8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Tag: practice makes perfect

Chapter List

  • 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.

  • Just Because

    This daily public affirmation has a blog.

    Oh, so you’ve figured it out? A little more than forty-odd posts into my persistent writing of these little public missives about my creative explorations  right here every weekday and perhaps you are sitting there pondering the point of two hundred words of indulgent affirmation.

    I could justify it. I could try and convince you that there was some marketable value inherent in such a prospect, despite that most pursuers of profit have moved onto bigger platforms. I could point at the personal brand value of exploratory concepts in words and sounds and images. I could brag about some hidden big-picture strategy towards a long term personal creative goal.

    I could. I won’t. It would all be a lie.

    Why do musicians play scales?

    Why do runners log training runs?

    Why do chefs trial recipes?

    Why do dogs howl at the moonlight?

    The answer is practice. The answer is habit. The answer is instinct and drive and compulsion to create and make and share and then makes some more.  The answer is doing without expectation of audience or purpose or influence or flex. The answer is accountability to self and ideas. The answer is human and even more than that, the answer is universally personal.

  • Warm Ups

    Oh sure, you read this and ask: what the heck? My imposter syndrome flares up like a torn ACL in the middle of a marathon whenever I hit publish on one of these posts.

    All sorts of people are filling blogs, podcasts, video channels, and social media feeds with unsolicited creative insights and rando advice, so much so that when I decide to do something (if nothing else) parallel to that effort it sometimes strikes me as a bit “influencer” —and not in a good way.

    I’ve been writing here routinely for a little more than a month now, tho, and I want to let anyone reading know that if motivations are worth anything at all, I think mine are leaning towards the innocent and genuine.

    I’m not necessarily trying to change your mind, or generate revenue, or glaze clout, or whatever the kids are saying these days. I’m largely using this writing as a warm up, a kind of public morning pages[1]. I’m writing for the sake of writing, and writing metaspective gloops to throw up on a scheduled, deadlined blog is to creativity is as to doing stretches before that aforementioned marathon: not crucial, but a good idea.

    It may feel like I’m jabbering on without any solid bonafides about these topics, but I do think I have something worth saying, imposter syndrome be damned.  And a couple hundred words of jibber jabbering is just what the doctor ordered to my brain limbered up for more important writing.

    Plus, if it turns out to be something useful… it’s already been shared for the benefit of you, too.

  • Reading Lesson

    I spent multiple hours this past weekend reading aloud.

    Call it practice.

    Call it production.

    Whatever it is, it was me attempting to create something from a skill that has never really been in my wheelhouse: reading aloud.

    Like any new-ish or re-visited skill that needs polishing, I have found that the best thing to do is just to do it… and be open to self-reflecting on the effort.

    Asking yourself: How can I make this better?

    Fighting the urge to doubt that progress is being made or to quit outright.

    I felt both, but I persevered and gave myself an impromptu reading lesson, all while building the pieces of a project that I’m excited to move incrementally forward.