Having thrown my toys out of the pram/ my drawing materials off whatever I was sitting on that day (I think it was my bed), I took a breath, as well as a step back, and just stopped thinking about it. Because clearly I was slap-bang in one of my classic over-thinking sessions, which are never ever productive, just plain pointless – brain going into overdrive and scooting round and round in circles, like car whizzing round a Scalextric circuit at the mercy of an overactive child, who just wants to see their toy motor fly off the track in a blur of fizzing sparks. Only ever going to end in tears, as my mum would say.

Lying in bed, listening to the dreadful drone of a mozzie circling in the dark, I started plotting a different storyboard in my head – featuring an irritating critter and a can of insect repellant, of course – one which was still there the next morning to keep me occupied with doodles on the train to work. And from that (almost) unrelated moment of play I got slapped round the face by the realisation that I’d stepped off the path I wanted to go down (of blending text and images, as I do with my usual illustrations). I sat up in my dingy train carriage and thought, ‘Hey, the words are as important as the pictures. They are part of it. They were always meant to be part of it. Why am I trying to squeeze them into whatever blank space is left over on the page?’ And then it all clicked…

So on (another) park bench at lunchtime that day, in my dedicated time block for play, I started sketching my storyboard from scratch. And now I am far happier with the results. Now to make it happen on a grand scale! Simple, right?!

So far, I’ve done most of my thinking/ writing/ doodling/ stressing/ editing while sitting on my bed, on the bedroom floor, in the park,  in the garden, on a train platform, on a train, and even in the middle of a shopping mall. Anywhere, it seems, but at my desk, which just looks at me blankly from the corner of the room as if to say ‘really? you want to sit here? No chance! You’ll be fidgeting within minutes.’ (Clearly, if I think my desk is capable of talking to me, I’m going crazy through lack of sleep, induced by an over excited brain that wants to work on the project 24-7).

I suppose I’ll just have to keep moving around to keep things interesting. But as soon as those art materials come out (soon, please SOON) I think my workspace options may become limited. It’s not like the local cafe will thank me for leaving inky smudges all over their coffee cups and furniture. I might have to get even more creative! Is anyone doing a build-a-portable-studio project by any chance? Anyone…?

After checking out my task for the day, I made a commitment to have written my story and produced a story board for it by next Sunday evening. Now while that might not sound like a lot of work, it is when you have other plans (whether work or play). But with bitesize chunks,  careful planning and a unique working environment I’m pretty sure I’ll get it done.

Inspired by nature... the bonus of working on a portable project!

Well, I hope I will as despite writing for a living, I was having some serious trouble finding the right words to make this story click together. I’ve been so focussed on creating the illustrations, I almost forgot that there had to be an actual narrative. About an hour after I sat down to write, I had three pages full of crossings out and a near-illegible scrawl of words with proofreaders marks all over them. It was at that point that I realised how much planning goes into writing a book – of any sort. It’s why I’ve never written a novel – if my chess ‘strategy’ is anything to go by, I have a complete inabilty to plan/ fear of cementing the minutiae of each step. I like to look at the bigger picture and then when I’m satisfied it’s got potential, just jump in head first… Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s more fun than theorising everything to within an inch of its life!

Still, doesn’t help much with this project which clearly needs a more structured apporach. Although I think plunging in and immersing myself in it is no bad thing, especially with such a short time frame. It’s an experiment after all… And if what just happened is anything to go by, I’m geared up and raring to go - I just got so excited by the prospect of getting drawing that I accidentally stabbed myself with an ink nib. Maybe tattooing will be my next challenge!

I am experiencing another way. Flow. There are many degrees of flow to live in – the all encompassing, completely engrossed state where the outside world ceases to exist or the day-to-day “living the life you love”, being true to yourself and your aspirations. In this state everything that you need is there; if you miss it, something a bit louder will get your attention.

The Screw Work, Let’s Play project of felt-making was a vehicle for me. It wasn’t about wanting to be a full-time felt-maker; it was a way of me doing something with textiles which was portable(ish), where I could learn loads about the techniques, be something I could teach others at the end of the project, to get myself back on track with textiles/creativity but it was a vehicle  to get the most out of the support offered on the 30DC community.

I enjoy crafting and making “things” but my attention does wander and it can turn into work, especially if I’m making for someone else. It ceases to be about my creativity and becomes about my perception of the other persons expections. Being pretty rubbish with other people’s expectations all of the joy goes out of the making.

I have signed up to do the 8 week project with Screw Work and Free Range Humans. At the time I appreciated how much I needed to move what I was making to be more artistic and less crafty and set myself the target of getting a piece of work into a gallery by the summer. It is pretty important for me to have that impetus and some kind of deadline to get a piece into the public domain. It may be a large felt piece or it could be something completely different – it will be textiles related anyway. The ideas are flowing and going into the sketchbook.

So, back to the whispers. Yesterday I got whispered at very loudly by Marianne Cantwell from Free Range Humans. She was talking about niche marketing and the importance of knowing what your niche is before getting too bogged down in the detail of selling. When I started to think about the potential audience for my work I had a strong inkling that it is more suited to commercial premises than galleries – or is it?

I like to work on a larger scale than most domestic environments could accommodate. This would mean that I can aim my arrows at people with big houses, commercial premises or public buildings. I was pointed in the direction of art consultancies who place artwork in offices and commercial property and am fired up already! I have a clear idea of the piece I’d like to make next as a tester and see how it would scale up. First I need to go shopping to the sweety shop (Wingham Wool Work) and get some supplies.

It is entirely possible that the pieces can be scaled up or down, but I may be trying to be all things to all people instead of just doing what I want to do, which is what it’s all about, isn’t it?

I shall get some pictures scanned to give you an idea of the work I was doing in 2000 which was put on hold until now. I really do feel like I’m continuing where I left off then and that is pretty amazing that creative urges can be paused for such a time and then re-kindled.

My gratitude is for Marianne in whispering loudly at me, and for Demetri creating the time and space I need to pursue this. You have a way of keeping me facing the way I need to be travelling.

This is often how I feel, being amazed at other people’s work, and finding my own ordinary and obvious in comparision. What Derek Silvers (the man who launched CDBaby!) argues is that everybody can think like that, even those who do all that amazing work. (Come to think of it, I’ve seen that in the shape of a couple of people who I know, and whose work I admire actually asking others if their work is any good!) Therefore thinking of something you’ve done as “ordinary” is no excuse not to share it with others. As the old Japanese proverb goes: we are fools, whether we dance or not- so we might as well dance.

Get ready for bunting making...

In my box of unfinished projects I have material to make bunting for our lovely Bell Tent and do you know what? It’s in the “unfinished projects” box. It’s almost becoming an instruction. Put it in the box and stop feeling guilty about it. Done.

So what happened to inspire me to make “gratitude bunting”? During the 30DC I received a whole load of support from many people, and one of them stood out as she was able to boot me up the bum in such a kind way, and in a way which made me sit up and listen. It was only a one word boot, but so efficient, well timed and very, very accurate.

I was wondering how I could get through my usual working day doing things which I found tedious and draining, but even more so now I had the contrast of doing something amazing, creative and playful. I asked advice. Selina Barker, play guru, from the Screw Work, Let’s Play 30 Day Challenge came back with the one word I probably didn’t want to hear -

“Discipline.”

Cut and ready to sew...

Short and sweet. From this simple, short, swift boot up the bum I began to see that discipline and inspiration are on the the same continuum, just miles away from each other. With the play project I feel inspired to get cracking with it and have loads of drive as it’s something within me bursting to get out and be made manifest. With my daily work I need to apply effort to do what needs doing and the discipline to see it through, and to have no sight of the end of the apparent treadmill.

Selina has an energy about her which is infectious and positive. She will say things as they are (I have found Yorkshire people are pretty forthright too!) and be gently encouraging with her way of keeping us on track, remembering that we are playing as opposed to working. There is a moment when one slides into the other and, boy, is it helpful to have a Selina around to remind you that it’s about having fun, not labouring – inspiration as opposed to discipline perhaps?

Full steam ahead! Inspiration on hand...

So, how to say “thank you”? Selina has embarked on her own Challenge by packing up her life into a campervan with her 100 things to travel for 6 months. She has successfully kitted out her new home with lots of gingham, but no bunting. That has been rectified! I spent a happy few hours making some “gratitude bunting” for Selina. I may have gone slightly overboard as there are 4 lengths of about 5 metres each, but they were great fun, and I hope she gets pleasure from them.

I have left space here in case there is a picture of Selina with her bunting in situ…

Giving gratitude is so easy. Receiving it or hearing it is harder! I’m working on it.

“Enter a world where penguins fly, statues sit in cafes, cats appear from walls, deer direct trains, fairies cross the River Clyde, time rewinds, and armies of the homeless take over.

Welcome to BARCELONA CANAL, a collection of poetry and photography by MICHAEL JAMES where the ordinary moments of life step through the looking glass to became extraordinary.”

Order “Barcelona Canal” from here.

But for now, phew! More details when I launch tomorrow.

The story so far: near the end of last year, I did a calendar called “Hot Shots” for Pizazz Enterprises. Initially this meant I did all the photoshoots, and processed the results for inclusion in the calendar, to be put together by a designer. However, for various reasons, the designer wasn’t able to do it, and with the deadline looming, I stepped in and designed the thing myself in Adobe InDesign, based on a public domain calendar template, and after a few revisions, we had the calendar. Hey presto, I was now a publisher.

In fact, I was intending to self publish for some time (That’s why I had InDesign in the first place.), so this provided the impetus for my current project. However, if I thought I had a handle of InDesign after my crash course in using it for the calendar, then I was to have a rude awakening when I went to create the Contents page.

I had all the content in my page, and I was aware enough of the idea of stylesheets (After all my work in web development) to utilise paragraph styles for the main text and headings. That done, I wondered if there was some way to make a table of contents in a similar style to the way Word, Open Office etc can generate content pages. Turns out there is: under the “Layout Menu”, you have “Table of Contents”. When you select that, you can include paragraph styles to include in the contents pages. (eg you can select the style you used for the title of a piece, and it’ll generate a contents page with the titles, and the page numbers.) So, grateful for deciding to use paragraph styles, I selected the header style I used for the “title”, and found I’d created pretty much near what I wanted for  the contents page. However, getting it to do exactly what I wanted wasn’t quite as obvious.

Basically what I was wanting was something like the classic justified “TITLE…….pg no.”  style. Thanks to some internet searching I found this solution:

1. The first bit is when you generate your table of contents. (From the menu: “Layout -> Table of contents”) Select the “More Options” button, and look at the section of the dialog titled “Style: [your header style]“. You’re looking for the “Between entry and number” field. Click the arrow to the right to get the related content menu, and select “Right Indent Tab”. Now generate your contents. This will generate a list of contents with the numbers on the right hand side of the page.
2. Now it’s generated, click on the contents, and bring up it’s tabs dialog (From the menu: “Type -> Tabs”). On the white bit just above the ruler, click on the bit just to the left of where the numbers appear. This will create an arrow icon, which you can drag around the ruler if you need to.
3. Here’s the important bit. Make sure you have selected this arrow icon. In the “Leader” field above in the Tabs dialog, type “.” You should now have the space between the Titles and page number filled with “.” in the style of a classic contents page!

Like I said, not very obvious, but once you know it, it’s actually quite simple.

For example on Sunday 3rd April we all had to state our intentions for the week and last Sunday we had to report back to the group on progress. Now there’s 100+ people around the world involved in the 30DC and we’re all keeping in contact via a specially put together social network. It was feeding back on the network on Sunday morning when I realised the actual progress of the week. I had set myself three tasks around my personal blog of the last year: (1) print out the blog in full in order to assess and edit, (2) decide on the format of the sketchbook I wanted to present the blog in and (3) complete 5 pieces of art / craft towards illustrations for the book.

Well I failed to complete the all my aims. I completed the print out of the text part and kind of decided on the format of the sketchbook but really didn’t make much headway in starting the art projects and that was the part I thought I’d really enjoy. But, as I started my feedback to my virtual team, I realised that, this time I wasn’t inspired to create art. Once I’d got into the text part of my task I really wanted to do more on the re-reading and editing and that anything else wasn’t relevant, or motivational to me.

So I turned the negative of not completing all three of the tasks into a positive that I’d learned the core of was motivating me at the moment. Therefore this week’s task will build on that.

What are you ‘failing’ to complete? Is there value in going with where your real interest is taking you? How can you follow / encourage more of your passions?

Have a positive week.
Georgia

07957 46 88 71 (it’s my direct line – please leave a message if I can’t pick up) mail@toppublicjobs.com

And – if you want to read more in depth personal development stuff please read my other blog 43 Things in 43 Years

OR – if you want to see what I’m doing with the finished blog: the45thyear

Most importantly, we have a title for this book! It will be called “Barcelona Canal“.

It's not that cold oop North...

It’s interesting how absorbed I have been in the day to day stuff. Here I am getting stuck into my 30 Day Challenge for Screw Work Lets Play and making lists of what I’d like to happen or things I’d like to achieve and when a golden opportunity to tick many of these off the list I then have to sit myself down and JUSTIFY it! What nonsense!

In life it’s a mission to be fully present, to live in the now and so on, but it then becomes very easy to take an eye off the ball that is the future. For instance, I am preparing to do a workshop teaching felting. It has been on my mind to attend someone else’s workshop just to get an idea of how  they structure it (I think I know how to do it, it’s just a confidence thing). I am also looking at getting a list of suppliers, finding out what publications are out there and getting general inspiration.

Then, a chance (is there such a thing) mention by an old friend of mine sends me into a flurry. “Is anyone going to be at WonderWool this weekend?” she asks. What happens at WonderWool? Felting workshops and demos, wool and fleece, suppliers and inspirations galore! Tick, tick, tick and, er, tick!

So, this weekend I’m going to be at http://www.wonderwoolwales.co.uk/ mopping up as much as I can mop up. I believe I’ve got over the, “I shouldn’t be going – I’ve got my list of things to make and do to finish for my Sunday check in with my group”. I shall continue to hear the voice which witters at me and shall also continue to ignore it on the basis that one day it will give up pestering me and GO AWAY!

If anyone wants to get hold of me this weekend it will be easy to find me – just listen up for the delighted laughter, sighs and drools coming from Builth Wells.

Firstly, I had each of the poems printed out, one per page. I put one down on the floor, then put the next one to a random side of the previous poem- left, right, up, down: whatever “felt” right. Every subsequent page I put down would be placed next to whatever “felt” right. So, by the end of this game, I’d end up with a irregularly tiled arrangement of pages, and that would running order version 1.

Next I’d move around the pages, a little like a sliding puzzle, in order to change the irregular tiled arrangement into a regular rectangular tiled arrangement. Only now did I look at the poems on the pages, as I decided to look for what would start and end the collection. First I looked for the best one to start, picked the one that “felt” right, and swapped it with the top-left page. Similarly, I picked the end one, and swapped it with the bottom-right. Now, I had running order version 2.

Now I had a start and an end plus an intuitive randomness in-between, I started to read it all to myself in this order to see how it felt. Some worked better together than others, and some had similar themes, so I started grouping the themes together as well as keeping the random good links together. The book had now become a giant jigsaw puzzle!

Once I had moved things around, and felt satisfied that every piece of the puzzle fitted together, I read the results all to myself again, and after a couple of minor changes, I was satisfied that I had running order version 3, the final version. I booted up the computer, and pasted the poems in the new order into a new Open Document called “My First Book v2″. I can use this as the basis of the running order of the Adobe InDesign document when I do that.

This experience was most illuminating. The prospect of choosing the running order was a bit daunting to me. The first game I played helped me get out of the mindset, by choosing a running order in a way that didn’t actually consciously involve choosing a running order, but letting one evolve through a combination of random and intuitive choice. The second game evolved a basic structure around the randomness. Again, not actual concious choosing of an order beyond the start and the end. The result was that my choices subsequently were limited within a manageable range.

The third and final game involved seeing patterns within the seeming randomness, both in the case of seeing the common themes between some poems, but also in seeing what poems randomly worked together. At this point, concious choice was finally brought into the process, but it was helped greatly by the previous two games giving me a good idea of the underlying feel of the collection- one that I wasn’t actually consciously aware of until I started seeing it in the controlled randomness created by the first two games, and not fully appreciative until the end of the third game and the (more or less) completed running order stood before me.

Most of all, it was fun! I was engrossed in the process, and time zipped by amazingly quickly. In fact, I found pasting the poems in the new running order on my computer to more wearing!

I’m thinking about trying something similar when I choose the photos to go with the poems now.

So, announcement over, what now? Well, I have done desktop publishing before: I did a series of shoots for a calendar last year, and then for various reasons, I ended up actually making the calendar myself in Adobe InDesign, and getting the typeset document ready for delivery to the printers. In the process, I made every mistake one could imagine- including the old classic about forgetting that the page count has to be divisible by four- but I learned a lot in the process.

So I’m more confident that I can handle the process of constructing the book from the material. It’s now the material that I need to focus on. I should have enough poetry for a mini-book, although I may need to write more for that. However, I intend to gather all my writing together and work out a basic “running order”. Once that’s done, I’ll know if I need to write more. At this point, I’ll also be able to start matching images to the words. In some cases I already have a good idea of what image can match which poem. I expect this process of consolidation might take less than a week, and then I’ll know what gaps there may be and how they could possibly be filled. And then.. well, that’s the big unknown at the moment, but it’s when the real fun begins!

Printing is more of a known quantity. Rather than just get it printed, I want this book to be for sale from print-on-demand websites Lulu and/or Blurb. Both allow importing of PDFs created Adobe Indesign to create online books which can be either sold as e-books, or printed and send to the customer’s address- as long as it fits their templates. So I might have to do one which is tailored to one of the site’s templates, then adapt it to another. I’ve already done a bit of research, and their sizing is not exactly the same, so I’ll be deciding which format is the best across both (As well as compatible with my local printers, should I decide to get it printed locally.) and use that as the main template for my DTP, and then amend for the other site. I think I’ve already got a candidate format to use.

Once I collate my work together, I’ll know how many pages I’ll need, and then the fun starts!

I have been following a great guy, John Williams, who wrote the book Screw Work Let’s Play and he has recently launched a 30 day programme to help people get going on projects they’ve been procrastinating over. Along with inspirational life coach Selina Barker, John’s aiming to get 150 people around the world to get going on a project that really excites them. 30 Day Challenge

I have decided to take this opportunity to launch the next blog (more next week) which will record the challenge of getting the 43Things in 43Years book into a format, produce the illustrations and get it out to appropriate publishers.

Can’t wait . . .

I’ve taken on a challenge this week – and I wondered if you were up for something similar. The fact that I’m doing it is all you need to know – I don’t expect you to do anything other than witness it if you’re interested. But, obviously you’re more than welcome to join in if you fancy a challenge too!

I have always enjoyed responding to a deadline. I work well when I know that I have to get something done or if there’s a definite end to a project. Therefore I am always interested in challenges that involve a set deadline. For some time I’ve been following a guy called John Williams who wrote a great book called Screw Work Let’s Play. He also runs a website and various workshops along the lines of doing the stuff you love to do and seeing if you can make money along the way. Anyway – he’s set up a 30 day challenge for April where he’ll get you to set yourself something you’ve always wanted to do – then get it underway in a month.

I love this because:
(a) You have to decide on one thing you want to do
(b) You have the motivation and support of a group
(c) You have a DEADLINE

So, in the interests of research and for the greater benefit of the TPJ blog reading public, I have signed up and will be feeding back to you how John and the team keep us all motivated and focused so you can get the benefits without the commitment! If you want to join in please see this link 30 Day Challenge
– I do not have any connection with this programme or any affiliations with John so feel free to make your own mind up about it!

I do love the start of a journey . . .

Hope you have a fab week.

Georgia

07957 46 88 71 (it’s my direct line – please leave a message if I can’t pick up) mail@toppublicjobs.com

And – if you want to read more in depth personal development stuff please read my other blog 43 Things in 43 Years

First, Screw Work, Let’s Play: How to Do What You Love and Get Paid for it, by John Williams.

I ordered this on a whim after reading an article in the Sunday Times that mentioned it…I was trying to set up as a freelance makeup artist at the time (Something I learned later, indirectly via this book, wasn’t really for me.) and figured I could use all the help I could get!

Now…I HATE self help books (every other one I’ve ever read I’ve given up after the first few pages…not having strength enough to continue reading, consider every ounce of will power was stopping me from throwing the patronising piece of *&%*@ out the window)…but this is very definitely different. With this book, by a couple of pages in, I was being told to go out, buy a ‘play book’ (note book) and start working through a series of exercises…I figured it was worth a shot and decided I was just going to go with the flow…complete each ‘exercise’ as the book told me and see what happened!…What happened was that a was taken on a fascinating journey of discovery…not only about my career and where I want it to go/be, but actually about myself and where I want my life to go (for me…parts of this book didn’t just work as a career book but as an overall ‘therapy’ in itself!)

Speaking of therapy books, the book I’m reading at the moment (one of a few actually) is Matha Beck’s Finding Your Own North Star: How to Claim the Life You Were Meant to Live.

I’m still on the first few chapters, but I think this book might change my views on life even more than ‘Screw Work’. I haven’t read enough of the book to give a full review (yet), but the general idea is that she walks you through the process of working out your deepest desires, and working towards making them a reality…An idea that really appeals to me, as despite the fact that I know for a fact that I don’t like the life I’m living, and the job I’m in very much, I don’t really know what I do want, let alone how to get it!…I’m hoping this book might help me some way towards working that out!

Image: Matt Jones

Last month I blogged about the importance of being prolific in order to get good at anything.

If you want to be a successful print journalist you need to write prolifically; if radio is your bag, you must be podcasting and audiobooing like a mutha. No excuses.

I still think it’s worth emphasising because I know as a busy journalist myself, a former student, and now a lecturer in journalism, that motivating yourself to invest in getting better at something is really hard.

If you’re a full time journalist or freelancer, you’re probably tired, poor, or can’t justify the time spent on going out and shooting some photographs without the commission. If you’re a student, you’re probably hungover.

But it isn’t any of these.

What you’re actually lacking is a project: some kind of framework, an organised challenge, bounded in time. It doesn’t have to be a big project, with a deadline years down the line – in fact, aim for the opposite: something you can achieve quickly and regularly.

They can take many forms. Documentary film maker Gail Mooney describes in a recent blog post how ‘passion projects‘ help her get films made. She’s just launched a new one, and is raising money for it on the crowd-funding website Kickstarter.

…as my career took hold and I became busier with work, I didn’t have time for sharing or personal projects.  But for someone like me who is a dreamer, I was starting to burn out.

There have been other passion projects since these first two and my head is usually full of ideas that are rumbling around, just waiting for the right time to surface.

Author Gretchen Rubin, currently undergoing a year-long and inspiring Happiness Project, calls it a Creativity Boot-camp. She wrote a novel in a month (it was terrible, she admits, but improved her writing massively); and there’s even a cool website which encourages people to draw a comic book in just 24 hours. No planning, no thinking, just drawing.

You lower your standards. If you’re producing a page a week, or one blog post a week, or one sketch a week, you expect it to be pretty darned good, and you fret about quality. Often, however, folks achieve their best work from grinding out the product.

When I’m having trouble getting work done on a big project, my impulse sometimes is to take smaller, easier steps. Sometimes that helps, but sometimes it helps more to take bigger, more ambitious steps instead. By doing more instead of less, I get a boost of energy and focus.

And author and career coach John Williams describes how a Play Project can get you out of rut and let you practice doing the work you really love, without having to get paid for it.

The process feels completely counter-intuitive at first because it requires that you stop fretting about your ideal work or how you could ever get paid – and start doing something. If you are stuck on that very first question “What would I enjoy?” you will benefit hugely from this. At a later stage, you can create further play projects to move you towards getting paid.

If you’re a journalist, young or old, you should be taking note of this. The shift in the industry has created a unique opportunity: to do the journalism we love, and get paid for it. There is a (slowly closing) window of opportunity to turn your journalism into something which provides income and makes you happy. You can’t just leap into it – you need to work out what your passion really is first.

My projects

I first hit on the idea of “projects” over Christmas 2009, when I read a blog post of good new years resolutions. One clever guy suggested writing an ebook in a weekend as a quick hit project. Inspired, I sat down on the first weekend of 2010, and wrote Newsgathering for Hyperlocal Journalists. I started on Saturday morning, and stopped on Sunday evening. A week or so later, I put the book on sale, and people started buying it.

It never made much money, and looking back, was full of spelling mistakes – but it was a finished project. And it gave me the confidence to write Next Generation Journalist a few months later, which has been infinitely more successful.

Now I’m looking for a new passion project to keep me occupied before Christmas. It’ll be a multimedia film project of some kind – and will get me making films every single week.

Have you got a project? Or an idea for one? Share it down in the comments!

There’s a movement that suggests adults work best when they play too. This makes perfect sense to me; when you do something you enjoy you put in the hours, learn more, care more and do your best job.

I could try persuading my two-year old to do a jigsaw instead of playing with his Lego but I’d have to stand over him and encourage him, I’d probably end up putting it together myself. Jigsaws just aren’t his thing,  but he’ll spend hours finding the right parts for Lego men, sorting light sabers for the ‘Skywalker ones’ and carefully fitting the pieces in place. It must be the same skills practised as the jigsaw, but to him one is a game and one a chore to escape as soon as he can.

Some parts of my job give me a play feeling and don’t feel like work at all. I feel guilty being paid to write blog posts, or chat to people on Twitter about poker – these are the kind of things I’d do for free, for fun. Poker tournament writing isn’t entirely my thing so I sometimes struggle, and the tweets are to random poker players not friends, but still the time passes pleasantly and productively when I do these tasks. I find it easy to give them my full attention, and I work hard to get them right because I love doing them.

Of course other aspects of my work are dreary, and I used to think that comes with the territory. Work can’t be all about play, can it? I’m not so sure anymore. When I watch the clock or feel unsuited to tasks I’m not giving my best for my company, and feel like I’m cheating myself, wasting my time and talents. Can I play all day instead?

I’ve thought about starting my own business to try to achieve this. I know I like to be in control, I like to be creative and experimental, trying new things rather than sticking to the same old. Not many traditional jobs give these kinds of freedoms. I’ve worked on a couple of business plans, but nothing came of them. I didn’t push hard enough and I think that was because the business ideas felt like work too.

I’ve decided I’ve been looking at this the wrong way around. I was trying to find a way to make a living that would be fun. A better way would be to play, and try to make my fun pay.

I wouldn’t need to make a fortune if I was spending my time doing something I loved, that would be a reward enough. It would be a whole lot better than earning some annual bonus only to spend it on a holiday that was needed to recover from work. 

Playful people seem to be creative types, so part of the creative fun could be coming up with ideas to make money from things I love doing. None of this means quitting my job or anything drastic, it just means taking my play time more seriously, playing harder, finding more time for the fun things, in the belief that my enthusiasm might lead to reward.

So I’m banning scary words like entrepreneur and self-employment, they never did suit me. I just want to play, and play hard enough to get some credit for it.

My sticker museum idea might seem like a crazy plan, but I love it, working on that is pure fun. I also like writing short stories, and when I’m happy with a few of those I should try to get them published. I have a few more playful ideas in the pipeline too, including some for my poker site job.

The practicalities of my sticker museum idea worried me when I realised it ought to have a shop, but running a shop doesn’t interest me at all.  I came up with a playful approach to solving the problem – I decided I should find a friend who loves playing shops. There must be lots of big kids out there who would like to help with this, and then I get more time to play with my stickers!

If any one of these ‘play projects’ make money that’s good. If not I’ll still have fun. I can’t lose.

Wha?

John Williams, on his site, Screw Work, Let’s Play! describes the personality type of the scanner. Intelligent, interested in everything, on fire with excitement about a new idea or thought. After a short while, the high is gone, the idea seems less interesting, and the person moves on to something else. Why? Scanners have a deep sense of desire to have meaning in their life, to be able to be creative beings and to express themselves creatively through their work. Once the high is gone, it feels as though the idea wasn’t that interesting after all, and the scanner moves on to something more exciting. If they could, their ideal would be to have enough money to not work, and to play and learn all day.

It feels very shameful and childish to say you’d like to have enough money to not work. Wouldn’t everyone? Well, not exactly. Scanners like work and will work to the bone, if it feels like play to them. If they believe in an idea, their results will astound you. This is why, as a teacher, if I see something in a kid that feels like it is lying beneath the surface – a talent, a proclivity towards something, a shy possibility towards greatness – I can help pull it out faster than anyone else and facilitate the transformation of into the blossoming of some of their potential.

This talent is my greatest strength but can also have a dark side, too. I can read malicious intent or a leaning away from good choices faster than most, so I often find that hard to bear and to watch as it takes shape. When I speak with someone, usually I can feel where they are coming from emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, which can also be exhausting. I have spent a lot of years learning how to strengthen my filters, set better boundaries with people.

Traditional ways of channeling this adaptability include teaching, coaching and therapy. In terms of the way my life will unfold, I have no doubt it will continue to involve these things. What I’m curious about is how I can continue my own path of growth and change while facilitating others towards their own best. This will be an interesting time…

Don’t simply reject it as a hippy fantasy: Even if you are not realistically going to leave your job in the bank and discover your inner novelist, there is much wisdom here about getting in touch with the passions that truly motivate you – the ones you often leave behind because you think you are ‘working’.

“The rules are changing,” he says. “My mum’s belief was that work was to be endured, not enjoyed, and her generation didn’t really have a choice. But we no longer need to be driven by the old work ethic; we have entered the era of what the author Pat Kane calls the Play Ethic — ‘placing yourself, your passions and enthusiasms at the centre of your world’.”

Williams makes it clear that he’s not advocating doing the thing you love and just hoping that the money turns up. “Aristotle said, ‘where the needs of the world and your talents cross, there lies your vocation’. You need to find the sweet spot between the things you love to do and doing them in a way that solves people’s problems for them — and there is your means of earning a living.”

How do you find this sweet spot? How do you even know what you really want?

The answer is to follow your instincts. Imagine someone handed you a year’s salary and said you didn’t have to go back to work for 12 months. What would you do? Sit on a beach? Go travelling? But after the first three months of pleasure and idleness, what would you do then? That, says Williams, is the clue to what you should be doing with your life right now.

He suggests that you get yourself a notebook “Write down everything you discover — what you like, what you don’t like, people whose work or lifestyle you’d like to emulate, ideas for contacts to talk to, projects to try. This is now your playbook.”

You should also make like Columbo — the detective with the famous line, “Just one more thing”. “You can learn a lot from Columbo,” he says thoughtfully. “No clue goes unnoticed by him, and it shouldn’t by you. What part of a bookshop draws you in? What did you enjoy doing as a child? It doesn’t have to be something that immediately seems ‘creative’, just driven by a genuine interest — I had a client who, it turned out, wanted to be a City trader: one of the clues was that he always turned to the business section of the newspaper first.”

Try to make every Wednesday a day when you get a little bit closer to your ideal life. “Halfway between weekends, it’s the ideal time to build a little play into your working week,” Williams says. “Even if you can grab only a few minutes out of your day, do it. If you want to be a poet, take a book of poems to read and a notebook to write in on your commute. Then find ways to free up more time as the weeks go on.”

The problem is, Williams says, that we tend to have a job mindset, and that doesn’t necessarily serve us well in the current climate of economic upheaval. We think like an employee and look for a hole to fit into, whereas we should be thinking like an entrepreneur — what are my strengths, how can I create something from scratch that fits me like a glove? “If you can think like that, you’ll be better placed to survive big shifts in the economy,” Williams says. “If you have a self-driven, passionate, creative approach you’re one of a kind, and can’t so easily be outsourced.”

Some of this connects with the advice we give here at the seminary about how to discern your vocation. Often what starts people on the vocational journey is a ‘just one more thing’ moment.

[Addition:] A friend just sent me this quote from Mons. Luigi Giusanni:

What I must do, what I must be – my vocation – does not normally emerge as a specific command, but as a suggestion, a proposal, an invitation. Vocation, which is the meaning of one’s life, introduces itself more as a glimpse of a possibility than as something absolutely inevitable. The more difficult the task to be accomplished the truer this is. In its purest and most evocative aspect, awareness is the most discreet cue: it is inspiration. Thus one confirms one’s personal worth by readily agreeing to the subtlest of possibilities.