Oh, hi friends!
Well, guess what? We made it. It’s Friday. The Friday before many workplaces go dark for the holidays (except retail, of course) and where people plop all their vacation days. Judging by the mania seeping from the pores of every person I’ve encountered this week, both online and offline, it’s been pretty hectic for us all.
But has it really? Maybe it’s been OK.
Kara, you might be saying, You screamed at me on Monday to take it ONE THING AT A TIME. On Wednesday you pretended you were in one of those space movies and projected a month into the future to imagine a time when you were sane again. And on Tuesday and Thursday, well, you didn’t even WRITE a newsletter and we all know that when you don’t write a newsletter then things are ugly.
Well, yes. All of that is true.
But let’s pull back for a second because I would bet good money that this week YOU barreled over many sticky hurdles. YOU got a lot of stuff done. And because of the tick-tick of 2019, YOU are wrapping things in a bow, both literally and figuratively. And maybe that’s a worthy tradeoff for a few crazy days?
I thought about this tradeoff last night while I was sitting in the Atlanta airport on a little pitstop from New York to California.
Because this was a big week! Let me tell you what happened since Monday.
My composer collaborator Kris Bjarke and I submitted our 10-minute musical “Letters From May” to two theater festivals that will take place in 2020 (Samuel French Off-Off-Broadway Festival and Sound Bites!). We’ll find out in a few months if we get in.
I reviewed the first proofs of a motivational journal that I wrote earlier this year, called Do It for Yourself, which is coming out in September 2020, and which honestly I’ve barely mentioned on here because it seems so far away and yet isn’t at all??? So that’s happening! What?!
My partner-in-musical-crime Ron Passaro and I doggedly worked on and rehearsed and presented our latest song from our musical adaptation of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel in the BMI Musical Theatre Workshop! (My stomach is a pretzel on presentation days.) You can hear our work-in-progress song for Abe, called “There’s an Order to the World,” over here on Soundcloud.
Somehow, I continued my run streak! I’m doing one mile a day from Thanksgiving to New Year’s. While it is one extra thing to do, it’s also now the ignition to start my day.
I wrote a new piece for Forge, Medium’s site about personal development. Story coming soon!
Most thrillingly of all, I saw my dear Aunt Gina sing at Carnegie Hall as part of a choir celebrating Beethoven’s 250th on Monday night. Seeing people I love fully in their element and immersed in their creative work makes me higher than high.
And BIG NEWS, after a year and a half, I wrapped my last week as an editor at MONEY magazine. This meant editing and publishing all of my writers’ stories and doing all that “last week at work” clean-up.
This also meant facing an ending. My friend Adam brought me into MONEY for a little two-week stint to write and edit in summer 2018. It turned into something much more: After six years of full-time freelancing, I was reintegrated to #officelife, and realized that, contrary to my previous work experiences, not all magazine staffs work until 2am every week. Some offices are normal. Did you know this?
I grew to appreciate stability, both on the financial front and the “gotta wake up, there’s a 9:15 a.m. meeting” side. (Even though my average time of arrival was 9:24 a.m.)
I felt that newsroom pulse again while listening to brilliant reporters jump on the phone for interviews, and also from sharing a floor with the staff of TIME magazine, which was overgrown with wonderful former Daily Beast colleagues. It reminded me that you don’t have to work alone if you don’t want to. And I also learned that you get better by being around better people: the MONEY team was small but scrappy and dogged and nice. And I always wanted to do right by my writers, since I know from first-hand experience that freelance writing is a grind, and being nice is always free.
So yeah, all of that just happened. In three days.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve still got a nice pile of things I wasn’t able to do. (Emails, emails, emails, and Julia, I owe you a song, I am ashamed!)
But overall, looking at the tradeoff of getting very little sleep and some small sacrifices, I'm actually really proud of what I accomplished. When you see what you can do, it’s a reminder of your future potential.
So take a minute and look at everything YOU have accomplished this week (and this month). You will likely see the same.
You will see micro progress and macro progress, seeds planted and flowers plucked, some endings and certainly some new beginnings.
You might have felt completely crushed and hopeless and like a big dummy one day, and literally dancing around your apartment the next. (Or, perhaps, if you’re me, these feelings arrived on the same day!)
You could be stressing over the presents not yet purchased or counting down to your upcoming 16-hour nap.
You may be filled with the Christmas spirit, throwing gingerbread men at every real man you see, or you could be feeling a little blue, because yeah, the holidays can make you feel a little blue.
You might be reflecting about what 2019 did and didn’t bring — and plotting a bigger and better 2020.
All of that can happen.
Because this is life, as you’re living it.
And I’m happy to be here with you. I really am.
By the way, if you’re here via Lifehacker (Brass Ring Daily made the list of Lifehacker Staff’s Favorite Email Newsletters in 2019, thank you Virginia!!), then welcome, hi, hello, and I SWEAR ON THE CUTEST SLOTHS this email is usually about 200 words long, like a cute little tasty appetizer, except instead I just shoved a 16-course José Andrés tasting menu down your throat.
And you know, I almost hit delete on this entire email because I didn’t want to scare new friends away.
But then I remembered 2019's biggest lesson of all: Don’t overthink, just do.
Hit send and let the chips fall.
So happy happy happy days to you and all your loved ones (especially your cats).
I’ll see you very soon.
“I would just say it’s always about writing the thing that you want to be reading and also making sure that you’re always reading. I have a friend who had been working so hard on this book, and she had not been reading anything at all. It was sort of shocking how six years later or whatever, she came out of this fugue state of writing her book and was like, ‘I don’t even remember what I liked about reading.’ I think always reading and trying to write the thing that you most wish you could be reading—the thing that’s most exciting to you—is what is most important.”
From this Creative Independent interview with writer Kimberly King Parsons (h/t Delia Cai)
I’ve never thought about my own writing from this angle before? But of course it makes sense to want to create things that you would want to see on stage and on the page. So maybe this isn’t something you ask yourself at the start of every paragraph break, but could be a nice check-in for a project:
Would *I* be watching this right now? What do *I* want to see happen next?
Even if you’re not the intended audience for your project, you are someone with impeccable taste. Live by it.
Finally, all my New York folks, listen up. For the past three months I’ve worked really hard to organize my life and my projects (many of which are meticulously and annoyingly spelled out above). I realized that my old processes were no longer serving me, and in order to become a better collaborator and creator who stays accountable to herself, I hired Tari Ayala, who I met in magazine land and who is now taking her incredible project management and development skills directly to the people.
Tari’s holding a workshop in New York in January, with the goal of getting your personal, professional, and creative projects off the ground. To see real change, you need to blueprint your life. What you need is a workflow architect.
I couldn’t have achieved a quarter of the goals I recently set for myself without her. We organized and filtered my projects, built out roadmaps and timelines, and even created that tricked out Airtable I mentioned earlier this week. She made me think more clearly and deeply about what I was doing and how I was doing it. If you’re a creator, entrepreneur, actor, writer, or someone who keeps saying “but one day I’ll do [insert dream here]” yet can’t make a plan, then you need to talk to Tari ASAP.
Go here for more info about the workshop and to set up a call with her to discuss. You know me. I don’t mess around, OK? When I say this changed my life, I mean it.
And thus concludes the longest Brass Ring Daily of all time.
—fin—
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Thanks, as always, for reading.
Love, Kara