Planning… I think we have sufficiently discovered and expressed that it is not my cup of tea. A quote by E.B. White sums it up well for me, “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to
improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard
to plan the day.”
The experiment phase lets you take something on a small scale and try
it out to see if it is worth pursuing. The chase phase is where you
take it more in depth and pursue it to see if it will work. If you find
it will actually work then you program it, implement it.
Light bulb moment.
It was so refreshing because I did not need to plan out and have a
final result, just a step for determining if this is even worth working
toward. Experiments give you freedom to fail because that is the nature
of an experiment, you usually fail a lot before you figure out the
formula that works.
Of course my breath of fresh air was sucked from my lungs as we went into time management later in the afternoon.
Then enter this morning, another day of planning. My venture I decided
to map out will make several of you happy… the steps to writing a
book.
Ditching the boxed, formulaic approaches that make me squirm and
protest at rigidity and sends my blood pressure soaring, I decided to
do an artsy, crazy approach that probably no one but me would be able
to actually look at and understand.
Mark walked over and asked how I was doing and I am pretty certain a
gave a bit of a “Help me, I’m dying look” before admitting I was stuck.
He took one look at my planning experiment and commented on my colors
and shapes and arrows that filled the page before me. As I tried to
translate the jumble in my head into words someone other than me could
follow I was THRILLED when he understood me and within five minutes at
a white board between sessions we had determined my next few steps in
my writing process.
That only took me the last three days! It excited me and put me on a roll and by the end of today I had “mapped out” my kingdom dream, realizing the connections I couldn’t see before.
So that is the brief story of how Mark Almand became my hero.
