Inspiration

This weekend I read a fantastic book - The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. He's an author and screenwriter, a late bloomer who is mildly successful (wrote The Legend of Bagger Vance), and has some very important things to say about procrastination and why we don't do the things we should.

He identifies "Resistance" as the primary defeater - on one level, it's the cloud you need to push through to do anything uncomfortable - the first 5 minutes of working out (or better, getting into the car to work out!), the first half hour of any creative endeavor... you need to push through it, even though Resistance gives you all sorts of very good rationalizations as to why you can put this off another day, and how there are all sorts of other things to do.

His analogies in the book tend toward physical combat with this force (hence "war" in the title), and he personifies the force quite a lot... and his tips for beating it are great, as are his descriptions of the rewards you will reap for doing so.

It was flat out inspiring, and really made me think about the things I do or don't make time for... my working out really started against the largest wall of resistance ever seen... and I battle it every week - I'm not sure when I'll make it to the gym this week, for instance. But Music is probably the area where I've self sabotaged the most: I really have no good keyboard technique - I use computers as a tool, but also a crutch, and I don't spend any disciplined time working on my art. If I devoted just 5 hours a week to it, I could be writing a lot more music and getting my hands more comfortable with the keys again... if only I could play with the same unconscious instructions to my hands as I use when typing.

Pressman says that the way through that is to be a professional - treat your art like a job that needs doing: Show up on time, punch the clock, and check out when you're done. Give it the same "gotta do it" we all give our day jobs, and it'll get DONE. So I'm looking at my calendar, figuring I could start with two nights a week, say 9-11pm, and see what that does.

Anyway, it was a short book - the man didn't belabor his points too much and kept it readable. I highly recommend it as a swift kick in the shorts to anyone with a creative pursuit you haven't 'found time for'. Remember, Leo Tolstoy had over 12 kids... and he wrote a heckuva lot.

Fortunately, I haven't been entirely fallow: Brainready.com continues to pick up readers/listeners. While sales of the book are light, it's finally on Amazon, so go get a copy! Search on "Brainready", or "BrainFlex" and it'll be right there. We're also picking up a good thousand or two additional podcast listeners every other week, so that's growing nicely. And I've been writing more of the news posts on the website too... so it's a real partnership.

I also have started work on large-print editions of my worksheets - while they're great for the 40-60 crowd (who we had initially identified as our core market), the 60-90 crowd has trouble with 8-point fonts and crazy formatting, so I'm taking the core exercises and laying them out more straightforwardly. It turns every 2-page puzzle into 3 pages... but that's ok.

Oh one more thing - today at lunch I translated my weekend post into French... on paper. It's at work. But I'll be posting it tomorrow, so you can expect occasional "translations" to appear, as I work on strengthening my language skills. I hope that those of you who know the languages I'm using will help me out when I write something completely incorrectly. French I'm pretty comfortable with, but when I start posting in German or Spanish, I'll need your help.

Ok, that's enough for one night. I'm nuts.