When Feeling Awesome Isn’t Enough.
So. It’s 8 o’clock in the morning on a Friday and I’m listening to The Cure… Never, never a good sign. As ‘Pictures of You’ wails out from my Wall-O’-Sound, I start going through the things I’ve accomplished to date. It started out as a moment to make a list of things-to-do… But some part of me decided that I needed to hear this music… And Robert Smith had other plans for my prioritization this fine morning. A serious but light voice with a road-worn English accent pops into my head and says, “Why not take a moment to reflect on your past for a second. You sometimes do not know where you are going unless you take a moment to see where you have been. What use is a journey if all you see is yet another goal you haven’t reached? Also, have you thought about absolute, stark and deep failure lately?” And then imaginary Robert Smith and I face forward and sink down in our seats… The imaginary, judgmental population of the world inhabiting my living room thinks we are staring into space, but we are staring into something much more empty… Much more empty, indeed… And then I realize that my coffee cup is empty too, so I get up to get more coffee.
So, while going through this introspective time, I decided to look through my portfolio. As a designer, the portfolio is what marks success. And while I feel that my portfolio is filled with things that are impressive for their circumstance, feeling awesome isn’t enough. What it really boils down to is payroll and self-satisfaction. It I wanted to just walk around patting myself on the back for doing the work that I like, I should’ve been an artist. As it stands, what I do is branding, advertising and design… Basically, I push other peoples’ and organizations’ messages. From the couch I hear imaginary Robert Smith almost sigh the words: “And you could do a better job”, as ‘Lullaby’ plays on. Thanks Mr. Smith.
What do I do about that? I suppose I can do better work… I suppose I could spend more time working through the message and focus of the client. I suppose that I could encourage a client to spend more time thinking about what it is they are trying to accomplish as well.
Sometimes you have to take your eyes off what you think is the goal for a moment. You have to make sure that the path you have been taking is actually heading in the direction you want to go. You have to look back, even if for a moment. It’s the only way to recognize and understand that there have been failures. Once you do that, you’ve got the choice to keep going your route or change it a bit.
After deleting a few spam emails, checking up on GoogleNews, and viewing the forecast, I grab one more half-cup of coffee and sink down in front of the gigantic speakers wrapping up “The 13th” off of the ‘Wild Mood Swings’ album, I contemplate what I’ve done to reach here… Sometimes, feeling awesome just isn’t enough. “‘Sometimes’?!”, imaginary-Robert Smith mutters from across the way. I briefly think that I could take him in a fight, and decide that I’ll not fight with the imaginary King of Sullen-ness. It’s just not a good idea on a few levels. First of all, he’s not really here. Secondly, if he was really here, the heavy atmosphere of his tortured soul could crush the hearts of mere mortals with but a single note.
So I’ll revisit the past a bit more and reevaluate the path I’m on. I’ll take my eyes off the goal for a moment to make sure that the path has been the right one. And I’ll double my efforts to get to where I’m supposed to be… But first I’ll spend sometime in a silence that says so much with the imaginary-Robert Smith as I finish off this coffee.
Busy Busy Busy
Well, it’s been awhile since I’ve posted anything. It’s more out of frustration than lack of interest in writing anything. When my site went down it was an adrenaline-filled hair-pulling party to get something back up and running. And when I had it all up and running, I just sat back and relaxed a bit. “I’ll take a day off from the site”, I said. Aaaaand a month later I’m saying, “I should write something!… Tomorrow, maybe…”
That said, stay tuned. I’m sure I’ll be gearing up something great in the next few days or so. Keep your ear… erm… eyes… open for a new post.
I’ll make it brief…
Whoa. What a hard couple of days. If you have visted the site before, you may notice a couple… changes. Maybe the site looks a little different. Well, it looked really different when my domain register service auto-renewed my long-past hosting service when they renewed my domain name and parked my site as a page advertising for liquor… While simultaneously my hosting service hiccuped my site’s database out of existence… And so a new site was as easy as fixing the old one.
Please be patient as there is still a lot of work to be done here. A lot. But, to all of you who visited regularly: “Welcome back!” And to those who are first timers, I hope you stick around for a bit. It’s always interesting around here.