…words

My friend and fellow blogger Dave Seah has published his own Groundhog Day Resolution post, and it is a doozy. I wanted to share a piece of it with you, although you should go read the entire piece:

Groundhog Day Resolutions 2010 Kickoff

Seah spends more time in his blogging sharing personal insights than I do, and perhaps that is simply a matter of style. Or it could be a holdover from the “old me” – a complete introvert, nose buried in a book and a very small circle of real friends. Or, as I think about it a little more, it could be because I tend to intuitively arrive at decisions and conclusions without really having to think through the intermediary steps. I have always done this, it caused no end of frustration in school, especially in math class…where “showing the steps” was allegedly essential in Basic Algebra. Hmmm…

Note to self: Think about how you arrived at your conclusion. Show your work, it’s a little bit more important now. In fact, your life may depend on it.

Anyway, the first piece of Seah’s post that I want to share is about what he has resolved for 2010:

The first two resolutions were restatements of my 2007 resolutions: write about what catches my eye, create that which illuminates and achieve financial independence through what I create. I knew it wasn’t going to be the “fast track” to money, but it was the way I decided I wanted to do it. A little later that year, I finally noticed that the more I worked with other people on their projects, the better my own projects seemed to go. That lead to a new directive: Be involved with dreams that are larger than myself.

By the end of the year, my Groundhog Day Resolutions had coalesced into a set of principles:

* Communicate with a variety of people in a variety of ways. Be interested! Have real conversations with them! Do it face-to-face, and through online media.
* Create tangible new things every day, then show what you’ve made to those people you’re talking to.
* Be involved in other people’s dreams that are larger than yourself, with people I like and respect.

These are external principles that seem to serve me well, and they have been stated for the past five years of my blogging in various ways. It hasn’t been always easy to maintain the momentum, particularly when it came to creating everyday.

Robert Hruzek, Joanna Young, Brad Shorr at SOBCon

I had never really thought about it, but these are very similar principles to the ones that guide my own life. The last time that I actually sat down and thought about my own guiding principles was last year at this time when I started putting down the outline of my 7 Habits of Highly Effective People in Context e-book. These principles, especially that of collaborating with others on projects bigger than myself, really coalesced after my first experience at SOBCon in Chicago (May 2008).

The seeds of the personal and online network that that experience planted have grown and blossomed into something that I would never have dreamed possible: real friends and collaborators that I can ask for help when I need it, and whom I am happy to help when they ask. And they do ask. Not just for links or re-Tweets or things like that, but for my honest opinion on their work and their dreams. I find it humbling and thrilling at the same time.

Reading Seah’s post made me realize that I had completely internalized these principles. I just don’t think about them anymore, I live them. One of the first things that I do when I find something interesting or valuable is share it with my network, ask for thoughts and Ideas (yes, big “I” ideas), and volunteer to share my own efforts to make it into something bigger (like work.life.creativity – which I will be the first to admit needs a little more attention).

As I am writing this post, the gears are turning in the back of my brain, and I believe that I would benefit from re-establishing these principles, and making them part of my daily routine. Really thinking about and analyzing how they affect the things that I am working on, not just here but in my role as the Tavern manager too. You would thank that with the amount of effort I put into creating things, tracking them and managing them, I would think a little harder about how they got there…

Seah goes on to add another layer to his overall strategy:

However, late in 2009 I had formulated two additional principles, which are curiously-contradictory:

* Just do is about doing something that changes something about the world, and then quantifying its effect. This is the action-oriented, metrics-based approach to productivity we’re familiar with. This is the direct approach.
* Just be, by comparison, is more about observation and context than action. The change in the world, come from the cycle of observing what is happening, and then reacting to it as part of the mysterious flow of it all. This is a more artistic approach to life, and the surprising thing is that the world also changes just by your being in it.

Finding the balance between “just doing” and “just being” is helping to unlock my creativity and productivity.

The “A-ha Moment”

Indeed, finding the balance is always the most interesting part of your life and work and job. I am pretty good at the Just Do part of this whole journey/adventure. In fact, I have spent the past three years working very hard on training myself to embrace my ADD in order to find and implement routines and lifestyle structures that allow me to be productive and effective. Observing and iterating these activities into a ruthlessly efficient productivity practice.

Only recently have I decided to push myself to do something creative every day, to start thinking more about thinking, and to really discipline myself into starting less Projects in order to complete more of them. But there is something more to it, something missing from that equation: Observe and reflect upon what effect my actions are having on the world around me.

I will admit that I have been in a bit of a “funk” lately, working (too?) hard and accomplishing quite a bit. But I have not been my normal, smiling self (the Lovely Bride has commented on it more than once in the past month). Because I can see that I have not created the balance that I need, I have been pre-occupied with the Doing and paying scant attention to the Being. (I just checked, and I have not written my Morning Pages since 23 Jan.)

So, here goes. I have a few things that I have scheduled for myself in the Doing column to complete yet this morning, so I am going to go and do them. One of those things is the laundry, which offers me a chance to have about an hour to just Be. To observe and reflect. To a kind of mind-dump, not the “what are my open loops and what do I need to do to close them” sort, but the “why am I motivated to do the things that I do” type. Or whatever turns up.

I will write it all down and report back tomorrow. It should be interesting…