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Why pursuing your dreams is a bad idea 4

Filed under self, the world, work
Written by Annie on 9th Jun -11

The curve in the middle of the path .... its gone what do you think???

Creative Commons License photo credit: Nina Matthews Photography

Change always makes me stop

and evaluate where I’m at, where I’m going, what I’m spending time on… my life, in other words, and if I’m “doing” it right.
A few weeks before Lily was born I was thinking about work, wondering how I would fit it all in with a newborn, wondering, once again, if I should listen to that overpowering voice of guilt that nags at me whenever I take time away from the kids in order to spend it on writing.

Does it know something I don’t know?

Growing up, I had a lot of interests, a lot of fantasies about what I would be and do when I was done growing up and was actually all-grown-up. Never mind the mythical nature of that statement, for now. Of course a lot of the things that seem great when you’re thirteen or sixteen or nineteen seem much less great when you’re twenty-two or (gasp) almost thirty. Or forty or fifty or so on.

The questions remain basically the same, though, even as the answers change.

  • What is my passion?
  • What is my dream?
  • What am I really good at?
  • What should I be doing?
  • What is my calling? My purpose? My vision? My life’s work?
If only I could answer those questions (or even just one of them) with complete accuracy and confidence, maybe I could shove aside the fear, the guilt, the resistance, the inhibition, the hesitation. Maybe I could go for it.

If only I knew. For sure. No doubting.

Except it’s not that simple.

Many things in my life have fit nowhere in my dreams, but I needed them. They weren’t a passion or a desire, often the opposite, but they were good, gifts nonetheless.
  • This house I’m living in, for example, with the enormous, spacious rooms and the ten acres of land and the bay window where my desk is parked and I can sit and type while a kid (or two or three) draws beside me and we can look out on a green field and an oak tree.
  • Lily, the fourth child who came a few years sooner than we planned or dreamed, and turns out, she’s just what we need right now.
On the other hand, some things I have known, with clarity, were mine, part of my life’s dream.

Joe, for example,

from the moment we met at age 14, has been my dream. 7 years of marriage later, the reality of life with him is even better than the dream.

Score one for dreams.

Motherhood.

Three kids in a row – and then four – one dream after another (even when our timing was a little off). Not blissful, but rich. Rich, enduring wealth. Dreams that have come, truer than I could have known.

Score two for dreams.

Score one hundred plus for the other unexpected, sometimes unwanted, unanticipated, undreamed events and experiences and relationships that have come, turning my life into something different and better than what I could have dreamed.

Sometimes pursuing your dreams is a bad idea because then you’re limited to what you can dream.

What if there’s more for you? What if you haven’t dreamed big enough, bold enough? What if your life is meant to be more than your dreams?

road to nowhere.., rain's coming
Creative Commons License photo credit: ChR!s H@rR!0t

How do you live in the space between?

The space between concentrated effort for what you dream about and acceptance of what happens despite the focus of your efforts, the fierceness of your dreams? How do you navigate life in that undefined gap?

It feels like a space with nothing to hold on to.

It’s more like tumbling, stumbling, hand-out-in-the-dark-grasping than walking any certain path. And that’s uncomfortable for us, with our obsessive planning, our agenda, our need for control, our desperate quest for security.

Isn’t security why we start asking those questions in the first place?

If we can figure this out – this who am I and what should I be doing and what is my life about – then we can get somewhere. Or so we think.

Let’s be honest.

How much of what we plan ever turns out as we anticipate?

Even if you plan to be a parent, is parenting anything like what you thought it would be? Or marriage? Or that trip to the other side of the world, or the intense effort and gratification of writing that book, or the bittersweet experience of revisiting an old friendship, or even the hour of solitude you anticipate and schedule into your life?
Is any of it quite what we expect it to be in the planning phase?

Isn’t reality much richer, and deeper, and stranger, and more unfathomable, and unnerving, and rewarding, than any of our dreams?

Isn’t it riskier, more dangerous, more subtle, more shadowed, and more fulfilling?

Thank God we are not limited by our own dreams.

{how to} do the next thing 1

Filed under work
Written by Annie on 11th Mar -11

spring siesta

Persistence, however, is a trick worth nurturing. If you can keep at something, if you can find and rekindle that little spark of faith that you’ll figure it out, then you can rebuild again and again. Persistence is the art of building continuity. It’s the deliberate action of doing something, doing it again, doing it again, until you get it right, and maybe doing it over and over after that, too. - Chris Brogan

1: figure out what the next thing is before you need to do it.

The best way is to have some sort of plan; that could be a calendar hung on the door, a planner on your desk, a scratched-out list on a paper scrap. If you don’t know what the important items in your day are, you can’t move from one to the other. Instead, you’ll just float here, slog there, wallow a while, and even what you accomplish won’t feel like an accomplishment because it was done by-the-way, not deliberately.

2: give yourself some time buffers.

Moms know about set-backs and repetition, and how much longer it can take a child to do a 2-minute task. Spending time pointlessly in transitions doesn’t help anybody, but understand that there are the simple tasks of cleaning up or clearing out or refreshing the brain or, you know, going to the bathroom or refilling your coffee cup. The important step is to know where you are headed even when you’re in the in-between. If you don’t know what the next thing is, you’ll just stay in the in-between. You’ll get caught up on a detail, on the phone, on Facebook. If it’s not time for those things, don’t let them interrupt. Do the necessary stuff and keep moving toward the next important point of your day.

3: set up and start quickly.

The most difficult part is getting started, so give yourself a time limit on getting down to business. Set a timer for five minutes and set up and actually start doing within that time limit.

4: talk it up.

Let other people hold you accountable, whether they know they are or not, by talking about what you’re going to do next. This will also help your kids/spouse/friends/dogs/etc to know to get outta the way, or at least minimize the interruption, when you’ve got something important on the brain. Rule of thumb: the younger your kids, the more you’ll have to talk it up and you’ll still have to deal with interruptions. Check that. Age has nothing to do with interruptions. Just keep coming back to talking about what you’re doing. Eventually they’ll get the message. If they hang around, make them help.

Image: spring siesta by Muffet

a writer’s manifesto: I should know what I’m talking about Comments Off

Filed under work
Written by Annie on 11th Jan -11

My notebook loves writing group

I write about things as if I know what I’m talking about.

It’s part of the package with writing for money. Or maybe just with writing, period. You feel like, as a writer, you should be able to present some authoritative view or revelatory moment to your readers. Having readers is a big responsibility, people. You may not know what a burden you are to us writers, but really, you are. Obviously we’d all want to kill ourselves if you weren’t around, but writing for you people is serious work.

You want to know all sorts of stuff.

You want fact-checking and witty commentary, all in one.
You demand a lot from us writers.

And we strive to give it to you, really we do, because the biggest fear we have is that you’ll leave us.

You’ll decide we’re not witty enough.
Or that we’re too witty, self-consciously painfully witty like a ponytail pulled too tight.

Or we’ll give you too few facts, or the wrong facts, or not enough facts. You readers, these days, you’re so inundated with information, you have so many options, you can get multimedia anything; the chance that you’ll simply sit and read some words we wrote? Slim, slim, slim. So those of you that do stay with us (and we bless you fervently as we drift to writerly dreams at night) may not be surprised to find us kind of clingy. A little desperate. And so very, very aware of the responsibility of keeping you here with us.

And that’s why we kind of resent you people sometimes.

It’s not your fault.

It’s just the weird little dichotomy we live, writing these posts and articles and books as if we know what we’re talking about, when the one thing running through our head is just desperate, clingy, 5th-grader’s refrain: please like me please like me please like me please like me.

Please?
Because as distantly higher-than-thou as we act like we are sometimes, we really really like you. Really.

Image: My notebook loves writing group by juliejordanscott

How To Keep Writing 2

Filed under work
Written by Annie on 16th Jun -09

How to keep writing even when your brain is mush, your fingers are numb, and your eyes are bleary…me, right now. Two cups of coffee later… it’s still me.

blech

You Threw Off My Groove

It’s been a dead couple of weeks, inspirationally speaking. Do you know what I mean? I’m used to the day or so like that every now and then, but I can usually get excited about blogging by stopping to plan, getting some titles and outlines and series ideas together. Once I have a page or two of notes, I’m ready to write again.

Usually. continue reading…

Steps to Blog Writing that Works Comments Off

Filed under work
Written by Annie on 7th Feb -09

Everybody has a blog, so make yours better…

  1. Produce longer content. Numbered lists under 5 items, short posts with big photos, a little linking and one-sentence reviews with the embedded YouTube videos = short content. Balance the little stuff, the shallow stuff, with some big, deep, heavy, valuable, longer content. Actual articles, with good quotations and relevant research cited, or with a logical outline and argument, development of an idea longer than one paragraph. You know. Stuff like that. Like those essays you had to write in college. Opening paragraph with thesis, main idea, supporting ideas, evidence, refutation of opposing ideas, summary, conclusion… Yikes. Seems like a lot, and sometimes it is. But if you think about it and give yourself time to do a bit of brainstorming and researching, and you’re used to popping out regular (shorter) posts, you can do longer posts as well. Just think of them as a series presented in a single post… might help.
  2. Link within context. Don’t make a big deal out of your links and don’t link to irrelevant junk that you haven’t really looked over yourself. Link through the appropriate (couple of) words within the related sentence and move on. If people like what you’re writing about, are interested, and want to read more, they’ll follow. If not, being flashy and obvious isn’t going to convince them. And if visitors try a link or two and find them to be boring or broken, well, you’ll have a lot of work to convince them to try again.
  3. Use professional pictures. Or at least professional-looking pictures. There are thousands available with Creative Commons Licenses, many of them taken by actual professional photographers. Some are taken by talented people who just like to take photos and let other people use them. With that great a wealth of photos around, there’s no excuse for using sloppy looking photos or graphics with your posts. And as far as using your own, that’s great if you know how to make them look decent as well. Crop the unnecessary edges, lighten or darken if needed, fix the red-eye. Don’t get too crazy happy with the effects, with one caveat: turning a not-so-great photo into black and white will not make it a better photo, but it will make lots of people think it is a better photo. Just so you know.
  4. Give proper credit. For photos, for research, for data, for statistics, for opinions, for graphics, for videos, for music, for articles, for ideas. Sure, not all of that stuff is copyrighted and you could probably get away with using and not crediting more obscure items, but it would still be 1) unprofessional, 2) stupid, and 3) just wrong. So don’t do it. Give credit where credit is due.
  5. Take one idea further. Instead of trying to promote fifteen ideas in one post or article, grab one idea – the one that is most exciting to you as you are writing – and just expand it. Write about it. Look at it from every angle. Give examples. Give illustrations. Draw a graph. Do some research. Brainstorm. Get deeper with one idea. By the way, since I just preached about giving proper credit, I want to come clean that this idea of taking one idea further came from a post I read several months ago. I just spent ten minutes searching for it and can’t find it… it was a guest post on a productivity blog, but that’s all I can remember except for the (well-developed, single) idea of the article. So, to the writer of that article, my apologies for lack of specific credit. If I find it, I’ll come add it.
  6. Use recurring themes. You don’t have to use memes or join groups, though that’s a good way to get a recurring theme going. Come up with your own, something in keeping with the focus of your blog (you do know what that is, don’t you?). People like what’s familiar and they like knowing what to expect. If you have a great post every Monday about, um, meringue pies, then you will get a following who come to your blog simply because they know and love the Monday Meringue Pie Post.
  7. Pick a side. Don’t be wishy-washy. Say what you mean, say it clearly enough that people know what you mean, and then back yourself up. Accept that there are enough people with enough diversity accessing the internet that you are guaranteed to displease someone, somewhere, on something you say. That’s okay. You don’t need to be mean, rude, disparaging, or get personal: you do need to be honest and have integrity. I’m drawn to writers who are honest even when I disagree with what they say. I just like the honesty and the willingness to put a view out there even though they know they’ll end up with lots of negative comments or questions simply because they stated their opinion strongly. I don’t like pandering. Nobody does.
  8. Be professional. As mentioned above, don’t be “mean, rude, disparaging, or get personal”; it is unprofessional, impolite, and juvenile. If you’re old enough to drive, you’re old enough to learn how to express yourself without using profanity, personal attacks, and/or inappropriate expressions. Sure, everybody is going to differ a bit on what’s appropriate and what isn’t, and obviously the focus, content, and audience will differ from blog to blog. But you know when you’re crossing a line, and so do your readers. When your writing is emotionally fueled, free from all logic, and backed up by evidence that is personal and subjective, you’re probably deep into unprofessional territory.
  9. Use a consistent format. Set your standards for your paragraph headings, image sizes, links, quotations and block quotations, and other little niceties of blog posting. Once you’ve decided on what you like, stick with it. It’s annoying when the format of posts across a single blog keeps changing, annoying enough to make me quit reading.
  10. Throw in some extras. Give people good resources that you’ve found. Offer tips. Offer ideas. Offer the research sites for further investigation into the subject you’ve just posted about. Offer the sites you’ve found that present completely opposing views. Go a bit above and beyond in what you write about, how you write, and how you respond to your readers. “Extras” can be as particular and personal as you want them to be. They don’t necessarily have to be products, or freebies, though of course people like those, too. Just take what you’re doing, and then take it a little further. Do that consistently. People will come to quality.
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