I haven’t arted very well this week
This was originally published in my Prime Lenses Newsletter. You can sign-up for a weekly update to your inbox here.
James T. Kirk wearing the expression I’ve worn all week
In a recent episode of Star Trek Strange New Worlds, a young Commander James T. Kirk finds himself in command when a planet sized catastrophe disables the USS Farragut leaving them stranded in deep space. With their captain injured, it falls to Kirk to take over and when he stumbles early on, it is to the surprise of those around him who’ve seen him take control in difficult situations before. This week, I feel a bit like Kirk.
When I left Double Eleven, one person wrote in my leaving card,
“Oh, Iain’s in this meeting. It’ll be alright.”
It was really touching and spoke to the comfort developed by 20 years of work in a fairly recognisable and consistent office setting. Last week was comfortable, I had 3 episodes to edit, I was generating output. It felt good, I’ve shipped over 80 audio products now, sometimes twice weekly. I know what I’m doing when I’m making episodes, but this week was different. With no pressure to edit my latest conversation with Laurence Bouchard as it’s not airing for 3 weeks, now I’m forced to face the fact that I have some projects to move forward and well, I don’t know quite how. More images for my sky project? Investigation into packaging and paper stocks for prints of some photos? What about Kinto reusable coffee cups with the name of the show on them? I was paralysed.
Fortunately, I found that listening to another podcast, Simon Sinek’s Bit of Optimism, provided a little bit of thought technology that may help me out of this rut so that, like Kirk, I can come out the other side and go on to save the Enterprise and her crew*.
His guest was Arthur Brooks who teaches about happiness by way of working as a musician, head of a thinktank and now professor. It’s a fascinating conversation that specifically helped me as it talked about the myth of falling behind. My worry this week through the paralysis was that I’m not producing enough, not making enough progress towards growing the show. I was paralysed by possibility.
“Intention without attachment”
Arthur reminded me that I need to remember that the goal here is to make something great to listen to first and foremost. Some days I’ll be laser focused and know exactly what that means, and some days I won’t have a Scooby, opting instead to stare into the middle distance until school pickup and all I’ll achieve is baking a loaf of bread and getting dinner ready.
That’s ok, that’s definitely going to happen, it happens whatever line of work you’re in. And when those days happen, chances are, I’ll bumble into something that reminds me that progress is not a straight line. What’s important is the process, because that’s where the learning happens. Thanks, Simon and Arthur!
*I don’t consider that a spoiler, Kirk canonically becomes captain of the Enterprise so I think it’s fair to assume that he’ll come through this scrape.