The Universe Strikes Back

I did it again. I had to let the universe know I was about to storm full-steam into the creative writing process. It punished me by pushing my nose fast and hard into the grindstone of reality. I had laid out the 5 books I wanted to 'power-read' my way through in order to get a few lessons in writing children's books and redrafting/fine tuning my skills and had started reading them. Then this morning, as I'm working my way through Stephen King's 'On Writing', I was reminded about my role in the family household and how I had not brought in my share of paychecks since November last year when my final IT project came to an halt. I got this from both my dad and my wife and believe me: they couldn't be more polarized in opinions about life, the universe and all in between.


So what does this mean to me, when people who normally wouldn't agree on anything both think I should be inserting myself once again into the rat race, fighting in this current economic climate to pinch out a living? Perhaps sacrificing the one opportunity I've had in years to be unabashedly creative and intensively motivated to share my story with the world? At first, because I love my wife beyond anything on Earth's green soil and the sky above, my first reaction was to drop everything literary and start scourging the Internet to release its every byte of freelance offerings for desperate IT experts and webdesigners. But after a good two hours of digital scrambling I ran out of steam and was not the least bit horrified I had found myself at sites offering 'work at home' filling in surveys and answering phones....and for a fee no less.

Is this what I want? A job for the sake of having a job? A paycheck, however thin, to prove I am a dignified working person? Contributing to funds that, let's face it, for the most part will be used for entertainment purposes to mentally check out from the very job I'm doing? This was wrong. And then I remembered a good friend in Holland had sent me a presentation from Seth Godin called 'Brainwashed - seven ways to reinvent yourself'. This simple manifesto sparked something within me. Read it yourself and see if you agree. It basically makes the case that we've all been programmed by education and upbringing to think that we need to follow the rules of society or die a social death. Aka: work how society wants you to work, for pay they determine or cower in ridicule for not doing so. The very realization of this entrapment however is also its promise of release.

Companies like Google and Apple, inventors of social dating and networking sites and in fact a great many of free-thinking self-made successful men and women in various industries have discovered something cool. Overcoming the primal fear of failure and learning from it when it occurs, they have discovered that if you stand convinced behind your unique idea, you are the one who sets the rules of the game. Seth calls this: Connect - Be generous - Make art - Acknowledge the lizard - Ship - Fail and Learn. Be bold and use the technologies of today to connect with ideas and resources around you. Give and share your idea freely and attract motivated like minded people to gain momentum. Make your art whatever it may be. Face up to the fear, but don't succumb to it. Present it boldly. Turn any failure into a learning lesson - in fact learn from all steps along the way. We all have something unique to offer and by employing positive methods of rethinking and retooling how we present ourselves to the world we might just find our path to happiness and success.

So what does that mean for me? First of all I have to stop thinking in traditional values and terms. I am not an IT guy who wants to write a children's book. I am wildly creative, smart enough to handle a wide set of tools to express this and in a position to fail and learn from it. As such I need not choose between writing a book and finding a web design project - why can I not do both? I can find what it is exactly that drives me to tell this story of Simon & Sally and make use of my expertise of over 15 years of IT skills to present it (and myself) to the world. This should even transcend methods that only cautiously approach (and mimick) such an reinvention like e-publishing the book while finding a web design gig for... hey, maybe an e-publishing site. No, I'm thinking larger. Bolder. Fresher!

I don't know yet where this train of thought might lead me, but one thing is for sure: I have discovered the mechanism of my personal reinvention and am feeling the shackles of conventions of yesterday's set of rules fall away. Now all I need to do is keep this train of thought going and use the energy to make it work.