Impulse

Today is Benjamin Franklin’s birth­day! It’s also the third anniver­sary of my say­ing good­bye to the big com­pany in Redmond and set­ting off to do some­thing cre­ative. To be a renais­sance man just like old Ben. As when I turned two, I find myself look­ing back and won­der­ing what I learned this year.

Years ago, a friend and I came up with a great sys­tem for mak­ing changes in your life —  Detect, Discern, Decide, Do. It seems pretty obvi­ous now, but in 1996, it was an epiphany:

• Detect — First, you’ve got to real­ize that it’s not all fun and games any­more; that some­thing needs to change. Figure out what the prob­lem is.
• Discern — Figure out what is caus­ing the prob­lem; thus what really needs to change.
• Decide — Decide what changes in life you’ll make to fix those causes.
• Do — Make those changes.

Looking back on the last few years, I real­ize I’ve uncon­sciously fol­low­ing that process:

• 2002 — Detect — I real­ized that I was hav­ing no fun being a man­ager, that I was burn­ing myself out feel­ing per­son­ally respon­si­ble for the hap­pi­ness of 475 peo­ple, and that I wasn’t doing any­thing cre­ative any­more. So I quit (a bit rash, yes).
• 2003 — Chill — I goofed off mer­cilously, trav­elled europe, took hun­dreds of pho­tos and had a grand old time work­ing off the burnout.
• 2004 — Discern — Ok, I goofed off a lot here too, but it had a pur­pose: to exper­i­ment in dif­fer­ent cre­ative avenues to see what sticks. Took hun­dreds more pic­tures, helped make sev­eral movies & shorts, and returned to writing.
• 2005 — Decide — I knew I enjoyed pho­tog­ra­phy, film­mak­ing, ani­ma­tion, and writ­ing. So now what? I spent most of the year try­ing to fig­ure out which of these media to get seri­ous about, then fret­ting because I couldn’t think of leav­ing the other media behind. Then, in November, I real­ized I was ask­ing the wrong ques­tion: I had been ask­ing, “which media?”, which is a “how” ques­tion: “how will I make things?”. The bet­ter ques­tion was “what”: “what do I want to make?” That’s when I set­tled on sto­ry­telling — in any media. I changed my blog’s bio to include “sto­ry­teller”; my mom bought me a sto­ry­teller, then pro­ceeded to tell me how I’ve been talk­ing about being a sto­ry­teller since I was a lit­tle kid (sheesh, why didn’t any­body tell me?!?).
• 2006 — Do — this year is all about doing stuff. I’m meet­ing with folks tomor­row to do some free­lance writ­ing. I’ve got an adap­tion to screen­play to do. I’m build­ing a pho­toes­say on film­mak­ing from all my var­i­ous pro­duc­tion stills, and after that, I’ll do an entirely new photo series. In June, I’m film­ing some friends bik­ing across the coun­try. I’m going to learn Flash. And, I’m finally going to sit down and learn to draw.

This explains why I’m not as reflec­tive this year. No long lists of hard earned wis­dom. Right now, I’m much more inter­ested in the future than the past. I’ve had enough intro­spec­tion for a while. Time to get busy.

Related posts:

1. Happy Birthday
2. Happy Birthday: I’m 2 years old!
3. Buy Jessica Simpson’s song!