Show Your Work

Inspired by Austin Kleon's book Show Your Work, and my wholesome need to generate a new blog post everyday, here's what I'm pondering.

  • In Five Pots, I said I was thinking of becoming a time management coach. What would a 3 Principles-based time management coach look like? Rather like any other 3 Principles coach, I guess, except the pain point for the customer is their feeling of overwhelm.

  • I wondered about writing a giveaway PDF -- the two things you need to know about time management. The two things idea is something I ran across in Oliver Burkeman's column.

  • In listening to Mary's Daily Principles audios, she mentioned a fear she had at one time of being 54 and thinking her job at that time was the best she could hope for, or something like that. That rang a bell with me. I've felt the same thing.

  • I thought, waitaminnit -- maybe the thing to do is not time management. That's been an intellectual hobby for decades, but is not so urgent to me now.

  • But ... what do I want to do in the next stage/chapter of my life? That's an interesting, urgent, painful thought right now. And since we teach what we want to learn, then my experiment would be how to gracefully enter that stage myself (a "stage" being only a thought, of course, though we talk about it as though it were real) while coaching others who are making the same transition. In the end, it's still 3Ps coaching, but the entry point is different.

  • I started this post a week or more ago. I've made one "pot" (mock-up of a business card) since then. I made a list of four or five things that felt like good ideas. I notice only now that I'm still thinking about pots instead of making them. I waiting for inspiration, but I know I can create while feeling uninspired. Not berating myself, just waking up a bit.

  • Make four really bad pots, really quick, to meet my quota. Trust that the next five will be better.

Michael E Brown @brownstudy