Focus and Flow

I’ve had one of those nights where I write and rewrite and rewrite and it all still sounds like whining and I toss everything.

Anyway…

The 2011 Primer is great, buy it. No really, it’s fabulous, just buy it. Will change your life.

But I had this idea where I was going to edit and revise the Primer annually. So far I’ve made three attempts at doing that for a 2012 edition. Each time I’ve ground to a halt for one reason or another. In no small part because I have loathed feeling like I was being “held back a year” and repeating a grade. Everything was a little better and more polished as I wrote, but in the end it all felt like I was simply moving stuff around inside the book.

Basically I didn’t really have a compelling reason to write the 2012 edition… which means there would be no compelling reason to buy it.

The whole of 2012 has felt like a energy-less dead zone for me. Which is ironic in that book sales went up, blog readership is up, the forum was started and is huge. Everything looks really good, but I’d not been enjoying much anymore. So I gave up thinking about the Primer revision.

Did the Army thing, played a lot of Warcraft and generally did nothing in particular for months. I’ve also had two potentially big opportunities that I’ve declined recently as well. The first was fairly easy to discard, interesting, but not that appealing. The second I really wanted to work and would have made some potentially quite decent money… but felt not quite right. I mean seriously, on paper, potentially lots of exposure and cash and fame and helping people. Nice people to work with too. Not a scam or anything objectively wrong about it. So I spent a long time thinking about it.

What stopped me was watching this video of Aryton Senna less than an hour before his death. The look on his face was how I felt inside and gave me the heebie-jeebies.

I don’t think I would have died. I just know something really bad was going to happen. So I declined. Since that moment, I’ve felt better and more energized. Probably not co-incidentally it synced with Jennifer and I getting back into really exercising again. We’ve felt more connected too I think.

Anyway, shortly after declining… I had an idea. One of those blinding “how did I not see that?” ideas where you just sit back and go… “ahhhhhhh” and realize you’ve been wrong about something really important even though you’ve had all the pieces the whole time. Right now it’s just a single sheet of paper with a total of eighteen words on it. There’s a grid and some arrows as well.

Anyway, no idea when it’s finished, but it’s done when it’s done. I have to start from scratch in many ways, and then throw a little fire engine red in there.

Jennifer: He stole my pen and scribbled that page out in front of me. It’s really good.