Mitosis
I am splitting.
Not in the “I’m outta here!” sense, but in the biological cell mitosis sense.
It was almost two full years ago that I picked up a book called “Refuse to Choose”, by Barbara Sher — the first voice I heard that told me it was not just okay but valuable to be skilled, interested, and qualified in more than one thing! I can honestly say this book changed my life (and you can read more about that in one of my first posts).
However, I’ve lacked for practical ways to reconcile all that I do and accomplish. You ought to see the trail of half-used blank books and shoeboxes full of ephemera that I’ve left in my wake. It will take months, possibly years, to sort through it all. Raw food recipes, kombucha brewing methods, programming projects, business ideas, publicity stunts — you name it, I’ve thrown it into a box and forgotten all about it, sadly.
With my new Okonomiyaki Recipes blog, however, I’ve had a taste of success in cordoning off an interest, creating a concrete project, and producing something at the end of it — something public, searchable, and thus possibly of use to more than just myself. Now I am hungry for more.
So begins a long-overdue process of creating environments and sandboxes for myself where I can chronicle my strange and varied array of competencies. Like buying boxes to put your toys in, and special inserts for your drawers so that your socks and undies go in all neat and tidy, it feels really good to have the proper places to put ideas.
My first title for this post was “Fractionating”. But the sense of chopping my Self into pieces, pieces with only fractional value from the whole, proved inaccurate.
I may be splitting my “personality” and my time and setting up several different blogs. But really it’s no different from how I was before, constantly shifting my attention between half a dozen projects in the span of a week. I’ll just be documenting it as well.
In fact, because ideas will have places to go, my brain now has “permission” to generate ideas. Liberty through organization? It feels good and my mind is already working at top speed. Perhaps that’s why I’ve been burning my candle at both ends lately.
Thus I am not splitting into smaller, less valuable pieces. I am dividing (to conquer!) into smaller cells that are equally viable and will grow over time.
As for this blog, I think I will keep it posted at least once a week. The ION drums articles I’ve been putting here will be moving to their own site on “the nthmost network“, my pet name for the multicellular organism I am. Three more sites are in the works (kombucha, gluten free, and the metablog), all simultaneously.
All at once! It’s really the only way I know how to do things.
ps. holy crap! Amazon is selling “Refuse to Choose” for $4.03 right now. Time to pick up another copy — my last one never made it back to me. Not that I mind! I think it’s being enjoyed.
Have you read this? I stole it from somewhere, sorry forgot the attribution:
Cult of Done Manifesto
1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
3. There is no editing stage.
4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
7. Once you’re done you can throw it away.
8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11. Destruction is a variant of done.
12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
13. Done is the engine of more.
I love this.