Archive for May, 2011

Making Time and Giving Stuff Up: Part II

(Via)

Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you’re doing good work when it feels like all you’re managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.-

Stephen King

So, did you reflect on what you’re willing to give up in order to get what you want? (Don’t tell me you thought the world would shower you with fortune and praise in return for nothing!)

Good. I’m proud of you. Now, let’s get back to the nuts and bolts of making space for your art. In other words…

Creative Lifestyle Design: 101

Now, this is how I go about my day in order to clear space for my writing. Take from it what you will. Leave out all the bits that don’t resonate with you. Believe nothing, not even if I have said it, unless it accords with your own inner truth.

I organise what I do each day according to the energy I have at a particular time as opposed to arbitrarily picking things off my to-do list or leaping into a task whenever I remember it. Human beings have what is called a “circadian rhythm“. It’s an internal body clock we evolved that makes us feel sleepy when it’s dark outside and peppy when the sun’s up. We don’t have night vision, so our bodies are designed to function when the world is working in our favour. Each person’s is a little different. I advocate working with your circadian rhythm in order to produce your best work each day. You can try and fight mother nature, but all it takes is a hurricane to demolish the best man-made bridge.

Action to Take From This

  • For one week (two if you really want to be thorough), carry a notebook around with you at all times.
  • In your phone, set a calendar reminder to prompt you every 2 hours with the question, “How am I feeling right now?”
  • Each time your alarm goes off, whip out your notebook and jot down your thoughts. One to two lines will suffice. Just make sure you write enough that you have something to work with when you go back and do a review. Also note what you’re doing at the time and where you were doing it.
  • At the end of your 7-14 days of self-reflection, sit down and block out  your day according to your emotional/physical energy range. I use a High/Medium/Low scale, but you could just as easily use a 10-point scale to measure yourself, or a percentage point basis. Doesn’t matter- do what works for you.

Now, reflect on your craft. What state of body/mind do you need to be in for you to do good work?

If you’re a dancer, you’ll probably need to work when your physical energy is highest and you’re in a place with plenty of room. If you’re a writer, you’ll need little more than the physical energy to push a pencil across a paper, and said paper and pencil within close proximity.

Write out your energy phases  and the time they occur onto a piece of paper or Google Doc.

You’re done with Part One. Keep your daily outline some place safe. You’ll need it tomorrow when I go over how to critically evaluate optimising each portion of your day.

My day is divided into 6 distinct phases of energy:

  • Early morning- the first 3 hours after I wake up. This is usually 6am-8am. High emotional energy, slowly mounting physical energy.
  • Morning- 9am until noon. High emotional and physical energy.
  • Early afternoon- Noon-4pm. Medium emotional energy, high physical energy.
  • Late afternoon- 4pm-6:30pm-ish. Low physical and emotional energy. (This exact period of sluggishness is quite common in humans. By the end of late afternoon, you’ve probably been awake for about 12 hours and your body is ready to start winding down. It will pass.)
  • Evening- 6:30pm- 9pm. High emotional energy, low physical energy.
  • Night- 9-1am-ish. High emotional energy, no physical energy.

All of my important creative work is done when I have high emotional energy, like writing these blog posts or doing school work. When my emotional energy is low, I do all the stuff that requires little more than brute force, like grocery shopping or tidying my room.

There are a series of questions that I asked myself about all 6 portions of my day. They helped me to be more mindful and effective in how I go about balancing work with play. That’s lesson 102. See you on Wednesday!

Until then, head down to the comment section and let me know: when do you feel most energetic, and why?

Much love,

A.Y. Daring

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May 31st, 2011
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Making Time and Giving Stuff Up: Part I

(Via)

 

Did you miss me?  How you been since I been gone? I really missed writing for you guys.  I’d say “sorry” except I don’t feel particularly remorseful for focusing on my school work for a few days. Next time I have an Academic Hell Week (another one’s coming up in the second week of June) I’ll let ya’ll know before taking off. That said, let’s get back to artistic business!

So, last time, we talked about the importance of making time for your writing. At least 21 hours a week if you’re really, truly serious about finding greatness in what you do before you’re too old to enjoy the spoils of success.

This kind of time committment is an intense one though. If you feel resistant to taking up the hours of a part-time job to develop your craft, think of it this way: You want to be doing this full-time one day. If you can’t find part-time hours now, where are you going to find full-time hours in 5 years when your life will have undoubtedly become more complex?

You’re not going to be walking down the street one day and trip over a bucket full of 21 extra hours a week. No, you make you make the time you need to devote to your work- its not a found object. You have to take a critical look at what you’re doing in your life, and ruthlessly cull out the excess so there is space for all things wondrous and wanted to begin blooming.

This week, I’m going to be breaking down my personal Time Crafting Method for you guys. The principles will hold regardless of your particular craft. My methods are imperfect. I am constantly refining them, and I hope to share the messiness and progress of this system with you. After all, it’s the space in between here and there that the exciting stuff happens. That said, when I work the plan, the plan works really well for me.

All the planning and goal writing in the world will do nothing if you don’t follow through with your intentions. Planning doesn’t write books or orchestrate symphonies. Hard work does and planning is a small part of it.

So before you come back tomorrow to start feasting your eyes on the evolution of an artist’s lifestyle, you must ask yourself:

What am I willing to give to get what I want?

Because something will have to give. Perhaps it is Netflix. Perhaps it’s being messy. (Or “creatively chaotic.” How you word it doesn’t matter. The point is that every minute you spend looking for something you’ve misplaced is a minute you now can’t spend on your work.) Maybe you’ll have to take a step back from romance.

If you want this, if you really, truly want to be a great artist, the reality of the matter is that you’re going to have to spend a lot of well orchestrated time on your craft and that’s time you can’t be spending doing dishes or picking your nose or aimlessly browsing OkCupid.

Don’t worry- my plan makes plenty of room for fun and spending quality time relaxing and hanging out with friends. But that’s because there’s no room for nonsense and asinine pursuits.

I will reiterate because it is of the utmost importance:

What am I willing to give to get what I want?

Think about it. Come back tomorrow.

Much love,

A.Y. Daring

 

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May 30th, 2011
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Inspiration’s Got Nothing To Do With It

image via MakeupFTW

Passion + Discipline= Success.

Period.

But what about those days when you just don’t feel inspired? What do you do then?

Pick up the paintbrush anyway and make a mess. Open up a Word document, or sharpen your pencil. It’s in attempting to resolve your inner conflicts that you’ll find the ability to do so. Inspiration comes from being engaged in your work. It does not come from sitting down and hoping your muse will fly into your room and smack you in the face.

Chris Guillebeau is the writer behind The Art of Nonconformity- both the blog and the bestselling book. He’s also an avid runner, rain or shine. He has this to say:

If I don’t feel like running one weekend, I go anyway. … The days I feel bad about my writing aren’t the days when I’ve written poorly. It’s the days where I’ve done everything but write — those days are killer. If you base your workout schedule on the weather, you’ll never build a habit of exercise.

The same is true for writing or any other creative practice: base it on anything outside your control, and good luck getting anything done.

In a creative practice, waiting for “inspiration” is the worst. I follow the Somerset Maugham school of inspiration: “I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately, it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.”

“Inspiration” had little to do with becoming a better artist. Steady work over a long period of time will win out over random bursts of frantic work, every single time.

Action To Take From This

Turn your art in a ritualized habit.

Both Guillebeau and Maughan created distinct, unbreakable appointments with themselves during which they practise their practise.

Studies show that it takes about 10,000 hours of deliberate practise before anyone achieves something even close to mastery in their field. That’s just under 417 full days of round the clock work. No eating, sleeping, or making out in the moonlight with adorable people. Blech!

A much more reasonable approach would be to clear time in your schedule for about 3 hours a day to work on your craft.That’s:

  • 1 hour in the morning before work or school
  • 1 hour in the afternoon (lunch break maybe?)
  • 1 hour in the evening before bed.

It’ll take about 10 years to reach mastery at that pace, but you’ll also be getting really, really good along the way. Plus, if you start young, you’ll be well ahead of your peers a decade from now.

If you’re having trouble carving out the three hours per day, you should make a time-map for yourself. A time-map is a landscape of how you spend your time each week. If you’re a visual person, they’re really helpful for figuring out how much time you have each week to get the important stuff done. It’s fairly easy to do, and the website I’ve linked to has lots of great examples of effective ones.

With your time map, you might even notice that some days, you can write for 5 hours as opposed to 3, or on another day, you’ll really only have 1 hour. That’s OK.

Aiming for 21 weekly hours overall of focusing on your work is a good pace to set- just enough to improve steadily but not too much to burn out and start to counteract the benefits of practise.

It’s a part-time job, but you have weekends and most likely a lot of time-wasting habits that need to be cut out anyway. (Netflicks guilty pleasure, I’m look at you!) Besides, if you want it bad enough, there should be some part of you that also likes spending the time with the work.

The problem you’ll solve

by making your creative work into a habit is that it allows your inspiration flow to become something constant, steady and reliable that can be worked on and developed into the change-people’s-lives-cause-it’s-so-damned-good quality that you’ve been dreaming about all these years. Instead of the maybe-I-will-maybe-I-won’t-feel-guilty-about-it-later merry-go-round that you might be on right now.

I’m rooting for you,

A.Y. Daring

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May 24th, 2011
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Don’t Burn Bridges

Don’t burn bridges. Rebuilding a bridge requires an engineer. But if all you need is to replace a few bricks, you can call in a mason for that. Shake things up, but don’t burn bridges.

-Terre Chartrand

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May 21st, 2011
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Link Love: 05/20/2011

Hihihi Beautiful People! How was your week? And so it is Friday in which I share with you a curated list of links culled from the internets, sometimes to educate, sometimes to entertain, but mostly to cheer the weekdays out with a bang. Enjoyyyyyy!

How to Quite Your Job, Move to Paradise and Get Paid to Change The World. C’mon people, this is exactly the kind of story we should be hearing more of! I can’t wait to read your blog post about how you changed your life.

Jon Morrow also tells the story of severe congenital muscular dystrophy and how his mother’s lifetime of fighting for him taught him how to fight for his own ideas.

If you want to succeed, you can’t wait for the world to give you attention the way a cripple waits for food stamps to arrive in the mail. You have to be a warrior. You have to attack with the madness of a mother whose child is surrounded by an army of predators.

Because, let’s face it, your ideas are your children. Their future is as tender and delicate as that of any newborn.

So burn it up, baby.

Your ideas are counting on you.

 

Brock Davis made a piece of artwork everyday for 365 concentration days in 2009. And the results are incredible.

I love the concept of the blog Reclaiming Delphi so, so, so much! To clarify, Gaia is one of the primordial deities of Ancient Greece, and her place of worship was taken over by the male god Apollo. Apollo gave high priestesses on Gaia’s worship ground the power to make prophecies and generally advise kings from all around. Instead of strengthening a connection to Gaia however, the people switched over to worshipping Apollo. Boo!

If you’re an aspiring fashion designer, or just plain hardcore about your love of textiles and collar styles, the Fashionary notebook  might be for you.

For all you lovers of beautiful kitchens, The Yvestown Blog takes the cake.

Strange but smart: The Rack Trap essentially turns your bra into a pocket. This would be really good for going clubbing, or keeping your keys when you go for a run.

Ok, get your mind out of the gutter for a second. Not Martha’s surprise balls look like such a fun party favour to make. Time consuming, but nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?

Macarons are beautiful and gorgeous and lovely. Especially these matcha ones, with white chocolate in the middle. And because you obviously want to know how to make them now, even though pastry chefs train for years to get it right, here’s a seemingly easy to follow recipe.

The 6 Keys to Being Awesome At Everything doesn’t actually tell you anything you didn’t already know, except for one novel idea: ritualize practise. Says the article author:

Will and discipline are wildly overrated. As the researcher Roy Baumeister has found, none of us have very much of it.

The best way to insure you’ll take on difficult tasks is to ritualize them — build specific, inviolable times at which you do them, so that over time you do them without having to squander energy thinking about them.

The article about how to boot your willpower that it links to is really good as well.

Ahahaha! I’m icing cakes with 30 chicks and you fuckwits are showering together! You. MUST. watch. this!!

Just let you son be, don’t push him one way or another. That’s your kid, period….you’ve just got to love and support them, as rough as it can be in the world…home has to be stable.

I wanna be this chick. I wanna bring home the bacon and fry it up in the pan. Oh wait a minute. I ALREADY DO! Holla! Thanks 1908′s, for trailblazing for me.

Um…did he just play a trance song on his guitar? Dear lord, this is genius!

Did he just play a trance song on a guitar? brought to you by Free Funny Videos

OK, I’m off to go finalise the details for Rapture Art Party now! See you guys tomorrow!

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May 20th, 2011
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Things I Love Thursday: Text Lite and Image Heavy

YAY WEEKLY GRATITUDE!! This is my fave post to write each week. I really urge and warmly invite you to join me in writing this weekly thank you note to the world. I work on it whenever I’m feeling down and it erases bad moods pretty freakin fast, let me tell you!

What rocked my week this world. Or, you know, world this week:

Showing up at the best fine dining restaurant in town in my sweatsuit and running shoes.

Chris Rock’s Good Hair. Have you watched it yet? Oh darling, you really, truly must.

Unfriending people from Facebook and reconnecting with true friends in real life. YES!

Plotting wonderful things for Focus on the Love. If you’ve requested a post card within the month of April and have yet to receive it, it’s because I’ve spent the month cooking this up with a friend: Rapture Art Party. This weekend people from all over town are getting together, and we’re hand making your postcards while we eat cupcakes and go crazy with hot glue guns. HECK YEAH BABY!

Also, friends who support me wholeheartedly and jump behind my ideas with enthusiasm that leaves me thrilled and humbled. Terre and I have already decided to plan more awesome things for the world. Yay artistic collaborations!

Overwhelmingly thoughtful gifts that have me tearing up and super grateful.

Post-dessert desserts right before bed. Because good pie deserves even better chocolate.

“No A.Y. Ursery is cruelty to bears. What you mean is usury.” – My Saturday nights seriously produce the best one liners. I dare you to challenge me on that one.

My Filofax!! Oh Yes, it has arrived. And so did my gorgeous glasses. I’ve been pimping my Filofax like I’m fucking Xzibit and I love life. I haven’t been this organised and aware of how I spend my time in a very long time. I loves it.

I know it’s old, but this meme still brings tears to my eyes:

I want this girl’s hair and I’m so, so, SO loving that she’s black because it’s super rare to see images of bright, unnatural hair colours on anyone darker than slightly tan.

I’ve talked for ages about my love of unnatural hair colours, and I’m growing my hair out so I can colour my roots blue.

This makes me laugh, and I keep opening it up during the boring parts of classes and LingMFAO. God, it is SO important to keep your self-esteem in tact. And to not be a fame whore.

OTAY! So this TILT was words lite and image heavy. I have a pounding headache and am spelling every other word incorrectly so I have to be very careful about how I spent the energy I currently don’t have.

I have four major assignments due next week, so my eyes are twitching and my heart is pounding. But it’s all for work I genuinely enjoy, so I’m very, very grateful for my intrinsic interest in the subject matter.

Most of all though, I’m loving you. You’re wonderful.

So head down to the comment section man: What are you loving this week?

Much Love,

A.Y. Daring

P.S. Have you noticed that I’ve posted errday this week so far? I’m trying a new thing where I post something useful everyday instead of focusing on a few huge posts per week.

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May 19th, 2011
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Poetry For BAMFs: Candor, Swag & Influence

can·dor

–noun
1. the state or quality of being frank, open, and sincere in speech or expression; candidness: The candor of the speech impressed the audience.
2. freedom from bias; fairness; impartiality: to consider an issue with candor.
3. (Obsolete.) kindliness.
4. (Obsolete.) purity.

swag

-noun

1. appearance, style, or the way he or she presents them selves. He got a killa swag.

you don’t need a definition for influence.

 

Your task, should you choose to accept it…

Write a poem using those three words.  Post it in the comment section below. The winner gets 9000 internets and eternal glory.
Get creative people!
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May 18th, 2011
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Don’t Mope In Your Room. Go Invent Something.


source unknown

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May 17th, 2011
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The Art of Utopia

If you properly define any goal, you can achieve it.

This is why it is so important to define what happiness means to you. Once you know what it is, and make it into something that you believe is possible, it’s as good as done and yours.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it is that I want out of my life and the world.

My two greatest needs are:

  • the need to create, and
  • the need to serve others.

When I have both of these needs fulfilled, food, water and shelter tend to be afterthoughts. Everything that makes my soul ache is soothed and I feel whole and well and complete.

I don’t yet make as much money as I’d like to, and I don’t have as many blog subscribers as I’d like to have, and my manuscript is far from finished, yet alone published, but those are periphery concerns to making sure that I am constantly producing work that I am proud of, in addition to benefiting those around me. There’s nothing to wait for to begin creating and serving. I pick up a pen every morning and when I leave the house, I make eye contact with everyone I speak with, and compliment my friends.

I know that if I constantly refine my work and connect with others about my mission, the money and the right people will come in due time.

Utopia is not an objective state in which the world is full of lush plains and rolling hills of grain. It is not a place you find beside a babbling brook or in the middle of a desert. (That’s an oasis.) It is a state of being that you can create, in which every action, thought and moment is seeped to saturation with personal satisfaction and a thorough love of who you are and what you do. This is so within your means that there is no way to break it down any further.

The perfect life is a one lived with no regrets. There will  surely be illness, perhaps moments of poverty and definitely times of sadness. But regret is a choice that you make in which you refuse the lessons and gifts that each experience brings. Regret is the child of lack of gratitude.

Your microcosm of perfection is only one moment of clarity away.

That is the art of utopia.

People talk a lot about wanting to change the world and affect humanity in a positive way. The wonderful thing about humanity is that it’s made up of individual human beings. Individual people are just like you- they have hopes and goals and needs and grocery lists and snot in their noses.

If you connect properly with just one person, you can give them the inspiration to live their best life and set their world on fire.

Then they will go forth and do the same for another person. And another, and another and so on and so forth.

Each time you are fully present and doing what it is you need to do, you are contributing to a global culture of creativity, innovation and peace. All you need to do is know yourself and be that person. Ahhhh. It’s so much easier to change the world when you think of it like that, right? You’re gonna blaze trails in your own way kid, if that’s what you choose to do.

Properly define your goals and what utopia feels like to your own heart and mind. I am urging you desperately to know thyself. Don’t do it because I asked you to. Do it because you are here, alive and breathing and there is something within you calling out to be set free and you know just as well as I do that you do not want to live a life of no‘s and what if”s.

Whether or not any greater being made you for any particular purpose, you can infuse your own life with a meaning that makes every tear, every fear and every worry worth the trouble.

And one day, you will look back on it all and you can say without a shadow of a doubt,

“I did my best and I have done it well.”

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May 16th, 2011
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Link Love <3- 05/13/2011

Sebastien Wiernick is a furniture designer, although I feel as though calling him a mere furniture designer doesn’t fully capture the scale of his work.

Raw on $10 a Day. I just discovered this blog. I think it’s absolutely perfect for students who want to eat healthy on a budget.

I don’t drink anymore, but if I still did, I would be ALL OVER these. It’s pre-measured wine in a portable shatter-proof wine glass! How perfect is that for summer picnics man?

Top 10 LGBTQ Book Characters of All Time. They’re putting it out 1 at a time (10, 9, 8, 7, 6,5, 4, 3, 2, 1). I really hope Dumbledore makes this list.

You deserve good things. God, yes!

Gaycabulary Lesson. Hahaha! Winning the Gay Lottery has been a dream for ages. My image of the perfect girlfriend is essentially a hybrid Barbie+Vibrator+Housekeeper with a pink convertible BMW in tow. Truth.

Also from Unicorns for Socialism, 100 Alternatives to “So Waddaya Do“? I’m crushing on Alexandra Franzen like mad right now ya’ll- subscribe to her blog!

The next time one of my friends gets back with a horrible ex I will send them this article: On “Feeling Bad” And Why That’s A Cycle of Bullshit You Need To Stop Immediately, Part 1 and Part 2. No matter how good the sex, by breakup #4, you know you’re wrong for each other.

Will Ferrell is going to be awarded the Mark Twain Prize for American Humour. Um…really? Don’t get me wrong I love Funny or Die, but wasn’t Twain’s humour a little more sophisticated than Anchorman? What do you think?

Animal ethicists call for new terminology. Ugh. Political correctness taken way too far!

Twitter’s promo video is a SO cool!  I had no idea that some of these people were even on Twitter. Did you know that there’s an astronaut in space right now who tweets pics of the earth every day as they pass over major landmarks?!

“Why did you kiss me?!”

“Because I like you.”

“Oh. I’m going to kiss you back because I like you too!”

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May 13th, 2011
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