8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

A
BLOG
FROM
NOWHERE

  • Blind Collapse

    I have a blind spot. Do you?

    I catastrophize.

    Imagine the worst possible outcome: the worst reaction from a client, the worst feedback from a reader, or the worst review from a customer. Imagine failure not just as a setback but as a liability to reputation or personal welfare. 

    It can paralyze. 

    It can freeze momentum into regression.

    I wanted to write on this blog a little more about the lies we tell ourselves, the stories we make up in our own heads, and the demons that haunt our efforts to hold us back.

    We all have them.

    One of mine is overthinking the worst of it. Those notions swirl around in my brain, often keeping me up in the middle of the night or causing me to sit and stare at the screen during those precious moments I could be writing. It snowballs into narratives that play out as conversations in my own head where I debate and explain and justify—none of it with any value to the work.

    The feedback loop would be much worse if I didn’t have strategies to cope with it: my personal counter-attack is math. Some little corner of my brain is a bookie for the odds and reminds the catastrophizing majority that the probabilities for the worst outcome are in my favour for a good result.  (That bookie, though, he takes long naps and only really wakes up when things are spiralling.)

    All that is to say: we each of us have blind spots, and acknowledging them might just be the first step in overcoming them.

  • Navel Gazing 

    I don’t think I’ll ever stop being fascinated by the simple idea that iterative work can lead to huge accomplishments.

    I was sitting down to write this post, pondering a topic, and I noticed that at some point last week I’d passed the one hundred post milestone on this blog.

    Navel gazing could have easily followed, and maybe that’s all this post is. But I’d like to think that it is a self-referential example of my point, too.

    A few times per week for the last five months I’ve sat down with a hot tea and my keyboard and written out a few words on a topic related to the mission of this blog: to talk about the fun and frustration of creative exploration, to poke at the obvious and pry into the obscure, and to generally reflect on the thousands upon thousands of aspects of what it takes to bootstrap oneself into a creative professional life no matter your career stage—the first person perspective version of that.

    And so I write, and often I’ve preached upon the simplest of simple topics: just putting in the work. Doing it. Actually writing, making, or creating—no matter how small or incremental it might seem.

    By example, one of the things I create incrementally is this blog, writing oft disconnected thoughts about the process itself: navel gazing upon navel gazing.

    One hundred posts later my incremental effort sits around forty thousand words: a short book worth of text and ideas posted here for people to read and enjoy. If that’s not something huge from a hundred little iterative efforts I don’t know what is.

  • Vibrato Know

    It’s no secret to those who know me that I took up playing the violin late in life. 

    I was about to turn forty and feeling this deep void in my life with regards to making music. It was palpable. I would go to concerts and wish I would have learned an instrument, or stuck with the one I briefly played in grade school. I would see my kid going to her piano lessons and feel a pang of jealousy for her privilege that we were able to give her this opportunity to learn. So I bought a violin and signed up for lessons.

    Ten years later I am pretty okay at the violin.

    I play in a community orchestra, though, and I am surrounded by dozens of other musicians of varying ability, many of whom learned to play when they were younger. I can’t help but compare. And here’s the rub: sitting among a dozen other violinists each week at rehearsal has highlighted something to me. I call it the vibrato problem.

    Vibrato is an important aspect of playing the violin. The finger presses down on the string to shorten the length so that the resultant note can be played. But watch a violinist and you will see that they don’t hold that finger steady: they wiggle it, subtly altering that string length like a sine wave as they are playing the note producing a gentle warbling of the tone. This is vibrato.

    Vibrato is still something I struggle with after ten years of playing the violin.  My fifty year-old fingers never learned early and are fighting to this day to learn it still. Having a young plastic brain would probably soak this up and it would become second nature, but being an older learner has left me to consciously think about it for every note when there is already a dozen other things to think about while playing.

    Extrapolate this to any other art form, any other skill. There is always a vibrato problem for older learners: and I’d like to believe that recognizing it is the first step in knowing how to overcome it.

  • Fibre Arts

    I have a lot of friends who consider themselves fibre artists, knitting and sewing and quilting and weaving, but if you clicked on this post thinking I had something to add to that conversation I apologize in advance: the fibre I have been thinking about more recently is the dietary kind.

    I think you would be hard-pressed to find a nutrition expert that disagrees with the idea that more fibre in our diets is a positive thing. We all know this, of course, but it’s the actual eating more fibre which has always been the tricky parts. Most fibre-rich foods are definitely not in the category of exciting, tasty, comfort foods.

    But then you get a bit older and you spend some time actually heeding that nutrition advice and, yeah, eating more fibre.  The correlation is not immediate, though. It takes a few days, or maybe a few weeks, and suddenly you just feel better.

    Fibre is a also a great analogy for other parts of life. As we age and develop a kind of mid-life urgency to add purpose and meaning to our fleeting days it’s so easy to look past the important bits of advice and go straight for the tastiest morsels. 

    See, fibre is more than a healthy food, it’s a way of thinking about a part of your life that thinks beyond the moment of gratification. It’s the lesser-palatable bits of effort and practice and pursuit for which we often don’t see immediate payoff, but in a few weeks or years makes the most difference.

    Figuring out what’s fibre and what’s something else, though, that’s up to you.

  • Resumes Resources

    I served my time in the white collar world of desk job, and while I can’t tell as I write these words if I’ll ever go back to being a salaryman poking numbers into spreadsheets, composing jargon-strewn emails to colleagues, and hosting countless meetings about project status updates, I can suggest that I’ve been there.

    Your experience will vary.

    There is a kind of unique uniformity to working in a desk job: they are all somehow the same, but then too, everyone has an experience that requires the caveat that you can never quite be certain what will happen next in those jobs.

    What I do know is that the uniformity can often work in the favour of creative souls. 

    Creative practices not only build skills and talents that make one stand out from the crowd, but many of those hobbies, habit and creative pursuits develop in parallel to skills that employers drool over. 

    Again, your experience will vary. Your boss may not care. Your company may crave conformity. Your job may require the precise opposite of creativity. But for many, creative pursuits and practices make you better at your job, a better employee and a better colleague to others.

    Under the category of Resumes & Resources I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.