Ben Crowder

When I dropped out of grad school a month ago, the plan was to go into publishing (specifically typesetting/book design) and write on the side, eventually doing more writing than publishing.

Well, over the past week or two, that plan has shifted its weight, and in doing so it uncovered my real dream: to become a full-time writer. I suppose I knew this all along deep down inside, but it seemed so infeasible that I never thought I’d actually do it. Writing would just be an on-the-side activity for me, I had decided.

And that is how it will be for the near future, but the goal now is to go full-time with writing as soon as I can. It may take five years, it may take 20 or 30, I don’t know. But that’s the goal. It’s what I love most, my dream job, more than anything else I can possibly think of. It’s my passion. I get goosebumps and butterflies every time I think about it. It’s me.

I do realize that it’s a heck of a lot of work to get there and stay there, yes. I don’t expect it to come easy. But it’s my dream, so I’m going to make it work, so help me. Nothing can stop me. :)

In the meantime, I’m still planning to do typesetting and publishing, of course. I love designing books, so it’ll be the perfect day job for me until I’m making enough off royalties to support my family. It’s also my dream, just not quite as deep as the writing dream.

In contemplating both the writing and (to a lesser degree) the typesetting, the exhilarating feeling tickling my soul is freedom. As a writer I’ll be able to work wherever I want — in a library carrel, on a bench at the park, on a bus, on a plane, wherever. And whenever I want — early morning, late at night, whenever. Being an employee is swiftly starting to feel like the bonds of slavery. ;)

Brief semi-related tangent: Over the weekend I came across Paul Graham’s new essay, “You Weren’t Meant to Have a Boss”, in which he has this great quote: “In an artificial world, only extremists live naturally.” Lots of food for thought there. I recommend it.

Anyway, as a writer I feel drawn toward what the publishers are calling YA fantasy, so that’s probably what I’ll be writing most of the time, though my interests are wide enough that I won’t be able to stick to just that — I want to write everything. :)

The next step for now is to just write a lot and start sending stuff in to publishers, because it’s kind of hard to make a living off writing if you don’t ever try to get published. ;) Here begins what’ll be a long and very adventurous journey…

My little brother was in the regional spelling bee this morning. Sitting there during the first round, I watched each kid get up to the mike and wait for their word to hit them. Some words were easy. Some, though, were hard, and most of the time their not-so-lucky recipients missed them. Out on the first round. What a way to be. And I realized that spelling bees are, in a way, a mild form of child abuse.

I’m mostly joking. But really, why do we put our kids through this stressful insanity? What on earth does it prove? Childhood is a time to be carefree, to enjoy life, to play. Not to get caught up in our adult games of competition and comparison. If we have spelling bees at all (and I’m sure most of you realize that English is one of the very few languages where they’re even possible), they should be for adults, of their own free will and choice. But kids get pushed into them by their parents, directly or indirectly, and it hurts me to watch them get up there on stage only to get shattered.

Perhaps I’m a bit oversensitive to this, since I myself was in a handful of spelling bees back when I was a kid. My first year I went to state and took fifth place, falling out on “differentiation.” My second year, though, I somehow managed to win, and Deseret News sent me and my parents to D.C. for a week to compete in the national spelling bee.

The experience was worth it, certainly — it was my first time on an airplane (I was twelve), the first time I was old enough to enjoy the East Coast, and they put us up in the Grand Hyatt which was by far the biggest hotel I’d ever been in. :) But in the second round the stage fright got to me, and when the pronouncer said “collards,” my brain shut down. I asked for a definition; where collards are actually leafy green vegetables, somehow I thought that the pronouncer had said they had something to do with stacking crates in a warehouse. Panic struck and I brainlessly spelled them “colards,” which made no sense to me then or now.

That horrible bell dinged its fateful tone and I shuffled off stage to the cry room, where a lady sat with boxes of animal crackers. Not interested in consolation, I brushed past her, slipped out the back door, and went up to my hotel room where I sobbed for a good while. Eventually I got hold of myself and went back down to the bee room, where I slipped into the chair next to my parents and tried not to think about all my dreams of winning that had just popped out of existence. Life went on, as it always does.

While I don’t really regret all the time I put into studying and spelling, I’m still wondering what purpose the spelling bee serves. To add stress to the lives of parents and children around the country? To prove that my kid is smarter than your kid? If it’s to appreciate the joys and beauties of language, well, heck, you can do that from the comfort of your own home.

Granted, I’ve completely lost my competitive drive over the past few years, so that surely has something to do with how I feel about this, but I really don’t want to put my kids through any spelling bees. Or other activities of a competitive nature, wherever I can avoid it. The only real use I can come up with for them, anyway, is in preparation for war, and I don’t know if I really need to be preparing my kids for that. :) What ever happened to “love one another”? I don’t want my kids comparing themselves to other kids and getting superiority or inferiority complexes.

But I suspect that there probably are advantages to competition (compatible with the gospel, of course). Since I don’t know what they are, please enlighten me, dear readers. :)

If you haven’t noticed, I have a tendency to collect irons and stash them in the fire. :) (Why are golf clubs coming to mind? Wrong image. :P) I love having projects, love filling my to-do lists to the brim and beyond, love being busy.

But at the same time I don’t. I love having free time, love the peace of mind that comes when there aren’t any Damoclean deadlines hanging over my head, love being able to rest and recharge my batteries. (Oh no, the truth slipped out! I’m an android!)

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about this (busyness, not being an android), and while I certainly think it’s good to stay busy, I’m realizing that my priorities need some shifting around. I’ve been saying yes to almost everything that comes my way, like a dog drooling at the sight of a bone. This is not a good habit.

You see, I have some long-term goals in life — become a good (and prolific) writer and become a world-class typographer, to name just two — and in my desire to do good, I’m somewhat missing the mark and losing my opportunities to prepare for the best. I spend so much time doing peripheral stuff that I rarely get around to the core of why I’m here and what I was born to do.

It’s time to simplify. I need room to breathe. (It’s nobody else’s fault but my own that I’ve claustrophobized myself with tons of projects, mind you.) From now on, my default response to taking on new projects is going to be no, unless prolonged thought on the matter convinces me otherwise. I’m doing a 180. It’ll give me more time for things that really matter to me — writing, reading, typesetting, family history, family, and so on.

This is easy to say, but I don’t know how long it’ll take for me to retrain myself. :) What I do know is that saying yes to everything will burn me out someday. I want to get rid of that habit now so that when I have a wife and kids, I can actually spend time with them.

I suppose my fear with doing this is that I’ll be missing out on opportunities to serve — that it’s selfish of me to say no. But in all reality, I can’t do it all. I can’t even come close. And from now on, I’m going to stop trying. :)

This morning while scrambling my eggs for breakfast and listening to Aida on my iPod, one of my roommates came into the kitchen and started cleaning some stuff off the table and doing something with cottage cheese (I wasn’t paying close enough attention to see what). And I kept listening to my music, oblivious to the outside world from the look of it.

That bothers me.

I’m not one of those people who really cares if people walk around campus with their iPods on. Sure, it’s harder to say hi to them, and you hope they turn the volume down when they cross streets so they don’t get run over, but it doesn’t bother me. Let ‘em listen.

What does bother me is actually what I did. Or didn’t do. You see, I love people. I love talking with people, watching them, seeing what makes them tick, watching the interactions and connections when you get more than one of them together. (This is why I’m a writer.)

While I was listening to my iPod, though, I was cut off from this other human in the room — my roommate — and it was awkward. (Maybe not for him, but it was for me.) Awkward in the sense that the humanity in me was crying out to connect with this other person, but the earbuds separated us, and so we didn’t talk. At all.

Again, I don’t feel like I have to talk with my roommates (or anyone else) every single time we’re in the same room. That’s not what I’m talking about. It just felt somehow inhuman to isolate myself when we were right there, doing things that would ordinarily lend themselves to conversation. (If he’d been doing homework, I probably wouldn’t have felt quite the same way.)

New rule for Ben: when someone enters the room, off with the earbuds. Music’s important, but people are more important.

(For those of who you remember my iPod going on vacation back in October, by the way, my younger brother ended up giving me his for Christmas. Sweet kid.)

[tags]iPod[/tags]

For a while my alarm clock has gone off at five o’clock every morning, because that’s when I’m at my prime. Sure, it’s slightly less sleep (I try to go to bed around 10 or 10:30), but I’m very much more a morning person than a night owl.

And yet for the last five weeks I’ve slept in till seven or seven-thirty each day, trying to get rid of this niggling cold that refuses to go away. (I think it’s on its way out, though. ~fingers crossed.~) Sleeping in has allowed me the luxury of staying up later, too, getting to sleep around midnight or 12:30. (Which is insanely late for me. :))

Having tried the latter for over a month now, it’s cool, yes, but I really miss waking up at 5. That’s when I’m most productive, when I feel like I’m really using my time well. It’s the real me.

Well, last night at 9:30 I was working on the programs for stake conference, and as I finished them up and sent them out I realized that what I wanted most was to wake up at five today. (Lately, what I’ve wanted most has been to get everything done.) That desire was strong enough that I went to bed at 10:30 and did in fact wake up at five (and have loved it).

It was interesting to note how the catalyst in this was simply what I wanted most. I could have woken up at five for the last couple of weeks, yes. But the desire wasn’t there, and so I slept. And in a twinkling of an eye that desire blossomed last night, and it became easy to go to bed early, and easy to rise before the sun. (Not that everything becomes easy with desire. :))

Yesterday I came across a great post by Leo Babauta of Zen Habits on ten ways to find time for your family — no matter how busy you are.

Even though I don’t have a wife or kids yet, almost all of Leo’s tips are equally applicable to me. Prioritizing commitments, doing less, focusing on the biggest impact, cutting out distractions, etc. — I can use all of these as I am right now. And I’m giddy just thinking about it.

You know, in reading blogs and books about productivity — I just started David Allen’s Getting Things Done again this week, after only getting halfway through it the first time — I occasionally catch myself considering tips like these to be too much system and not enough result. Like…I don’t know, like multi-level marketing or something. But a lot of this productivity obsession really does produce results.

Yes, I’m obsessed. Not to an unhealthy point, I don’t think, but I’m certainly riveted by discussions on how to do more, or do it better. And even those on how to do less. :) For me it feels like a journey toward reality, towards the way life really ought to be. It’s about “getting real.”

Most of us go about life in an ordinary way most of the time, and that’s good. But we’ve got so much more potential than we realize, and it’s that idea that drives me to seek out the better way. Or better ways, rather, because they vary for everyone, and even for ourselves as time crawls and sprints its way toward eternity. The point isn’t that we’re not doing enough; the point is that we could be doing so much more.

Except, as I mentioned earlier, “so much more” doesn’t necessarily mean more. It may mean simplification. Paring down. Stripping off the crufty peel and getting straight to the core — the stuff that really matters.

The idea is to live life better. To really live it, rather than letting it live us. And that’s worth our attention — and our effort.

[tags]productivity[/tags]

Yesterday afternoon I went up to my family’s for a few hours (I’m still woefully sick, by the way, but more on that in a later post), and while I was there some neighborhood teens came by playing “Bigger or Better.” For those who haven’t seen this in the wild, you split into teams, each with an initial object (something small). You then go around knocking on doors, asking for something “bigger or better” and offering to exchange it for the object you’ve got in hand. After an hour or so, whoever has the biggest and/or best object wins. (Ideally you then donate the stuff to charity or the needy or something.)

So anyway, I’d just been reading about the globalization of Bhutan in March’s National Geographic, and it struck me that a game like “Bigger or Better” is the sole domain of the rich (globally speaking). You don’t play games like that in third-world villages. You just don’t.

Why? Because the whole premise is that you have more than you need, and not just small things, but bigger and better things. And for most of America, that’s true. For the rest of the world, it isn’t. Not by a long shot.

It doesn’t feel right.

It’s not the poverty of the third world that bothers me so much, though. I mean, yes, we need to do what we can to lift them up to decent standards of living and try to exterminate disease and other things that poison quality of life. But there’s nothing wrong about working as a farmer in the rice paddies, if you enjoy it. (I think we of the middle and upper classes have convinced ourselves that luxury is the only path to happiness.)

What does bother me is the gap between us and them. More particularly, how far above our needs we live, while so much of the world lives under theirs. And how we’ve managed to delude ourselves into believing that we need what we really only want.

Affluence isn’t bad. But it takes an active effort to keep it from twisting our vision until we can’t see straight.

And now I’ll get off my anti-materialism hobbyhorse. :P

So, I have a small paper due tomorrow. Until this evening, I hadn’t done anything about it — I figured I’d just put it off until there was no longer any more off to put. That’s what I usually do.

But somehow, miraculously, the planets aligned and tonight I ended up getting the paper done. A full day early. (Yes, this means the end of the world is nigh, so tie up whatever loose ends you’ve got in your life. I’m giving us a few weeks at most. :P)

The most interesting part is how darn good it feels to get stuff done — especially early. Why don’t I do this more often? (With schoolwork, that is.) What kind of benefit do I get from procrastination? None, really. Or at least none that I can think of at the moment. All I get is yet another “undone” tag stuffed into my head, taking up precious brain RAM, and a dollop of stress that grows as each deadline nears. It’s not worth it.

This will be the semester where I try an experiment: doing work early, all term long. I’ve “tried” this before but it’s never lasted very long. I always have a plethora of beautiful excuses — my art, my writing, other projects, you name it — and those are good things, but I feel so much more at one with myself and the universe (which puts me in a better position to do those good things) when I put first things first.

Yes, that’s it: it’s all about balance and doing the important things before the not-so-important things. Something inside me can tell when I’m off-kilter. That same something can also tell when I get back in line, and boy does it feel good.

I’m starting to write a mission statement for myself — more as a constant reminder than anything else, to help me avoid slacking off — and I can already tell that balance is going to be a biggie. It matters.

Today I came across Shaun Body’s article, My Publicly Funded Office (Thanks to Scott for the link):

Whenever I want to get serious work done, I take a 5-minute drive to my office. Once I’m there, I immediately shift into “working mode” — I knuckle down and accomplish whatever needs to get done quickly, often in under half the time it would take to accomplish the same task at home. Although this may be the primary reason I take advantage of my office, it’s certainly not the only reason. Other luxuries of my office include: free access to books, free access to newspaper and magazine collections, free computer and internet access, and free movie rentals. Furthermore, my office is filled with an entire staff of personal assistants — all of whom will try to help answer any question I need answered, or assist me with any problem I need resolved. Best of all, I don’t pay huge operating costs for my office — it costs less than one dollar a day to run it year round. If you’re jealous of my office, don’t be. You already have access to your own publicly funded office exactly like mine. This is because “my office” is my local public library.

That’s what I’m talking about. :) And as I’ve mentioned before, I’m becoming more and more enamored of the idea of forging my own career the way I want it to be — unshackled, doing what I love, living a fulfilled life instead of running around like a lab rat. I still waver back and forth between the solid security of having an employer (oh, wait, is it solid? :P) and the blessed freedom of doing things my way.

And what is my way? None of this is set in stone yet, of course, but I think my dream basically is this: to make books. I want to write books — lots of them. I want to design books — both classics and work from new authors. I want to illustrate books. I want to spend my days talking about books, breathing books, living the book life.

Common sense tries to stop me, but it’s losing its strength. Besides, I can’t describe in words how giddy and excited I get when I think about doing books for a living. It’s what I was born for.

How do libraries fit into that? I don’t know — like I said, I still have no idea how this is all going to pan out, so for now I’m content to stay with my job and finish my master’s. I might end up doing both libraries and my own thing. Or maybe I’ll stay in the library for a few years and then go off on my own. I don’t know. And it’s kind of exciting not to know. (Whoa, did I really just say that? :P)

This morning I was reading in the Joseph Smith manual (Teachings of the Presidents of the Church), and it just struck me that Joseph was only 23 years old when he started translating the Book of Mormon. Twenty-three! Somehow I always forget that, and in my mind I superimpose the 38-year-old Joseph onto those events. After all, it’s easier to imagine a grown man translating something like that. But that’s not what happened.

Beyond that, Joseph was only 24 when he organized the Church. Heck, I’m twenty-four. What have I done with my life?

Which reminds me of something Dean Hughes said at a reading yesterday on campus. Rather than butcher what he said by attempting a paraphrase, I’ll just recast it like this: When we get to the next life, the Savior isn’t going to care whether we were a writer or a doctor or whatever. He’s going to ask if we were kind, if we were meek, if we were selfless. It’s not so much what we did — it’s more about who we became.

With this bubbling around at the back of my mind, I was sitting in the temple earlier this morning, and I realized that somewhere along the last couple of years, my priorities have gotten a little skewed. Some of the more important things have had to step down and take a seat a few rows back while on the front row I’ve entertained what I in my foolishness thought took precedence.

This isn’t to say that those things were bad. They’re good, worthwhile things. But not when they swell to fill space that ought to have been dedicated and consecrated for better things.

You’d think I would have realized this while listening to Elder Oaks’ good/better/best talk in general conference. Alas, epiphanies seem to work on their own timetable, and it’s taken this long for mine to come together. But I’m glad it came.

On the walk home, I continued thinking about all of this, of course, and the burning question was how I actually go about changing myself. I can use up a lot of air saying I want to be a better person, but there’s a huge gap between just talking about it and actually doing something. Lots of somethings, even.

While I can’t say I have a definite answer yet, what I’ve come up with so far is this: action items and daily reviews. Yes, it’s a process. Yes, it’s mechanical and artificial. I’d prefer something more organic, frankly, but I’m finding that it often takes something mechanical to get to that point.

For the action items I’m thinking along the lines of David Allen’s “next actions” in GTD — the next step I need to take to make progress in that area. It has to be a verb, something I can actually do — not just vague, fluffy, abstract concepts and ideals. Being more kind is not a concrete action; washing the dishes for my roommates is.

When I get inspiration on how I can become a better person, I always write those things down in my journal, since I know I’ll forget them if I don’t. But I’m finding that I never do go back and review what I’ve written, which makes the exercise pointless except as a matter of historical note. And while I do care about my history, I’m more interested in my future.

To get there, I’m thinking I’ll start a new “improvement notebook.” In it I’ll record all of these things I know I need to work on. But that’s not enough. And so each morning I’ll review it (along with those New Year’s resolutions :)) so that I remember. It’s all about remembering. If you’ve got a perfect memory, great. I don’t. I’ll probably also start a weekly review — an hour or so, maybe on Sundays — where I can take a deep breath and look at how I did that past week.

Reviews and notebooks do give the impression of trappings, of things we do to do what we really want. But since without them I’m not making the progress I want to make, I’m willing to use them. After all, I don’t want to show up in the next life only to find that I totally missed the boat to heaven and instead get myself dumped onto Charon’s ferry. :P