The Start of a New Expedition

It's the day after Memorial Day, and with this the unofficial beginning of Summer is upon me! It is a good time to start a new habit, which is simply writing. I want to get in the habit of writing publicly again. The challenge is getting over the slight terror I feel about not knowing exactly what I'm doing.

So let me share where I am right now. About 10 months ago, I began the transformation from being a freelancer with contracts to having none at all. After ten years of doing Javascript development for Learning Sciences research projects, I'd not had the time to work on my old design business or write as extensively as I once did. I hoped to do a relatively quick transition going back to The Old Ways of 2010. However, the transition itself is taking far longer than I had hoped. Again, I am beset with questions like:

• What do I really want to do? I'm not all that into writing software for it's own sake.
• Can I really support myself by selling digital and physical stationery products based on my old work at davidseah.com/productivity-tools? Does anyone even care?
• How can I really do the things that I want to do, presuming I achieve some kind of sustainable financial independence? I can't even think of what that would be anymore.
• Is there a better way to answer these questions, or a process that I haven't tried yet?

These are pretty difficult things to wrestle with. This year's personal strategic goals—what I call Groundhog Day Resolutions—has continued to turn my assumptions inside-out.

• Instead of assuming that productivity efficiency is the goal, I officially put emotional values alignment in the driver's seat.
• Instead of following a reasonable step-by-step production task list to predictably produce results like a well-run factory, I am using gathering style productivity to harvest whatever falls out of my day, polishing it up, and sharing it.
• Instead of following a straightforward marketing strategy to match product with potential customers, I am spinning a narrative about running a ship that sails on the oceans of human interaction, using human-centered values of hospitality and operational excellence as the key metrics of success.

It all makes sense to me on paper. Here is the paper!

It's a work in progress, picking up from my May 5th Groundhog Day Resolutions Report where I discussed how my forgotten allergy to marketing steered me to try reframing it as sailing a ship. It's also a lot of words that even I don't feel like reading; these reports are really intended to capture my frame of mind every month rather than tell a good story.

I'm planning to use this Ghost blog as a vessel for telling the story of this experiment. I'm framing it as an expedition to test the ideas that are implicit in the diagram I shared above. However, my so-called ship needs an ocean to sail upon, and that is made not of water but from waves of human interaction. My first test is to generate some kind of interaction by writing daily to articulate my vision, not just here on this blog but everywhere.

We'll see how it goes. The goal is to check-in every day and share stories about this new adventure.