I recently read this post by Merlin Mann. His name is fitting; he is just a man, and yet his brilliance borders on wizardy. His ability to keep things in perspective is truly inspiring.
I like to do stuff. Especially making stuff. Lots of stuff. Different stuff. But important stuff. Yet I don’t do enough of this stuff. It’s easy to get caught up in schoolwork and other activities that the System expects us to participate in. School is certainly important and valuable for most people, but it’s important to keep perspective. I already wrote about finding empowerment within myself. Emerson wrote about Self-Reliance.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the things that I do now, what I want to do for the rest of my life, and how my priorities are ordered.
I like writing. Sometimes the essays that I write for class are neat. I played with stream of consciousness writing last year, and I want to keep experimenting with that. I want to write more essays on this blog. I believe that writing helps clarify my thoughts. Giving language to ideas makes them much more useful.
I like artwork. I remix clothing. I make sculpture with cheap and accessible materials like paper, tape, and marker. I take photos and use Free Software to edit them. I like asserting the accessibility of the tools for creation and expression. I like remixing things that we interact with every day so that they tell a story and become a unique work of art.
I like programming. I develop the web. It’s my day job. I like making websites that are pretty and useful. I’m focused on creating websites that empower users to create and update the content themselves, without the help of a web developer (see also Web 2.0). I want to write more Open Source code that people will actually use and build on.
Merlin’s post helped me form a clearer idea of what I want to Do, and it got me thinking about what I can do to Make Things Happen.
I would consider myself a Renaissance Man. Most people would say that, as a college student, it’s time that I start picking and choosing and focusing, for fear that i should become a “Jack of all trades and expert of none.”
But I think that having varying interests is important because information and perspective gained in one field helps form new ideas in other fields. Plus I really like all of the stuff that I Do (or, rather, love Doing but don’t Do enough). I can’t keep up all of my hobbies simultaneously. But I can still pursue all of them indefinitely. I can rotate pursuits, getting really into my photography for a week and maybe doing some web development while I let my sculptural work lie fallow for a bit. A kind of Hobby Crop Rotation.
But I’m having trouble doing anything at all in this new college community where I’m trying to stay on top of my schoolwork and make friends and carve out my Space. I need motivation. Inspiration.
So I came up with a few ideas. Today, I’m launching one of them: Marathons. For a period of X days, i’m going to do one Y per day. Some will suck. Some will be awesome. Some will be well thought-out and formed, and some will be thrown together at the last minute. I have a theory that there’s not necessarily a correlation between the amount of planning ahead that I do and the brilliance of my work (don’t tell my prof when I actually started that midterm paper). It has more to do with my mood and whether or not I can get into the zone. I work better when I approach something casually. Sometimes I can get to a place where the stuff just pours out of me and time passes without me noticing (see also Mihály Csíkszentmihályi and Flow).
So here it goes.
This is Blog Week. A post a day for 7 days. This is day 1.
