As an exercise in writing about something as many days as I can manage, these recent blog posts are a good forcing function for flexing multiple portions of my creative brain. The title comes from a paraphrase of something I saw over on one of Chase Jarvis‘ feeds (He’s a west-coast based photographer I follow on social media), and it’s a good tie-in to something Tim Ferriss talks about: “Win the morning, win the day.” Set some reasonably simple goals to knock out first thing each morning, DO THOSE, and the rest of the day will fall in line behind the early quick wins.
I have been doing a 5-minute journal exercise for a couple of months now. It involves listing 3 things I’m grateful for, followed by 3 things which if accomplished would make the day great, followed by a daily affirmation (… and gosh darn it, people like me. 😉 ). It may sound a bit fru-fru, but the act of concentrating on things I’m grateful for right out the gate each morning has done wonders for setting a steady ‘level’ each day. Then, by listing a couple of things to get done, I can help set a good vector for the day. And… believe it or not, the days I list three items of ‘grandiose accompliwondermenting’… I get approximately jack and sh*t done. But on the mornings I set 3 much smaller goals, the grandiosity somehow manages to fall in place by day’s end. It’s a lot easier to take care of:
- Carve off a slice of the elephant.
- Season and cook elephant slice.
- Eat elephant slice.
… than it is to get after:
- Eat elephant.
- Make million$$.
- Save the world!
And yet, when we work on the first list, somehow the elephant gets eaten.
Back to the title of the post: Each day’s entry may or may not be directly related to the day before, as there’s a LOT of stuff that’s been rattling around inside my head which hasn’t yet made it to these pages… so I’ve got some cobweb cleaning to do. But each day requires beginning with some sort of cogent theme, to include at least a single picture for the featured image at the top of the post. I could post without these pictures, but it throws off the aesthetic of my WordPress theme front page, and irks me. This is where that multi-disciplinary creativity exercise comes into play. There is always some sort of ‘art’ in my head which is related to the topic at hand. The act of staging that image, taking that image, quickly editing and uploading that image… helps get daily repetitions at those processes. Prominent youtuber Casey Neistat has come back to daily vlogging because he’s got a drive to tell the world about what he’s working on again. He shut the vlog down because there wasn’t a ‘story’ for him to bring across, and it had become rote. But doing it on the daily, he has gotten very, very good at the process, and while his production value was high when he started, he continues to get better and better. I’m way, way, WAAAAY on the other end of that curve right now, in that I have lots of stuff rattling around inside my head that needs to go somewhere, AND I’m not especially well practiced at getting those thoughts out in a timely fashion. But repeating the process daily helps refine the process, and get me practice repetitions at the mechanical steps in that process. I’m already pretty good at conceptualizing, shooting, and editing images, and with writing as well. But those processes could go much faster, which is my aim.
ORSAs don’t make your process, we make your process better.
So I’m writing. Some days may be like yesterday, in that they’re quick exercises in ‘What can I do given constraint X?’, and some will be longer forays into areas which I’ve either had experience, am gaining experience, am interested, or have done the analysis and those thoughts bear explaining (at least from my nerd-brained perspective).
NB: Astute readers will have observed that I have a red pen on the notebook pictured, and yet there is black ink on the page. This is because I have a little trick where I swap the red ink cartridge out for a black one… it keeps people from stealing my pen. Simple examination will reveal the ink inside is black, but because people only take a quick glance… they think there’s red ink in my red pen, and move on with their search.
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