Mixed.

I liked having more time for reading and making things. And my mind did feel quieter, less distracted and more focused.

But (and you knew there was a “but” coming because of my use of the past tense in that last paragraph) I missed being social on Twitter. Apparently I need that. I love people and I love talking with people and that’s basically what Twitter is. Also, I get enough time-sensitive emails that checking Gmail only twice a day isn’t going to cut it. (This was news to me.)

So, no more 2x/day limit.

My new goal is where I should have been all along: the middle ground, sane and healthy and ruddy-cheeked. I’ve coaxed my subconscious into monitoring how often I’m checking Gmail et al., and if my middle ground frenzies itself into a frothing every-other-minuteness, I’ll pull back and take a breather for a few. That should do the trick. (If it doesn’t, you’ll be getting another blog post.)

Now to go tweet about this…

The Internet is a magical place. I love the Internet. Much of my life revolves around it. Because of the Internet I was able to start an online magazine which led to my meeting my wife. My day job is web design, and I applied for it because of a LinkedIn forward I got. I’ve made a lot of friends over the Internet, through mailing lists and blogs and Twitter, and I value them.

But the Internet is almost too much, you know? Too many voices, too many things to do, to watch, to read. A steady patter of pings begging for my attention relentlessly, and if I turn my head every time they come, I spend my life turning my head instead of actually doing things and making things and being a real person.

I like this line from Jack Cheng’s article Habit Fields:

Just because you can have instant access at your fingertips doesn’t mean you should.

More and more, I’m finding myself turning things off, trying to silence the buzz so I can get some actual work done — and regain my sanity. I’ve disabled all incoming email and Growl notifications. And even then, I’m still checking Gmail and Twitter every two minutes hoping I’ll have shiny new emails or tweets waiting for me. I have to exit out of the apps entirely if I want to stand a chance at avoiding distraction.

What I’ve discovered: The longer I go in between checking Gmail/Twitter/Google Reader/whatever, the better I feel. I don’t know how long is ideal (a day? half a day?), but I’ll tell you what, it sure as heck isn’t every five minutes.

It’s not just Gmail and Twitter, of course. It’s the whole idea of multitasking. Peter Bregner’s article on how and why to stop multitasking is beautiful. Also, if you haven’t already read the Nicholas Carr’s Wired article on how the web is rewiring our brains, go read it. Now. I’m not convinced that this rewiring is entirely a bad thing, but I do find that it’s harder and harder to finish reading books (which are so much longer than blog posts). And the more I multitask, the less I get done and the worse I feel. (This is one of the reasons why I like the iPhone and iPad — you’re effectively forced to singletask, and it’s an oh so beautiful thing.)

Big blocks of focused time are delicious. Spurts of attention timesliced every which way, not so much. I want more quiet, less noise.

Unplugging is hard for us Internet junkies. After all, feeling the pulse of the world in your fingertips is heady. No man is an island, and extricating ourselves from the web, even for a short time, can be sticky.

But people have been doing just fine for thousands of years without the Internet, and a few more hours away from my email or Twitter really isn’t going to make anything blow up, much as I’d like to think it would. A couple years ago, I couldn’t for the life of me understand people who didn’t have email or who only checked it once every week or two. Now, though, I envy them.

I want to try something radical, something completely crazy like, oh, checking my email and Twitter only twice a day. ;) Twice a day. Man, it feels almost impossible, but at the same time my heart wants to sing at the thought. I’m giddy thinking how much more I could get done each day with all that extra time — more time reading, more time with my family, more time just thinking. Peaceful time. Mmm.

Okay, I’m going to do it. From now on, I’ll check my email and Twitter once in the morning (around 9:00) and once at night (around 9:00), and that’s it. Period.

Which means I can’t check my email for another four hours. Goodness, this is already getting hard. (Yeah, I’ve got it bad.)

Here we go.

I’ve discovered my dream job: illustrating children’s books. It mixes together a ton of the things I love (books, stories, art, kids), and it makes my heart sing with giddiness at the thought of being able to do it as a day job. It’s so me.

But (and isn’t there always a but?) every time I seriously consider changing careers to chase this dream, bam, the anvil of inferiority falls down from hell-in-the-sky, trying to flatten my hopes. I’m not that good at illustration, it says. I didn’t get a degree in the arts. There are so many other better illustrators out there. I’m late to the game. (I’m almost 30. Okay, I’m only 26, but hey, I like to round up.) Blah blah blah. It’s a dang convincing argument.

I don’t care.

Daunting though it may be, illustration really is my thing, and it’s something I’d love to spend forty hours a week at for the rest of my life. I’d do it even if I didn’t get paid for it. Sure, I know it won’t be perfect and that I won’t love every single second of it, but I’ll love most of it, and man, when something calls to you like this, you have to answer.

It won’t be easy. I’ll have to pick up all the experience and skills I wish I could have gained years ago. But that isn’t going to stop me. I’m doing this, for real. Even though switching careers like this is scary. Even though my illustration skills need lots of work. Even though that stupid little voice inside my head keeps chanting, “You can’t do it you can’t do it you can’t do it.”

I can do it. And I will. Mark my words: within five years, I’ll be illustrating children’s books regularly, if not full-time. Mmm.

Yeah, it didn’t last.

What happened? I kicked off my shackles, giving myself permission to make art and to code. See, I’d been telling myself that I shouldn’t do art because I wasn’t an artist and shouldn’t write code because I wasn’t a coder, blah blah dee blah blah. Hogwash. (Besides, even though I was telling myself this, I was still coding and making art on the sly.)

Trying to fit myself into the mold of what I thought I should be has once again proven a failure. I admire those people who just write or just paint or just whatever. I almost kind of envy them. But that’s not me.

No, I’m a got-to-do-everything kind of guy, rotating between a smorgasbord of hobbies all the time. One day it’s writing and coding, the next it’s illustrating and writing, the next it’s coding and animating and book digitizing. And that’s okay. It’s blissfully okay. Because artificial limits are stupid.

You know where the resistance has been coming from? There’s a little minimalist inside of me who wants to chop chop chop everything out of my life so that I’m only focusing on a few things. He’s only half right. What matters is chucking out the unimportant stuff so that the important stuff is what remains. I thought only writing and design were important. I was wrong. They’re important, yes, but so are coding and art and lots of other things. (And of course God and family and all that come first. I’m just talking about hobbies and interests here.)

This realization has been liberation. Sweet, blessed freedom. I’m making art and oh my goodness, it’s so much fun. (Which is why I’ve been doing so much of it.) I’m also writing code and reveling in being a geek, brushing up on my math skills by reading tutorials on Instapaper on my phone (along with the RenderMan spec and articles on chess strategy), and learning funky programming languages like Erlang and Haskell. And I’m still writing and designing, too.

So yes, there will be more art. Much, much, much more art. There will be more software and geekerie. There will be more stories and novels and plays. There will be more language charts and books (the D&C’s almost done).

Ironically, this is what I’ve been doing all along, just with a little red-with-horns guilt trip attached. “You’re supposed to be a writer, dude. Why are you wasting all your free time doing all this other junk? Go work on your novel.” That guilt trip is now nothing but a wisp of smoke in my memory.

Now to go finish up my next iPhone painting…

1. I’ve moved both this blog and the Mormon Artist site over to my new host, and it went surprisingly smoothly. (Well, with a few hiccups like forgetting to enable mod_rewrite, forgetting to add the new domain zone, etc. And when I tried to import the 15mb WordPress XML file, I ended up with 7,000 comments instead of the 5,000 I actually have, so I had to dump the SQL directly and use that instead.)

2. The advantage of moving hosts like this is that I’ve been forced to decide what’s actually important and what’s not. I used to have around twenty-five domains registered. I’m paring it down to three. And I’ve gotten rid of years’ worth of cruft on the old server.

3. I love Linode. Everything feels faster and I’m learning tons (like how to use the MySQL command-line client, which I’ve always been meaning to get around to but haven’t yet).

4. I’ve unlinked my feeds from Buzz. I’m still trying to decide if I should unlink my blog from Facebook, though. Not sure…

5. Today included paring down my Vim statusline and then adding a wordcount to it (which updates when you save). Oh, and I added line numbers to the terminal version. See my .vimrc for the details.

6. To keep this post from being all geekspeak: Tonight we went to my brothers’ church basketball game — three of them on a team and they creamed their opponents. It was awesome. At first I kept thinking, “This is just civilized war,” and I still think that’s true of most sports to some extent, but yeah, it’s just a game. I have to remind myself of that. ;)

7. I know I said I was going to finish my novel Tanglewood, but I’ve decided to put it on hold for now and write some short stories. Also, I’ve got a blog post coming up soon on why I’m spending so much time doing genealogy and art and coding when I said not too long ago on here that I was going to focus solely on writing and design. :)

And I got scared. Overwhelmed. My next thought: “You know, I’ve abandoned this project before. Like, five times. I can abandon it again.”

But then (and thankfully there is a “but” here) as I was walking home later that day, I was visited by the first of three epiphanies. (Hmm, this is starting to sound a little like Dickens’ Christmas Carol.)

Epiphany #1: Writing Beyond will be hard. Very. Hard.

Corollary #1: It’s still worth it.

As usually happens in these cases, supporting evidence quickly rallied to my side.

Exhibit A: After dinner, I was reading Seth Godin’s book Small Is the New Big and came across an essay on hard work. “It’s hard work to invent a new system, service, or process that’s remarkable,” he said, and it grabbed me by the collar and shook me, because that’s exactly what I’m trying to do with Beyond.

Exhibit B: My friend Janssen told me about an article on the perils of praising your children — if you tell a child they’re smart, it actually inspires them (despires them?) to underachieve, whereas if you tell them they’re a hard worker, they do better. That’s the story of my life, folks. People told me I was smart, and as a result, whenever I ran into something that I couldn’t coast through easily, I gave up almost immediately. I put too much trust in innate talent (which may or may not have been there at all) and almost completely ignored effort. This is a recipe for failure. Edison was right: it’s 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.

We now turn to the epiphany of Creativity Present. As a brief bit of backstory, I’m about 15,000 words into the first draft of Tanglewood, my young adult fantasy novel. Last week I decided to put it on hold so I could focus on writing short stories, because they’re shorter and thus easier (in my mind, anyway). Then on Wednesday I was walking home and had yet another epiphanic visit:

Epiphany #2: Writing Tanglewood will be hard.

Corollary #2: It’s still worth it.

I’m sensing a theme here. I decided that yes, writing a novel is something I really want to do, and jumping ship now isn’t going to help my goal. So I’m going to write short stories after I finish the book.

The third epiphany, tall and cloaked, came yesterday — also while I was walking home. (Seriously, my best thinking time is while walking home from work. And in the shower.) As you may have noticed, I’m an artist (with a very, very lowercase ‘a’). I like making art. But I’m not very good at drawing, particularly at drawing anything that remotely resembles a human. And I’ve been stuck at the same level for a very long time.

Epiphany #3: Learning to draw will be hard. Corollary #3: It’s still worth it.

In retrospect this all sounds completely obvious, but dang, I’ve wasted a lot of time avoiding hard work — and I didn’t even realize I was doing it. I’ve been evading the hard stuff by doing easier things, or by telling myself that I wasn’t cut out for art or that I shouldn’t spend my time programming when I really should be spending my time doing x, y, or z.

Bzzt.

Lesson Learned #1: Just because it’s hard doesn’t mean I shouldn’t do it.
Lesson Learned #2: Worthwhile things take effort. Always.
Lesson Learned #3: Recognizing that it’ll be hard somehow makes it easier.
Lesson Learned #4: Doing things that stretch my skills is exhilarating.

So I’m going to forge onward with Beyond, keep writing Tanglewood, and practice drawing humans until they look real and not like hobgoblins with elephantitis.

And yes, I know I’m sort of bending the actual meaning of the word “corollary.” :)

My initial reaction? Disappointed. The science fiction nerd in me wanted the tablet to be full of the new technologies Apple has patented — haptic feedback, solar-powered battery, individual finger detection, etc. — and I felt disenchanted, disillusioned, all of that dis- stuff. (Ironic, since I said in my initial tablet post that “I do expect some cool, glamorous new technology in the tablet, but the more exciting thing (for me, anyway) will be the re-envisioning of how we use computers.” Sometimes I think I need to read what I write.)

The iPad was more evolutionary than revolutionary, I thought. Wrong. The revolution is more subtle, but it’s definitely there, and it’s exactly what I talked about at the end of that post (duh, Ben). But we’ll get to that in a moment. First, let’s look at those speculations.

Speculations

• Canvas. iPad. The name is awful and I’m sure most of you have heard all of the female hygiene jokes already. It’s also a bit too close to “iPod.” But that’s what it’s called, so whatever.
• 10″ screen. 9.7″. Close enough.
• New multitouch gestures. Some. At first I didn’t think there was anything new on this front, but watch the Gizmodo video on the new gestures. They’re mostly natural enough that I didn’t even realize they were new.
• A brilliant new input method. We got a big virtual keyboard instead. I originally thought this was lame, because who wants to type like that standing up? Then I realized that it’s mostly not meant to be typed on while standing. And that’s okay.
• Amazing battery life. Not solar-powered and not infinite, but ten hours isn’t bad. We’re getting there.
• New OS. Apparently it is iPhone OS, from what I’ve heard.
• Both 3G and wifi. I was wrong about no plan being necessary, but there are no contracts, which is cool. As for the 250mb/month thing, I checked my iPhone and found that I’ve been using around 170mb/month on it. Streaming video, though, would need unlimited (or wifi).
• $1000 price tag. $499–829. I’m happy to have been wrong here, and yes, I’m planning to get one (the $499 model).
• Books. Yes, indeed. More on this shortly.
• New section of App Store. Not quite. Letting the iPad run iPhone apps is smart, I’ve realized, for two reasons: new iPad owners can use all of their iPhone apps from the get-go, but it’s also a spur to developers to make their apps iPad-ready. (iPhone apps look kind of lame swallowed up in that vast sea of black. And no, pixel-doubling is not a real answer.)

iBooks

When Steve mentioned that there’d be an iBook Store and that the books would be using the ePub format, I got a little giddy. This could potentially be really, really big for ebooks. (It could also fall flat. We’ll have to wait and see.)

First, the iBooks app. The page-turning animation is nice eye candy, sure, but the typography on the book in the demo was pathetic. Rivers of whitespace running all over the place. Seriously, Apple needs to learn about hyphenation. (And this from the company who first brought beautiful typography to computers. Sigh.)

Brief semi-related tangent: As a ebook designer, I’d prefer users to be able to read books the way I typeset them, but if they really want to change the typeface or the font size or whatever, then I say let them do it. If they make it worse, it’s their own fault. My job is to set sane defaults (since most people don’t change the defaults anyway). Similarly, as a reader, I’m willing to stick with the default settings if they’re beautiful, but if they’re hideous, I want to be able to change things till I get something I can stand. Apple, if you can’t get the justification to look good, at least let us turn it off. Please.

Also, the font choices (Baskerville, Cochin, Palatino, Times, and Verdana) wouldn’t have been at the top of my list, but I’ll reserve judgment there till I see them in use on an actual iPad.

I hope the iBooks app doesn’t mean Apple will be restricting other ebook apps (like Eucalyptus, Stanza, and Classics) on the iPad. Probably not. Will I be able to load my own ePubs into iBooks? Hard to say, but iTunes does let you add your own music and videos to it, so there’s precedent for that. I’m crossing my fingers that the iBooks infrastructure will be available on the iPhone and Mac as well. The iPad might be the ideal way to read iBooks, as far as form factor goes, but it’d be nice to switch devices when I’m away from my iPad (the way you can read Kindle books on your iPhone).

Speaking of the Kindle: Its display is ugly and the slow refresh rates turned me off from the beginning. Yes, I know that e-ink is supposedly easier on the eyes and all that, but I’d rather have a crisp, colorful, fast display, and most people are used to reading off screens anyway. (And if you’re planning on reading for long periods of time, go get a real book. The iPad/iBook isn’t meant to replace paper books — at least not yet.)

iBook Store

This is the more exciting part for me, being a publisher. In the keynote, Steve Jobs said that they’d be opening the floodgates to every publisher in the world, which is great. I’m wondering what their requirements are for who they consider to be a publisher, though. Will it be a yearly fee (like the App Store, where you have to pay at least $99/year) or something else? No clue. I don’t really know what the process is for getting music or videos into the iTunes Store. (Podcasts are relatively easy, though.) Unless Apple’s requirements are unnaturally stiff, I plan to sign up and try it out.

This is great for ePub, I should add. Apple’s backing could help it become the MP3 of books. And ePub is itself a decent ebook standard (it’s HTML/CSS zipped up, basically, with some XML metadata attached — nothing too proprietary).

Will there be DRM? I hope not. Apple is already moving away from DRM for the music on iTunes, but I don’t know if the book publishers would sign on if there weren’t DRM. My guess is that there’ll be Apple-specific DRM, like there was in iTunes, and in a few years when the publishers see how they’re selling way more ebooks through the iBooks Store, Apple will press them to drop the DRM and they’ll comply. ~fingers crossed~

What the naysayers are saying

Two of the biggest complaints I’ve heard so far are about the iPad’s lack of multitasking and Flash — both of which are complete non-issues to me.

Multitasking: First, it’s detrimental to productivity. Seriously. Not only that, but you can switch between apps on the iPad (and iPhone) fast enough that it doesn’t really matter, and the apps remember what state they were in before so it’s almost like you never even quit the app. Not allowing multitasking also really does result in more stability and better battery life. People who keep begging for multitasking are missing the boat. For more on multitasking and the iPad, read Milind Alvares’s article.

Flash: Honestly, who cares? I’ve never, ever missed having Flash on my iPhone. Ever. And believe me, it won’t be long before content creators whose stuff only works on Flash (Hulu, I’m looking at you) make iPhone/iPad apps using H.264 instead. Flash is dying. Let it die.

For more on Flash and the iPad, read John Gruber’s post. Also read Zeldman’s piece on how “lack of Flash in the iPad is a win for accessible, standards-based design.” (And HTML5 video is coming along nicely: check out the new SublimeVideo player. Only works in Chrome and Safari right now, but Firefox support is coming soon.)

My brother-in-law brought up a point that I hadn’t really considered so far: if someone emails me a document, I can’t easily save it to my iPad, edit it, and then email it back. A central Document Library (ala the Photos Library, which apps like CameraBag and Brushes can access and save to) would be nice.

The revolution

It began with the iPhone. Millions of iPhones sold, millions of customers saying that yes, they really do want a more human computing experience. They don’t want to tweak. They don’t want to fiddle. They don’t care about open v. closed. They just want something that works.

And you know what? They’re right. This is what most people need: a computer that’s easy to work with, that abstracts away all the details that don’t matter, that’s as stable as, say, a car. And on that note, check out Gruber’s comparison:

Used to be that to drive a car, you, the driver, needed to operate a clutch pedal and gear shifter and manually change gears for the transmission as you accelerated and decelerated. Then came the automatic transmission. With an automatic, the transmission is entirely abstracted away. The clutch is gone. To go faster, you just press harder on the gas pedal.

That’s where Apple is taking computing. A car with an automatic transmission still shifts gears; the driver just doesn’t need to know about it. A computer running iPhone OS still has a hierarchical file system; the user just never sees it.

Why the iPad matters: people who aren’t “good with computers” will be able to use the iPad without having to call their tech-savvy nephew or granddaughter for help. It’s computing for the masses.

Don’t believe me? Read On iPads, Grandmas, and Game-changing, Old World and New World Computing, The iPad is the iPrius, and Future Shock.

Sure, techies who like tinkering will still be able to get old world computers. You can still buy cars with manual transmissions. But within, I don’t know, five to ten years, most computers will become like the iPad. And yes, there will be more open solutions as well (running Linux or what have you). Give it time.

This is huge. It’s perhaps one of the biggest steps we’ve ever taken towards making computers more human-friendly (and not just geek-friendly). Until the iPhone, computers were the province of magic and wizardry, or so it seemed to everyone else. No longer. And again, the iPhone has shown that this is what people want, and the iPad is going to give it to them.

So, I have lots of interests, and for the longest time I’ve been trying to figure out what I should focus on — what my life’s work would be. I’ve been crawling closer, but it wasn’t until recently that I narrowed it down to something doable.

In reading Jim Collins’ article Best New Year’s Resolution? A ‘Stop Doing’ List, this paragraph dinged my mind and set it abuzz:

Suppose you woke up tomorrow and received two phone calls. The first phone call tells you that you have inherited $20 million, no strings attached. The second tells you that you have an incurable and terminal disease, and you have no more than 10 years to live. What would you do differently, and, in particular, what would you stop doing?

Right after that, he lists three questions with some follow-up kick:

1. What are you deeply passionate about?
2. What are you are genetically encoded for? What activities do you feel just “made to do”?
3. What makes economic sense? What can you make a living at?

And that was the beginning of the epiphany. I started going through the things I do, examining each in turn.

Writing? I’m passionate about it, I seem to be made for it, and if I work hard enough at it, yes, I could make a living at it. Plus, I’ve been doing it all my life. I’m a man of books. I love reading. I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was a little boy. I love sculpting words into sentences. Writing just fits me.

Design? I’m also passionate about it, I seem to be made for it, and I’m already making a living at it, both full-time (web design) and occasionally on the side (book design and graphic design). I love iterating through drafts until I get to a design that clicks and shines with beauty. Design is what I’ve spent most of my free time doing for the past five years, actually.

Art? I’m passionate about it, yes, but I don’t think I’m made for it. If I were, I’d have been drawing my heart out all these years, burning to make art. I get flickers of interest every once in a while, but it’s not consistent enough to make a career at it. (And I almost typed that as “flickrs”. Dang, Web 2.0, you’re getting to me.)

Music? I’m also passionate about it, but again, I’m not made for it. I play the piano from time to time for fun, and I’ve composed a number of pieces, but the even then, the last time I composed anything was around ten years ago. I’m not drawn to it enough to do it seriously.

Coding? I’m not as passionate about it, and I’m only partly made for it. I realized a while ago that most of the coding I’ll be doing in my life will be to make tools to assist the other parts of my life’s work. I don’t love it enough to make it the alpha dog.

There were other things I’d contemplated doing, but these were the main ones that had repeatedly risen to the surface.

And there it was: writing and design. It makes sense. It’s what I love. It’s what I spend my free time doing. It’s me. (And I realized that I’ve been calling myself “a writer and a designer” for the past few years. Apparently I’m nearsighted in more than one way. ;))

So, I’m going to stop worrying about getting great at art or music or coding. I’ll still do them, sure, but just for fun and relaxation. That’s the difference. Dabbling is now enough. This way I can focus on becoming a great writer and a great designer, without other things distracting me and pulling me away from my goal.

I’ve already felt like a burden has lifted, like I’m finally free to do what I was born to do, unfettered and focused. And it’s awesome.

Chris Anderson

The tools of factory production, from electronics assembly to 3D printing, are now available to individuals, in batches as small as a single unit. Anybody with an idea and little bit of self-taught expertise can set assembly lines in China into motion with nothing more than some keystrokes on their laptop. A few days later, a prototype will be at their door, and if it all checks out, they can push a few more buttons and be in full production. They are a virtual microfactory, able to design and sell goods without any infrastructure or even inventory; everything is assembled and drop-shipped by the contractors, who can serve hundreds of such small customers simultaneously….

Peer production, open source, crowdsourcing, DIY and UGC — all these digital phenomena are starting to play out in the world of atoms, too. The Web was just the proof of concept. Now the revolution gets real.

This makes me giddy. He’s right — this is going to change the world in a huge way. Most of the stuff I make is purely digital, unless it’s a book or a magazine or a chart I get printed, and while that’s not a bad thing, it gets a little ethereal at times, just a bunch of bits floating in cyberspace. I’m excited to make it real and start creating some hold-it-in-your-hands bona fide objects. (Objects that weren’t previously possible, that is — tools and gadgets and the like.)

William C. Taylor

Imagine any and every field possible. There are so many brands, so many choices, so many claims, so much clutter, that the central challenge is for an organization or an individual is to rise above the fray. It’s not good enough anymore to be “pretty good” at everything. You have to be the most of something: the most elegant, the most colorful, the most responsive, the most accessible.

I’ll save my thoughts on this for the blog post I’ve got in the oven, but let me just say that I agree completely: quality is better than quantity.

Daniel Pink

Management is great if you want people to comply — to do specific things a certain way. But it stinks if you want people to engage — to think big or give the world something it didn’t know it was missing. For creative, complex, conceptual challenges — i.e, what most of us now do for a living — 40 years of research in behavioral science and human motivation says that self-direction works better. And that requires autonomy. Lots of it.

If we want engagement, and the mediocrity-busting results it produces, we have to make sure people have autonomy over the four most important aspects of their work:

• Task – What they do
• Time – When they do it
• Technique – How they do it
• Team – Whom they do it with

Hallelujah! This is music to my ears, and it rings so, so, so true. In my line of work, autonomy trumps management, period. If only there were more of it…

John Moore

A winning business understands that to gain a customer it must first be willing to lose a customer….

Costco wins customers by losing customers. Its membership model shuns consumers not willing to pay the yearly membership fee. Its broad but shallow merchandise mix turns off consumers wanting more choices. Costco makes deliberate sacrifices because its customers will also make deliberate sacrifices in exchange for lower prices.

Winning businesses have a common trait, an obvious and divisive point of view. Losing businesses also have a common trait, a boring personality alienating no one and thus, sparking passion from no one.

This goes along nicely with William Taylor’s essay. You can’t do everything, and if you try, you’ll be mediocre at best. Also, take risks. It’s the only way to succeed.

J.C. Hutchins

Most of us settle in, and settle for what we have. Rather than pursue, we accept. Our lives become unwitting celebrations of passivity: we undervalue our work and perceive ourselves as wage slaves (and so we phone it in at the day gig), we consume compulsively (but not create), we pine for better lives (but live vicariously through our televisions).

These corners we paint ourselves into, it’s no way to live. There’s no adventure here, no passion, no hunger for change. Remember that relentless optimism you once had? The goals you wished to achieve, before settling in? They’re still there. You need a nudge to find them; a little gumption.

You can start that business. You can lose that weight. You can quit smoking, and learn to garden, and write that book, and be a better parent, and be all the things you want to be…the thing this world needs you to be. It requires courage and faith, both of which you can muster. It requires effort — but this effortless life isn’t as satisfying as it seems, is it?

Declare war on passivity. Hush the inner voice that insists you’re over the hill, past your prime, unworthy of attaining those dreams. Disbelief is now the enemy, as is the notion of settling. Get hungry — hyena hungry. Get fired up. Find your backbone, and your wings.

Flap ’em. It’s the only way you’ll be able to fly.

Love it. Grab some gumption and go do cool, beautiful, wonderful things.

Besides, the Lord doesn’t speak to us through doubts or fears. That’s just not how he does it. If the Lord wants to tell us something, it’s going to be through the peaceful, calm touch of the Spirit, not through a panicky sense of despair. But if you let those doubts and fears in, you’ll forget that. If you listen to your fears, a shroud of darkness will cover you, and dreadful things that aren’t real will seem tangible and inevitable. And then it’s hard to tell what’s true and what’s not. It’s really hard.

Doubts will grip you and shake you till you can’t tell up from down. Don’t listen to them. Don’t let them get to you. Cast not away therefore thy confidence, but instead live by faith and by every word that proceedeth forth out of the mouth of God.

If you do accidentally open the door and let in the storm of doubts and fears, get ready to go through hell. And remember Winston Churchill’s words: “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” Focus on Christ, because he’s the only way to burn away the deceptions so you can get through to what’s real.

And yes, I know all of this from (very) recent personal experience. Sigh. (That’s a sigh for having opened the window in the first place. I’m grateful now that I’ve found peace again. Whew.)