Loving the Failures
WN.04 \\ 05.27-06.02.24
Greetings!!
I hope spring..summer…sprummer? is finding you wherever you are, and small people are discovering the joys of sleeping in every day instead of just the weekends.
Welcome to my off-weekly off-the-cuff review of efforts, insights, and whatevers in the last few days.
This week’s notes include the value of:
self-imposed deadlines
intrinsic motivation
failures
Pssst…did I tell you…?
I’m leading a workshop!
Making Tough Choices & Practicing Commitment Care for Self-Compassion
Commitment Care, rather than project or time management, emphasizes a holistic understanding of our responsibilities, interests, and activities. Commitment Care cultivates discernment (what we say yes to) and discretion (what we say no to), so that we can maintain (or renew) personal integrity in our relationships with the divine, with ourselves, and with others.
In this workshop, participants will clarify their commitment areas, and map their existing commitments. They’ll also categorize their commitments by priority, which enables them to make decisions “ahead of time,” so that they can appropriately respond to new opportunities.
🗓️ Saturday, July 13
⏰ 3:00-4:30p EST
🖥️ Online via Zoom
🎁 Free!
Would love to see you there!
My Thoughts, Let Me Give You Them
As I mentioned in my last weeknote,1 I set myself the task of getting a sh*tty first draft of my book outline out of my head, onto paper, and into the world by May 31. I did it, I finished it, it’s sent out to folks. Now I will shift focus to getting ready for my upcoming workshop.
Working for and by yourself has some weird facets to it - namely, that the majority of your activities matter only to you. Obviously some results matter to clients and others, but the process of achieving those results rests on your very own bony (or brawny)2 shoulders. Sometimes you just have to tell yourself do it, come hell or high water.
Even though I’ve talked about this book with friends for a few months,3 the reality is that, at this moment, no one really cares what happens with it. I could stop working on it, focus on something else, and people would be curious but probably not much else. This book, these ideas, matter only to me and my willingness to keep wrestling with it. It requires that I keep before me a vision of what could be that few others see or value.4
Which is to say, it requires a lot of intrinsic motivation, because there’s literally no external incentive at the moment.
I have a fair store of intrinsic motivation. Perhaps it started when my parents decided to homeschool me. Rather than do the teaching themselves,5 we used a curriculum that came with textbooks and videos (pre-internet, people!). My dad worked weird hours, and my mom hated schedules, so they literally put the materials in front of me, and said, “You figure it out. Let us know when you have tests.” So I’ve got a long history of making it work.6
I’ve also been working on “my own business” for a few years now. At first it was a lot more dilettante-ish, something I tinkered on while working full-time and finding my way.7 Then it became something I really wanted to do, but matching want-to, skills, and market has taken me the last two years.
And I feel I have had a lot of failures. Failures of expertise and experience, failures of knowledge, failures of practice and application, failures of “market fit” and marketing. Mostly, though, I’ve felt failures of nerve, of a lack of courage in putting myself out into the world in so vulnerable a way, not having the “safety net” of someone else’s structure and systems to buffer my experiments.
I try to stay pragmatic about these things. A former boss of mine told me once, “If we’re not failing, we’re not trying.”8 But here’s something else I’ve recently realized.
The failures show you what you love.
Failing doesn’t necessarily guarantee success (it’s hard to put nuance into a neon sign), but it does act like a Venn diagram. It takes the goal you thought you wanted and the results you’ve gotten so far, and somewhere in that thin slice of overlap, you find out what matters to you.
So I guess that’s what I’ve learned lately: what exactly it is that I love.
How’s your week going?
Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.
Shalom,
And will continue to do so, sorry.
It is not unlike the Christian journey that Paul writes about in Philippians 3:12-14. There’s a long-term (very long-term) goal toward which we are called to keep moving, yet the clarity of vision and depth of desire sometimes feel a bit thin.
Good God, someone would have died if we had.
It did result in some cosmetics-related courses. Which, by the way, are available on YouTube for free! Navigate Cosmetics Retail & Curate Your Cosmetics Style
A piece of advice I’m very grateful I got early.