Self Portrait
Let’s start with the dreams. I spent all last night dreaming about presentations that I’d put together the night before. I woke up wondering if I should add a few slides to cover something else. What a crappy type of dream, dreaming about work. Especially stupid slideshows.
I woke early, but I couldn’t focus on having time for myself. Instead, I thought about work. I’m starting to sense that this is an issue. It’s not that I’m too focused about work, but that I haven’t been able to carve away another identity for myself that isn’t about work. More on that later.
My daughter got up next. She’s good for taking a quick Keith Richards roam around the loft, her pacifier dangling from the corner of her mouth and her hair a scarecrow stack on top. Her eyes little slits. She finally landed in the big bed beside her mom, still snoozing away. I pile in beside them for a little while, but I’m still restless. I have some stuff to do for work.
(And this is the recurring theme. I’m documenting this for my own examination. But what I’m doing is taking stock of my life. This is important to the process of personal growth).
So, I shower and get dressed. I stop by the local coffee place and get a big fishbowl of iced coffee, an egg sandwich, and the Wall Street Journal. I shave in the car while listening to NPR for a little while. I eat the egg sandwich on the road, switching over to listening to Louis Gerstner’s book: WHO SAYS ELEPHANTS CAN’T DANCE? about his turnaround of IBM from a giant mainframe company on the decline to a leaner ebusiness company who looked beyond the metal and saw the solution.
When I get out of my car at the office, I’m wearing an orange polo shirt and beige pants. I have the Wall Street Journal, a cell phone, a laptop, and an iced coffee in my hands. I am 35 years old. I’m standing in front of a company headquarters at 7:40 in the morning.
What the fred am I doing?
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Daily Fill
My day is filled with the following:
*designing process for our new little team.
*sharing ideas for our team, our company in general. Writing these ideas into documents.
*learning new technologies, including installing things on my little test beds and getting to play with them.
*phone conversations with big name hardware companies about future sales links.
*meetings about the same.
*working with the team to better deliver on requests.
*trying to come up with metrics to cover all this. (nothing here yet).
*answering random requests for information internally.
*research- lots of web-based research, including my nifty new Yankee Group subscription.
*interacting- trying to bring together disparate business needs within the company by linking people with knowledge to people with needs.
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The next phase of this examination takes longer. It deals with the following: If you weren’t busy running around doing all that, and if you weren’t busy THINKING about that stuff when you weren’t running around doing it, what would you want to do and think about on your own time?
Learning
First off, some of the things I’m doing are for love. I love learning. I’m enjoying learning about new techonologies, new business processes, etc. I also have this somewhat rare ability to merge the technical world with the non-technical world, such that I can explain technical things to non-technical people, and I can get really technical people to talk with me, even though I’m not nearly as technical as they are. To that end, I can’t count all that I’m doing in my day as “for work only,” because I really enjoy learning about new things, and it seems to be my lot in life to want to “teach and release” new information.
Self Improvement
Though I’ve been really lax in the fitness aspects of this, I’ve been doing lots around self-improvement. I need to do more. Or rather, I need to regroup, put a small plan together, and execute against the plan. I believe that you can let life lead you. I would rather lead my life. This requires action. It requires a little more focus and discipline than I seem to be exhibiting of late. There’s a key.
Creativity
I *am* using some of my time for creativity, but I’m channeling down these business paths. I come up with nifty graphics all the time, if you call rounded squares nifty. That said, I’ve felt the right-brain pull a lot lately. I think I’ll have to satisfy that in some way.
So, watch this space. I’m certain to be noodling through this “in the open,” as I find that it has some value to myself, and hope that there are things inside this blather that you can take from it.
Thoughts?
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