It’s only been a few months, but I’ve been putting in a tremendous amount of time and effort this year to work towards my Business Analysis Certification. Previously, I spent twenty-plus years working in non-profit, non-governmental agencies, and then municipal government doing a lot of work implementing and running projects, products, and programs. And so the decision to formalize some of that knowledge with a few classy letters behind my name was obvious. And now, being most of the way through the program, I’m confident that is was a good fit and a good choice. I’m actually pretty good at this stuff, if you don’t mind me bragging a little bit.
Now? In a little over a month I should be done.
I guess that means I’m officially open to work. And I suppose that also means I need to start poking around job boards, contracting agencies, and other places that might be looking for someone like that.
Then… I also figured I’d put some good vibes out into the universe. So, hey all out there in my little professional network. Big ask, I know, but if you hear anything or have any advice, I’d love to hear from you.
Category: plans and goals
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business analysis
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little experiments
Goals are out.
Experiments are in.
I was listening to a podcast a few weeks ago and an interesting idea was suggested by one of the guests. We have these big ideas about goals and resolutions and accomplishments, but maybe we’re wrong about all that. Thinking about self-improvement or personal projects as zero-sum must-achieve-end-state goals may be leading a lot of us to premature notions of failure.
Instead, the guest suggested, we should be thinking about these things as experiments.
Rather than saying “I’m going to blog every weekday, forever.” maybe we should be saying something like “I wonder how many days in a row I can blog before I run out of ideas.”
The first is a goal that is (probably) bound for failure.
The second is an interesting experiment in personal acheivement that ends with an answer and some self-knowledge.
It’s a little mental shift, but a big change in attitude, huh?
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hammer meet nail
Creativity is sometimes, to borrow a turn of phrase, a hammer looking for a nail.
Inside every creative soul there can be this latent urge to make something, anything, and despite the tools sitting on shelves or the technology idling on the desk, all of it patiently waiting for inspiration to strike, the creative hammer can sometimes be lacking a nail to strike.
Motivation without a project to constuct.
That’s not to say there isn’t always something worth pounding away at, a loose fence board or a wobbly bench that needs a few good thwacks, but constucting something brand new, whole cloth, fresh and crisp and exciting—therein life can sometimes leave the creative soul wanting for such inspiration.
Thus leaves the poor sap with a perfectly good hammer in his hand to walk from place to place, examining every nook and cranny of his own backyard for a bit of mending to be done or maintenance upon which to direct his energy. He may even fall into the trap of picking through a pile of scrap wood and with a bag of nails in hand feel as though there is something worth constructing from the leftover bits of other projects.
And sure, interesting artifacts may tumble out of such efforts. It is more soothing for the creative soul, however, to have a blueprint, even if it exists only in his mind, with a fresh purpose and a meaningful objective, to build something out of purposely acquired supply and to create with intent.
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day by day by day
I can’t write enough about incrementalism.
The classic proverb asks: how do you eat an elephant?
One bite at a time.
I have been writing and creating and writing and making and writing and posting. If I went back in time a year to when I set out on this little writing life adventure and looked out upon the quantity of work that I have banked in the intervening year, I know I would be completely overwhelmed.
Think of what you can accomplish just doing a little bit each day or even each week.
If you record ten seconds of video every day for a year, by the end of the year you will have over an hour of footage.
If you open a document and write one paragraph of one hundred words per day every day for a year you will have a document over thirty six thousand words long.
If you post one thing online a day every day for a year, you will have over three hundred and sixty posts at the end.
Incrementalism. One bite at a time.
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critical mass
After a year of pecking away at this thing I’ve learned to think of as a “writing life” I’ve found that I’ve kinda reached a critical mass of projects.
True. Part of me thought I would have created something worthy of publication by now, but rather that has not been the case. For example, I have a written 80% of a novel. I have penned about thirty scripts for yet-unrecorded podcast episodes. I have typed out a couple of completed short stories that need editing and the bones of at least a dozen more that need focus. My word processor files are now filled with so many personal essays on such a wide range of topics and in such a broad state of completion that I can barely keep track save for just to open one that looks interesting and polish, tweak, add, or prune.
And. It would be fair to say that I have typed a quarter of a million words in the last year. Sure, I’ve not but published a whole number percentage of those but they exist and they are not without value. Hardly.
In fact, as I stated, I’m at something of a critical mass. I have such a broad number of great little projects in progress that on any given day I can wake up and type a few hundred words here or few hundred words there and make progress on any one of those projects. Like, if I’m so inclined I can write another chapter in my novel, scope out a few more pages of that comic script I’ve been working on, or edit one of my essays for just a hint more of clarity.
None of this is wasted effort. It’s all incrementally building and growing and progressing.
It all just adds bit by bit, drip by drab, onto the whole of my collected efforts.
And while I may sometimes feel a little discouraged by the lack of publication-readiness of most of it, I am deeply encouraged that so much of it is slowly and steadily moving with momemtum towards that publish-ready state at some point in the future. Maybe even the near future.
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writing pages
With mid-year approaching, those of us who tie resolve to new habit are on high alert for roadsigns for self-improvement.
I spotted a popular brand of faux-leather notebook selling their 18-month daily journal-slash-planners whose imprinted dating scheme conveniently begins in a little over three weeks on July 1.
I stayed my hand with effort as I reached for my wallet.
I love paper. I love bound notebooks. I love the art of scribbling my thoughts onto pages. I love to journal and sketch and bullet and itemize my life.
What kept my credit card at bay was the recall of the dozens of partially filled notebooks already sitting on my shelf waiting for those past resolutions to write daily or sketch towards themes or etch my reality with ink upon paper.
Journaling is deeply meditative. It’s like mental yoga. Words spill upon the paper and in writing pages and pages and pages thoughts are churned through our mental gears and manifest as echoes of any variety of ideas, trauma, genius or fictional fabrication.
I do need to write more. I need to write more pages on the paper I already own and in the digital spaces I already manage.
I probably do not need another journal.
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tracked apps
It was fitting, or so I thought, that as the previous year came strolling to the finish line, one of my social media friends posted a screenshot of the step-tracking app they had been using throughout 2023 to motivate themselves to walk more. It was fitting because it was one of those “walk along with the characters” apps, the kind that aligns your daily pedometer tally to that of a fictional character and through story encourages the user to keep pace.
The character, of course, was Frodo Baggins. The journey, of course, was the journey to the mountain where the Dark Lord’s ring (spoiler alert!) would be tossed into the fire from which it had been forged to unseat the evil that had been creeping over the land. This, according to the app, was a distance of a little less than three thousand kilometres, and one helluva fitness goal for the year.
On the eve of the new year, I would have been silly not to download it and attempt such a goal myself in 2024, right?
Just like a certain fictional hobbit, I do a lot of traveling on foot.
I run for fitness, yes, and I log many miles that as these posts continue in the coming months and years readers will almost certainly hear more about.
But I also walk a lot, too. Arguably I walk more than I run. More than arguably. Measurably. Quantitatively in both time and distance, in fact, I walk more than I run. I walk the dog. I walk to the library or cafe to write. I walk with a sketchbook and pen in my pocket. I walk the trails with my voice memo app open and ready to make notes about what I am going to write in the next scene when I’m back in front of my keyboard. Walking is not just keeping my body shipshape, but apparently good for the mind and soul, too.
And this year I am tracking it via a goal tied to the Lord of the Rings.
Kinda.
For reasons of copyright, the app does a lot of handwaving to avoid using (and thus selling) any direct references to the beautiful works of Tolkien. But this year, in 2024 I’ll certainly be chasing “Mr. Underhill” to the mountain of fire via a single-purpose piece of technology that tangles up my pulse-making efforts with that fictional world. And so yes, this all this seems very fitting—and right and fun, too—as I spend the year walking and thinking and working to build and create my own fictional trails.
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those words
The whole point of this life I’ve drafted for myself, or so it seems to me more and more each day, is to simply get words onto paper.
That is why I am here.
That is why I am jabbing the creativity fork into the idea wall socket and hoping for a spark. (Do not try that at home, it’s a little bit crazy after all.)
In the middle of 2023 I decided to walk away from an okay government job to take a break and re-evaluate. That break evolved into a simple realization, the insight into my own existence that I had been pursuing the thing I needed at the expense of the thing I wanted. I needed to pay my bills and earn a paycheque, but I wanted to build stuff, create, make, write something that endured longer than a strategy memo or a performance metrics report or even a short-lived website. I wanted to create art and music and stories and somewhere in all that just put lots and lots of words onto paper that had even merely a small glimmer of a chance of outliving me.
It is why I am here, jabbing around for that spark now, having turned our home into a single-income family and while I mostly live off of my savings to buy my coffee and digital ink supplies—not to mention all those forks.
This is my vibe: to write.
To write all the time, because that’s what I get to do for a while, because that’s who I have chosen to be. It’s both what I want and what I need. And buried in there are the uncountable pieces of advice I’ve read over the decades, consumed in the years and months leading into this decision, and the same kinds of advice in which I’ve lathered my soul these past couple weeks as I jump into 2024 with a fork in hand, ready to jab around. That advice is this: just write then. That the point of it, is to do it. Go ahead. Think. Work. Feel. Immerse. Ponder. Wrangle the story, sure. But ultimately, just write. Put words onto paper.
So I am.
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resolution
Now that the big day is come and gone, we can start thinking about wrapping up 2023.
For me, 2023 was a huge year. Job change, life change, new roles, big accomplishments, travel, upsets, stumbles, achievements beyond belief and deleting hundreds of little things from my life. I had given myself the back half of the last year to figure things out after which I’d pretty much felt certain that life would start to make a bit more sense.
It doesn’t, of course. But the calendar is about to turn over and…
It’s not a wonder at all that I’m eagerly pondering 2024.
The new year is often a time of making resolutions, kicking off new projects, or setting big goals. I usually do that, and usually I stick with a few of my resolutions and find myself in a very different place at the change of the calendar twelve months later. This year is not much different, but those changes are motivated by the events of 2023, the events of the year past almost as much as a resolve about the future.
Maybe things will make more sense in 2024. Or maybe not. But we can resolve to hope so and aspire to find out, right?
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challenges
As October draws to a close I find myself standing at the start line of a race that I’ve run previously but yet is not quite as familiar as the running marathon I tackled earlier in the month.
For the fifth time I’m about to challenge myself by doing National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) the novel writing challenge where writers are tasked with penning the first draft of a new fifty thousand word novel in the thirty days of November.
Thousands tackle the challenge each year. Many succeed. Some even find success beyond simple completion and have published their work.
I have written four novels in my life.
And all four of those novels have been completed during previous NaNoWriMo challenges.
You could even call me a true believer in the value of public challenges, and you would be absolutely correct. As silly as it is to publicly declare your intention to do something like speed writing a novel in a single month, I’m going for number five this year …and that’s no joke.
(It might even be more than a coincidence that I completed my fifth marathon this year, too.)