics I write about here. Usually I have some expert I can quote, which makes me feel more comfortable stating my opinion. (Not that everyone cares about what some ‘expert’ says.)

Every once in a while I let people in real life know about the blog, and I’m finding out that more people I know from real life are reading it blog… and nothing bad has happened because of it…

I’ve been working on having my writing style match my speaking style (elipses, parentheses and all), meaning the person on the blog is more like the person I am in real life.

All of these things mean that TPLT is becoming easier and easier for me to promote. I’m not forcing anything. I’m not doing the “fake it ‘til you make it” thing. I’ve been working on making my underlying insecurities dissappear, and that has been paying off.

The “I Can’t Write When I’m Not Inspired” Mental Block

If you look at the archives you’ll notice I haven’t really kept a strict posting schedule. It’s gotten a lot better since I started the Weekly Check-ins, but before that… it was all over map. For some months I posted 10 posts. Others I missed entirely. On the whole my posting had been pretty infrequent until a couple months ago.

The explanation for this is… a bit involved, but one big part is that in the beginning I resisted the idea of scheduling time for writing. I’d found the few times I scheduled time to write, I’d go into my writing session with no inspiration whatsoever. I’d struggle to find a topic, then force myself to write something. Not fun.

Contrast that to when I wrote while I was inspired. Everything flowed. I knew exactly what I wanted to write. The content of what I was writing was better. Really everything was better. The only problem was that inspiration struck at inopportune times. Sometimes it was when I was doing something else pleasant like, say, spending time with friends or family. Other times it was while I was trying to get out of doing less fun things I had to do.

Then I read The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield. It’s quoted a lot on personal development blogs, and while I have my problems with it (it’s a bit too violent for my taste) there’s a lot of good information in there. Particularly there’s a bit where he talks about an author’s experience with inspiration.

Someone once asked Somerset Maugham if he wrote on a schedule or only when struck by inspiration. “I write only when inspiration strikes,” he replied. “Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.”
That’s a pro.
In terms of Resistance, Maugham was saying, “I despise Resistance; I will not let it faze me; I will sit down and do my work.”

Maugham reckoned another, deeper truth: that by performing the mundane physical act of sitting down and starting to work, he set in motion a mysterious but infallible sequence of events that would produce inspiration, as surely as if the goddess had synchronized her watch with his.
He knew if he built it, she would come.

When I read that something clicked. I knew he was right. Having a specific time and place set aside for creative work invites inspiration. By writing even when I don’t feel like, more often than not I’ll end up feeling inspired. I just have to do it.

I read that passage over a year ago, and it’s only been in the past month or so that I’ve really gotten a handle on writing consistently. It took so long because I spent a lot of time struggling with scheduling a time for writing. Taking an hour or two in the morning before work was hard because my morning routine takes a while, and I end up resenting having to stop to go to work. In the evening I have a lot of activities and my creative energy is often zapped by then. Bleh. What I didn’t realize is that, while having a scheduled time and place is nice, it doesn’t matter where my long stretch of time is, as long as I have it. I’ve also found having some ritual to set the tone helps. My ritual is taking a few sips of hot tea before writing.

Today I trust myself to keep to a posting schedule, which has neutralized another mental block I had: I was afraid of disappointing readers by my low and irregular posting schedule and my inability to keep my posting promises. Now that I’ve proved to myself that I can sustain a regular schedule, I’m less worried about sending new readers packing.

The “My Blog’s Name is All Wrong” Mental Block

Also related to the “My Theme Sucks” Mental block.

ThePathLessTraveled was originally called “LaVieConsciente”, French for “The Conscious Life”. Picking a French name was a terrible idea. How could I expect readers to remember my blog’s name if they couldn’t pronounce it correctly? So I got into the “I won’t promote my blog until the name is changed” rut. Of course my name changed and I still didn’t really promote my blog. Part of the reason for that was all of the other mental blocks I’ve already talked about, but there was another reason too…

…I don’t like my theme. I think it looks amateurish, and I’m afraid it’ll turn people away. Working on the theme takes time, though, and I barely have enough of that for writing. So, I figured I’d wait until I had more time to fix the theme and then I’d promote my blog.

Of course, that’s just another excuse. I am still planning to change my theme and get a logo and all that jazz, but I’m not going to wait until then to promote the blog.

The “I Don’t Know Who My Target Audience Is” Mental Block

That’s not entirely true. I’d love to have people like my younger self reading this blog. But I don’t know where people like her are hiding. I don’t think they’re reading the blogs of other personal development people…

Again, this is just an excuse. If I post around the Internet enough, my people will self-select, other people will recommend my blog to my people, etc. I just have to get off my arse and do it.

The “My Writing Sucks” Mental Block

I never worried much about the content of my writing. I’ve felt pretty confident that my ideas are good enough compared to what else is being written. My writing is another story. I know with time it’ll improve, and people aren’t that picky about writing quality, but still. I want to be known as someone who expresses her thoughts well, and it’s frustrating to see my attempts and know they aren’t what they could be. So I played the “I don’t want to promote my blog until my writing quality is good enough” game. Excuses again.

The “I’m Uncomfortable With Becoming a Popular Blogger” Mental Block

When I first started thinking about maybe pursuing blogging, I was put off by blogs like ProBlogger because of their rhetoric, specifically how they talked about their readers. It’s hard to describe accurately (something like readers are more like numbers than people), but it was enough to know that it’d be something I’d have to deal with. Could I handle having thousands of readers? Would I start treating them as some amorphous blob too?

To be honest, I still don’t know how I’ll handle it, but I do know I’m a lot less scared by the idea than I was two years ago.

The Primary Technical Problem

You’ve probably noticed that the one thing I think TPLT has been missing is promotion. I haven’t been comfortable doing the necessary things to get the word out about my blog.

Next month I’ll be starting a different chapter of my life, and I’m planning to actively promote this blog and do what needs to be done to make TPLT a success. If after doing that I still only have a handful of readers, I’ll pay for a blog review… or something.

Was TPLT a “Bad Business Idea”? No, not really. It’s just taken a long time for me to work through my mental blocks, to align myself with success. That’s not atypical for worthwhile goals.

Next week’s post–the last post in the “Many Bad Business Ideas” series–will be about how I’d go about figuring out what career I wanted to pursue if I had to do it all over again.

Last week I thought of a way to get some valuable experience for this blog. I’d love to be able to tell people to go out and start a business doing what you enjoy doing, but as of today I’ve never actually had a side business of my own. So, I think I’m going to start one… and blog about the experience. The one caveat being that I’m already feeling overwhelmed. How can I take on more?

Also that’ll mean my life will consist almost entirely of money making or potential money making activities. I don’t know how comfortable I am with that. :-/
Still this is a good thing.

It’ll be valuable life experience if nothing else.

I’ve decided to do it. Now, to tell you about it.

The project

The idea is pretty simple. I make stuff and then I sell said stuff on the internet and maybe sometimes in person. While I’m building the business I blog about the experience in as much detail as I can.

This idea isn’t new. Lots of bloggers blog about building new businesses. The difference here is that I’m starting  literally from the bottom. I have few readers right now. I’m not leveraging the traffic from my successful blog to jump-start my new project because there aren’t readers to leverage. Months from now, assuming the business is successful, people will be able to come here to read about how it happened as it happened, mistakes and all. That will be cool. And valuable.

What the project will mean for the blog.

On Wednesdays I’ll post something about business building. I’d like it to be general articles on the process or background information about my particular business, but if I don’t have an article ready, I’ll post an update on what I’ve done with the business since the last update.

On Fridays I’ll still have the weekly check-in, but I’ll include a busines update too unless I’ve already written one on Wednesday.

So once a week there’ll be an update on what I’ve done for the business and about once a week there’ll be a post about business stuff in general.
I may have an off-topic post on Mondays. Maybe.

It’s an ambitious schedule, and we all know how well I’ve been able to stick to a writing schedule so far. It’s practically a given that I’ll stumble along the way. That said, I’ll do my best, pick myself up when I fall, and analyze why I fell in the first place so it hopefully won’t happen again.

How the project fits into the mission.

The normal thing to do in life is to go to school and then get a job working for someone else. If you start a business you’ll most likely fail, so you probably shouldn’t try, and if you do succeed it’ll eat your personal life. Also you’ll be a bad person because you’ll have to get people to buy things they neither need nor want.

I grew up with this belief (and from I can tell, so did many of my peers), and after doing extensive reading, I’ve come to realize that this belief is probably flawed. There are plenty of examples of people who run successful businesses who spend less than 40 hours a week working on it and don’t have to compromise their ethics to do it. Assuming these examples are true, then these business owners have found a way to live that’s better than conventional wisdom. [1] They’re walking the path less traveled, which is what this blog is about. So this project decidedly fits into the mission of TPLT.

Yay big projects!

[1] That said, I don’t think that business ownership is the right path for everyone, or maybe even most people. (Aaron, for instance, loves his job, and I can think of plenty other people too.) I just have a hunch that there are a lot of people out there who would be much happier running their own business and aren’t doing it because they believed what  conventional wisdom had to say about business ownership. I think I’m in this category.

The Hard

Overwhelmingness

Lots of sewing to do. Little time and energy.

Not keeping my schedule

I made a schedule that would enable me to have time for writing and sewing and relationship time. I kept to it on Monday and Tuesday. After that… yeah not so much. I’m trying not to feel too guilty about it.

Work is Hard

Yep.

The Good

Punch Brothers

Saw Punch Brothers at The Ark on Wednesday. Awesome.

If you haven’t heard of them, they’re a progressive bluegrass group. By bluegrass I mean they play bluegrass instruments (mandolin, banjo, guitar, fiddle, bass) and play some traditional tunes. By progressive I mean they don’t play many traditional tunes and when they do they sound… different. Mostly they play their own stuff, and it’s very very good stuff, but not really what one might think of as bluegrass.

The best way I can think to describe it is modern classical music with bluegrass instrumentation, a steady rhythm, and vocals that sound human.

I’m so glad I went.

Also The Ark is the best thing ever.

Aaron helped with Sewing!!!

Honestly he often helps with sewing, but it especially helpful this week. He put together my shifts and his hood and hemmed three cotehardies. Because of that we should have just about everything done by Pennsic.

I like sewing.

Yep, still like sewing.

The Learning

I get good insights at the Ark

At the Punch Brothers concert I kept thinking about all these things I wanted to write about. Kinda frustrating since I didn’t have a good way to record them. Maybe next time I’ll take some time after the concert to write them down… or something.

Being in the Moment

I tend to spend a lot of my time fantasizing about the future. Be it a week from now, a month from now or a few years from now. Most of the time it doesn’t bother me, but sometimes it does. For instance, it bothers me when I’m out camping and instead of appreciating the moment I’m in I spend my time thinking about how I should go camping more often and visualizing a life where camping is a major part of it.

This week I was visualizing how I could do sewing for a living and it really took over my brain. I had a hard time focusing on the sewing I was doing and a hard time sleeping. Gah! It really hit home that I need to take a few minutes here and there to ground myself. To appreciate where I’m at right now.

That’s it for me. I’ll be back about two weeks from now.

The Hard

All of it’s related this week.

Bad Times in My Head

Depression. Guilt about depression. Shame for said depression. Believing my feelings are invalid. :-/ Not good times.

Is it over? It’s not as bad as it was over the weekend, but not sure it’s over yet. We’ll see.

Feeling a bit burned out on sewing

Mostly because I’m not sure I can get it and other things I want to do done in time. I can probably get the cotehardies finished, but the hose and the hood and the shifts… not so much. Unless I take time off work, which I can’t since I’m already going to be out of days due to Pennsic. Alas.

Not really able to enjoy my me time… even though I need it

Has to do with the burnout and the guilt. How can I be spending time on me when X, Y, and Z need to get done too?! Not that I have energy to work on X, Y, and Z. It’s just bad.

May have taken on more than I can handle

Gave up one SCA position for another. The other’s more aligned with what I want to do, but it may end up being more work than I bargained for. We’ll see.

The Good

Bweesness for Blogging

Last week I thought of a way to get some valuable experience for this blog. I’d love to be able to tell people to go out and start a business doing what you enjoy doing, but as of today I’ve never actually had a side business of my own. So, I think I’m going to start one… and blog about the experience. The one caveat being that I’m already feeling overwhelmed. How can I take on more?

Also that’ll mean my life will consist almost entirely of money making or potential money making activities. I don’t know how comfortable I am with that. :-/

Still this is a good thing. It’ll be valuable life experience if nothing else.

Chore Schedule

We have a roommate now, so we came up with a chore schedule with everything that needs to be done in order to make everyone happy. So far so good, although it’s only been up for half a week. Methinks think it’ll work, though, because of the accountability. I don’t want to frustrate both Aaron and the Roommate.

The Learning

Sovereignty

Havi writes a lot about Sovereignty, and for a while I didn’t see the value of applying those ideas to my life. Respecting your capacity is over-rated. A lot of people do less than they are capable of. I don’t want to sell myself short. Etc. But this weekend I started thinking that respecting my current capacity to do things might be a good idea.

I have a hard time saying no to things I would want to do if I had infinite time and energy. So I say yes to positions, or go to events and then don’t enjoy myself because I really ought to be doing something else. At events I’ll often beg out early if I realize that’s what I did. I feel better afterward. Positions are a lot harder for me to quit for some reason. :-/

The thing is, no one is happy when I say yes to things I can’t really do or stay in positions I can’t do well. I just need to say something like, “I’m sorry, my intuition says that that’s not the right thing for me to be doing right now. Have Fun/Good Luck!” It’s hard because it’s rejection. I don’t like to be rejected. I don’t like to dole out rejections. But people still aren’t happy when I say yes when I really should have said no.

So, I need to figure out what my boundaries are. I have a lot of data to work with now. I should be able to come up with something reasonable.

No “Weekly Check-in” this week because it turned into this.

On Friday I finished the book, Mastery, by George Leonard. Very good book, especially considering how short it is. There’s a lot of stuff from it I could write about, but for this post I’m going to discuss only one thing: the mindsets people have when they learn a new skill. After reading about these mindsets I realized that I haven’t had the master’s mindset for several activities I’d like to master.

Hackers and Obsessers

A person with the hacker mindset gets to some level of proficiency in a skill and then stops doing the work to improve. As an example, someone who goes out dancing every week, but has only taken a beginner class and has no intention of increasing his skill beyond that has the hacker mindset. He’s developed a certain level of competence and is either content to stay at that level indefinitely or would like to improve but doesn’t feel compelled to do the work to get there.

A person with the obsessive mindset will try to force himself to improve faster than is naturally feasible. Let’s say our dancer finished taking the beginning dance class and jumped straight into an intermediate class. He’s struggling with intermediate stuff because he hasn’t mastered the beginner techniques. If his reaction is to force his way through it, he’s obsessive. He’s probably going to injure himself.

I alternated between the hacker mindset and the obsessive mindset in school. Most of the time I’d do the minimum amount of work to get the maximum grade… or if not maximum, at least a grade I could live with. I resented being asked to go above and beyond. I’d try to coast for as long as I could. What was the point in mastering anything when I’d get an A if I did less? If I minimized the amount of time I spent on school stuff I could spend more time doing fun things, right?

For exams I’d jump into obsessive mode in a valiant attempt to pass the tests. I’d pull all-nighters studying, or spend a week or two before the test attempting to learn everything I was supposed to learn until then. By senior year of college this often meant years of material I’d never figured out. Not fun. And not very effective. :/

I’ve, regrettably, been a bit of a hacker (and sometimes obsessive) with music too. When I had piano lessons I never got into the “regular daily practice” habit. With recorder I spent a few months learning what I needed to learn and then happily hacked my way along. I’ve gotten as good as I have just by showing up to dance practice and playing for dancers. Conscious practicing? What’s that? The thing is I’d like to master some instrument, so realizing I’ve been a hacker all these years was a bit of a shock. If I continue this I’ll never master anything.

Dabblers

A person with the dabbler mindset tries something, encounters some difficulty, and then quits. The dabbling dancer is one that takes the beginner lesson, and soon after quits because “it’s not his thing” or “it takes too long to get any good”. Often he’s too ashamed of looking like the inept beginner that he is. He doesn’t realize that in order to gain competence he has to go through the beginner phase.

I’ve dabbled in SO MANY things, but four things in particular come to mind because I keep dabbling, quitting, and going back a few years later. They are languages, stringed instruments, jazz, and drawing. With languages and drawing I quit because I’m afraid to look stupid and they take a really long time to master. With Jazz, I can’t see the path for getting where I want to go. With string instruments… they’re really hard? I’m actually making some progress on the second two right now. I’ve picked up the ukulele, and have made quite a bit of progress on it alright. The goal is to use it as a stepping stone to guitar and to jazz.

Masters

The master mindset is a lot of things, but most importantly it means that when you’re on a learning plateau (i.e. you working hard but aren’t making on progress) you keep practicing, keep trying to make progress. What’s more you enjoy the practicing. Goals aren’t your primary focus, although you do still have goals. If our obsessive dancer had the master mindset his reaction to not doing well in the intermediate class would be to quit the intermediate class and work on the foundation material he still needed to master. Maybe he’d repeat the beginner class or maybe he’d go to open dancing and practice with some of the more experienced dancers. He’d accept where he was and do what he had to do. He’d also enjoy dancing where he’s at now, or at least consider the end goal worth the temporary awkwardness he’s going through.

I’ve had the master’s mindset in a few things. Three that come to mind are swing dancing, sewing, and intimate relationships.

When I started swing dancing I had the master’s mindset. I loved every bit of it. I learned a lot in the classes. I went to open dancing and wasn’t afraid to practice with the advanced dancers even though I was an awkward beginner. I practiced a lot and I loved the practicing. I’d still be dancing now if Aaron had the same interest.*

I love the process of sewing. I love sewing a straight seam on the machine. I love sewing cuffs on by hand. I also enjoy completing ambitious projects. The combination of these two things, liking the process and being ambitious, are the reasons I keep sewing and keep improving at sewing. I suffer through the visualization and fitting and refitting and refitting and refitting of a sleeve because ultimately I like sewing and the end is worth it. If I only cared about the end garment and felt ambivalent the sewing part, I wouldn’t sew. I’d just buy all my reenactment garb or have someone make it for me.

I had only one boyfriend prior to Aaron. We dated for two years in high school. I took the relationship very seriously. I was willing to work through whatever problems we had (assuming they were workable**), and all in all tried to be the best partner I could be. Not surprisingly I wasn’t the one to end the relationship. With Aaron, I feel the same way. I enjoy the process of being in a relationship. I like having date nights, I’m willing to have awkward intimate conversations that need to happen, I’m willing to admit I need to work on my issues with housework, etc. I want us to thrive. I love the practice and I have goals. I’m on the master’s path.

There’s More to Say, but…

…this post is already pretty long. Even though I just finished the book yesterday, assigning names to the different mindsets has already been useful. I’ve realized that in some areas I don’t have the master’s mindset and I wish I did. *cough*Music*cough*

I can also see it being useful for interacting with other people. There are a lot of hackers and dabblers in the SCA, and having a name for them will make it easier for me to deal with them positively. It’s OK to be a hacker or a dabbler. I just need to not expect everyone to be on the master’s path.

So, yeah, really good book. Highly recommend it. May write more about it in the future.

* We met through swing dancing, so it’s not that Aaron doesn’t know how to dance, he’s just has more of a hacker attitude than I do. As in he’d go to workshops if I was interested, but wouldn’t be pro-active about it. It was really important to me to be able to share the same level of passion about dancing with my significant other, so rather than give up Aaron I gave up dancing and replaced it with music.

** I learned later that my first boyfriend is gay, and had just been figuring that out around the time he broke up with me. Gay is not a workable problem. I stopped talking to him for reasons independent of him being gay, but that’s another story…

After I read Pillars of the Earth last summer I decided to put off reading the next book, World Without End, because Pillars destroyed my week. In a good way, mind you, but still. I couldn’t afford that kind of thing two weeks in a row. Or even two weeks in as many months. Also I wanted something to look forward to.

Now that the wedding’s over and we don’t have any TV shows to compulsively watch, I decided last weekend that I was ready to have my life eaten by a good book again. World Without End has definitely been delivering. I’m still not done with it, and I’ve had to read the book summary and skip around to the sections I was really looking forward to in order to keep myself from going insane.

Life is a Lot Better When You Want to Improve at Your Job

You’ll make more money. You’ll be more effective. You’ll more easily be able to switch jobs. People will be more able to handle it when you make mistakes. Etc.

Conversely, if you don’t want to improve at your job you won’t maximize your earning potential, you won’t be very effective, you’ll have a hard time finding another job in your field, and you won’t be very happy. It’s not fun feeling like you could be making more of your life if you were doing something else.

8 Hours Is Not Enough

I like the feeling of not being busy. I like playing with the cat, chit-chatting with Aaron, watching favorite TV shows, and spending time with friends and family. (Although sometimes the last one can feel like a chore…) I like choosing what to do based on what I feel like doing rather than based on what’s on my list.

I also like making progress on projects. I like being able to say I’m one step closer to my goals. I like making things. I like working through my mental blocks. I like practicing musics. I like learning about new things.

The 8 hours when I’m not at work and I’m not sleeping often don’t feel like enough time to relax, produce things, and do dishes. I also tend to get resentful about not having enough time to pursue worthwhile projects or having to choose between a Project and playing with the kitty (or the husband). Saying no is hard when I really do want to say yes.

I think the solution is to accept where I am… that I don’t have all the time in the world. I also need to remind myself that this state is temporary, and eventually my time will be much better aligned with my aspirations.

Online Shareable Lists are Cool

One of the reasons I wanted an iPhone was to have shared lists with Aaron. When I finally got one last fall I didn’t end up putting any list sharing software on it because there didn’t seem to be any good ones.

This week I had another look and found Listingly, which does just about everything I want. Aaron and I now have simple, shareable lists available anywhere that has internet access. Easy to update using my phone too. If there’s anyone you’d like to share to-do lists with, you should take a look at this site.

Building a Backlog of Content

I’m working on writing a backlog of well written content for TPLT. Once I get enough posts in there I’ll start posting them on Wednesdays in addition to the weekly check-in.

That’s it for now. Have a good weekend!

Self-Consciousness

When it comes to this blog I’m incredibly self-conscious. I feel like a fraud. I have a hard time telling people what I write about and feel like I need to defend why I want to write what I write. I need to get over this. The best way to do that is write about stuff I know. So that is what I will do… after the wedding.

Plans

After the wedding this blog will be my top priority. (After usual things like keeping up my current job, keeping my relationships afloat, not letting the house deteriorate too much… etc.) Basically Wedding Crapé will be replaced by Blogging Crapé.

Second to this will be music stuff. Specifically recording an album of Italian Renaissance dance music with Aaron and various other musicians from around these parts.

Third is artsy stuff like sewing myself a new Medieval dress or two for Pennsic. (I’m tired of all the unflattering cotton stuff I have, and my new Tudor Wedding Garb is too nice for camping.) Also I’d like to experiment with making period jewelry and kids clothes to sell. And maybe putting pockets in my skirts.

I will keep this order of precedence in mind.

Letting Go

Methinks I need to let go of some commitments that are weighing me down right now and will weigh me down even more if I try to pursue my already mentioned plans. At the moment, I’m holding on… doing the minimum… but I’m not growing as a leader and the people I’m supposed to be leading are suffering for it. Also I see people who would do a much better job in my place. I shouldn’t stop them from shining.

But it’s hard. I feel guilty for not wanting to grow into these positions. I had dreams for myself and they no longer fit. At the same time I know that feeling guilty about not fulfilling past dreams is silly. It doesn’t make me do what I need to do to be the right person for the job. It just makes me feel bad.

Also, it’s not like I can’t go back to these positions later. I could definitely see myself doing that at some point.

Spending to Earn

I’m thinking about spending money on this Blogging project of mine. I want a better design for the site and I have someone in mind to do it. But that will cost $$. I’ve also been looking for a community to help me get over my business/blogging related mental-blocks. I think I’ve found one that would be a good fit for me, but it costs $$. My hyper-sensitive instinct says paying money for such “help” is a scam or something, but if I view it through the lens of “it’s a class” it’s not so bad.

The trick is I need to block out the time to actually make use of it. It’s not going to be something where I just show up and have everything done for me. I’m going to have to pay money and work. But I think in the end it’ll be worth the effort. I’ll about it for another few weeks before I make any serious commitments. Plus there’s a wait list so I may not even get in.

At this point I trust myself to keep going with this blogging thing. I’ve been doing it for over a year and a half. I’d still really like doing it and want to improve at it. It’s worth throwing money at. Also throwing money at anything not related to music is a big mental block of mine so… yeah.

That’s about it for now. A week from Sunday is The Wedding. You can expect a Weekly Check-in next Friday. After that I’ll be on my honeymoon in Colorado. I’ll try to have some post ready for that Friday. It won’t be a check-in because… I won’t be there for the checking in. But it’ll be something.

Whee!

If you live like no one else, later you can live like no one else. ~ Dave Ramsey

Life is a journey, not a destination. Enjoy the Journey. ~ Anonymous

Sacrifice now; Enjoy later.

Life’s too short to not enjoy every moment.

These ideas are puzzling. How can you enjoy the journey if you’re in the sacrificing phase? Isn’t the first quote all about focusing on the destination? Is it possible to live both ideas simultaneously? Are they mutually exclusive paths?

To the last question, I think the answer is no, they aren’t mutually exclusive. The contradiction only occurs on the extreme ends of each idea.

If you’re sacrificing to the point where your life no longer has any joy, you by definition aren’t enjoying the journey. If you’re focusing so intently on the future goal that you’ve lost sight of where you are right now, you’re seeing life as a destination, not a journey.

If you over focus on the journey and have no goals, you’ll be happy–maybe–but you won’t amount to much. And if you over focus on the present moment you may develop a tendency toward reckless behavior: spending beyond your means, jumping impulsively into and out of relationships, living dangerously. It’s all about now, right?

Neither idea in the extreme is good. Ideally you want both. You want to enjoy the journey to achieving great things. You want to live in the moment AND look forward to the future. Let’s look at some examples of how to do that.

Example: Getting Out of Debt

The sacrifice here is money. If you want to get out of debt you have to spend less than you earn. You have to give up buying stuff. You have to sacrifice.

You could do this the hard way by focusing on the end goal of no more debt, trim everything away, have no life, no friends, no joy. Your life is all about getting rid of debt. If you manage to keep this up, yes, you’ll get out of debt, but it’ll be at a cost higher than the money you paid to the credit card company. You’ll probably have accumulated quite a bit of resentment for the months (years?) you spend over-sacrificing. With resentment you run the risk of overspending again because “you deserve to have fun now”. You could also go the other extreme and become a scrooge-like miser. You have no friends and no fun, but you’ve got money…

You could also do this the better way by learning to enjoy being frugal. Get the most out of every dollar you spend. Fully enjoy a single orange instead of eating 5 while watching TV. Enjoy cutting out the stuff that makes you feel guilty. Eventually you’ll get out of debt, and when you do you won’t have any resentment. The time you spent trimming your spending improved your quality of life. Why would you go back to your wanton ways?

Example: Getting to a Healthy Weight

The sacrifice here is tasty unhealthy food and a sedentary lifestyle. You have to eat healthier. You have to eat less. You have to exercise.

You could do this the hard way by going on an extreme diet. You will lose weight that way if you stick to it. But it’s not sustainable. You might get to your goal weight, but do you really want to live that way? Probably not. Do you want to spend your life doing exercise you don’t enjoy? Probably not. Not surprisingly when most of try such a lifestyle change we usually give up after a few weeks days.

The better way is to pick healthy foods you like. Slowly change your diet. Slowly change your lifestyle. Do the kind of exercise you like to do. Over time you’ll get to where you want to be. You’re still sacrificing. You still have a goal. But it’s not suffering. There’s no resentment.

Example: Starting a Side Business

The sacrifice here is time. Time for friends and family. Time for hobbies. Time for sitting around. It’s really easy to fall into the “focus too much on the destination” trap here.

There are several components to doing this while enjoying the journey.

First, love what you’re doing. If you love your work, you’ll almost automatically enjoy the journey.

Second, remind yourself that it’s temporary and enjoy the imbalance. Imbalance can be fun! Ask anyone who’s gone to a convention.

Third, figure out what’s essential to your life and keep doing those things. For me that’s family and friends, music, and deep thinking. Focus on maximizing the value you get out of the time you put in. As in, skip the chit chat about the weather when talking to your Significant Other. Don’t zone out when playing music. Don’t read feeds while attempting to write a blog post.

So yeah, you can definitely do both if you want to. And when you do try to do both, you get the benefit of sustainability (i.e. you’ll be able to maintain your destination state when you get there) and avoiding resentment. Is it easy? Not usually. Most of the time it’s a lot easier to think of the extreme way to get something done or to not do anything at all. Is it worth the soul searching to try? Absolutely. Don’t we all want to make and keep our goals and enjoy life the whole way? That’s why enjoying sacrifice is on the path less traveled.

9 ) Sometimes People Need To Be Shut Up
No one likes sitting at a 3 hour meeting where the main topic ends up being “whether or not we should require everyone to wear nametags”. Also no one likes being at a meeting where one or two people have the floor and 98% of what they say is meaningless.

On the other hand, a meeting that moves from one topic to another in which everyone has a chance to speak, but not too much time, is great. Everyone feels productive. No one feels that someone’s monopolizing the floor. We want this kind of meeting but most meetings I’ve been to (and unfortunately quite a few I’ve presided over) have been like the first type.

The main reason why my meetings tended to cater to the longwinded was that I’ve had the belief that interrupting someone is the GREATEST SIN EVAR. This is bad and makes all of the succinct people irritated. If this is a problem for you, here are a few simple solutions (some of which I’ve even tried!).

• Send out an agenda ahead of time and ask the longwinded people to send you a summary of their thoughts before the meeting.
• Limit the responses of everyone. Use a timer. This is kind of harsh for the 98% of people at your meetings who don’t have this problem, though.
• When you’re notice someone’s taking a while to get to the point, interrupt and ask them to get to the point, or interrupt and see if you can sum up for them. Ask if your summary is accurate in their eyes. The glory of this kind of interruption is that you aren’t really cutting them off. They still get to have their say, and even more than that they know they’ve been understood.

10 ) Calmness Trumps Defensiveness Every Time
If you get emotional at your meeting, you lose. If you freak out and have a tantrum… you lose. Calmness about your rightness is important. People will respect you more.

11 ) Sometimes People Just Want To Be Told What To Do
Compulsory democracy isn’t necessarily a good thing. The pace of choir practice is a lot slower when I try to get the choir to lead themselves. Not everyone has the time or inclination to spend time pondering how to sing the music or how to pronounce the lyrics. Heck, a lot of the time I don’t really want to put in the extra time/effort either.

Encourage people to be proactive, but don’t force it. Don’t worry too much about being too totalitarianism. If you take it too far, people will let you know and forgive you for it if you fix it.

12 ) Fully Think Through Your Proposals
Going back to that major proposal I passed for Swing Ann Arbor, the fact that I thought everything through helped a lot with getting people on board. People trusted that it would succeed since I’d thought about just about everything.

Another thing I wanted to do was to change the tone of Swing Ann Arbor. I started going swing dancing in Ann Arbor, it was right after I got back from Austin. The Austin swing is (or at least was… I haven’t been there in years) incredibly friendly. I made lots of friends easily and was remembered by a few of the good dancers. It was a great experience. When I got to Ann Arbor, things felt different… and not in a good way. After months of going regularly people I danced with every week still didn’t remember my name… yeah… it just wasn’t that fun. As president I wanted to fix that.

Few people on the board agreed with me that there was a problem, though… and in my mind they were part of the problem. I had no idea how to convince them there was a problem, nor did I have any proposals for how to systematically fix it either. Also, any ideas I did have required more time than I was willing to give. Unsurprisingly, between my trying to cut corners and my inexperience I damaged some relationships. Alas. The main point here is if you don’t have a lot of clarity on an issue, you should be wary about attempting to deal with a problem directly, especially if you can’t convince people on your team that there’s a problem.

13 ) Pass Proposals That Take Sense for Your Group Where It Is Right Now
The SAA proposal to add more classes was a bit overambitious and didn’t fully address the issues the group was facing. I tried to arrange a track of advanced classes so that intermediate dancers, like myself, would still benefit from going to classes. What we really needed, though, was a strong base of dancers who were confident with the basics first. Unsurprisingly the classes that did that were the most successful. The intermediate / advanced classes… not so much.

14 ) Preparation is Rewarded
The days I’ve fully prepared for choir rehearsal have always been the best rehearsals. I’ve gotten a lot done. The choir’s learned a lot. Honestly, I’m amazed that I don’t prepare regularly given how much better things go when I’m prepared.

15) Preparation is Hard to Do
Preparation is kind of like exercise. While you’re doing it you sometimes feel good, and after you’ve done it you feel excellent. But it’s really hard to get up the willpower to do it in the first lace. Convincing myself to focus and figure out a day or two before rehearsal what I need or want to to do at the next rehearsal is not trivial.

Having compelling goals helps this. (Huh, who’d have though…) Having a lifestyle setup that supports this is also immensely helpful. If you and everyone in your household knows and respects that every Friday after work you spend an hour on preparing for rehearsal, it gets a lot easier to take the time to actually prepare. Funny that.

16 ) Leadership Takes Both More and Less Time Than I thought it did
In certain respects, leadership doesn’t take all that much time. With being SAA president I didn’t have to be at every weekly swing dance. I only had to organize the monthly meetings, preside over said meeting, and make sure all the administrative stuff with being a student group was taken care of. Really it wasn’t that much.

Similarly with choir, I only really need to figure out the day of what we’re going to sing, and then be there every week to facilitate the rehearsal.

MOAS, I have 4 reports a year I have to send in, and then I have to organize the weekly workshop, most of which are recurring ones anyway.

At the same time, if you want the group to flourish you will have an invisible weight on your shoulders all the time. You have to coordinate with your executive board. You have to prepare for choir practice. You have to encourage people to come to the weekly workshops. Writing emails can take a while. Doing publicity can take a while. And these are the kind of activities where it’s hare to measure how long they take. Some don’t actually take that long, but they can feel like they take a long time. Some zap your mental energy. (How do you quantify that drain?) In short, it’s complicated.

Do I think Leadership is Worth it?
Absolutely. When something I’ve worked on turns out well it feels immensely wonderful. Working with other people to create something big and cool is also great. It’s a great way to develop yourself and come face to face with your limitations. You meet a lot of people. You become a better person for it. (Hopefully) Really, I’d recommend leadership to anyone who wants a systematic way to improve themselves and the community around them.