Making it happen
And learning what your medium can do / Issue 1,154
Oh, hi friends!
Last night at the BMI musical theater workshop holiday party, I was talking to a composer friend who I haven’t seen in a year. I asked what he was doing and he said he’s releasing an album this week. It’s 26 tracks of a musical he’s been writing for 10 years.
Ten years.
I asked how long the album took to produce.
He said first he had to teach himself how to use Pro Tools, the music production software. But actually, before that, he had to buy a better computer. Then he taught himself how to use Pro Tools, which took months. After that was recording, and compiling the audio, and orchestrations, and mixing and mastering. Basically, it’s taken most of the year.
But now he’ll have 10 years of effort gathered in 26 songs, available for anyone in the world to hear.
I told him, That’s a pretty great way to end the year.
He smiled and said, Yeah, it really is.
Whether you’re at the beginning of your process, in the middle of learning a craft, or about to send something out, remember:
If you keep going, you eventually get to ship your work.
From Fleishman Is in Trouble writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner interviewed in the Atlantic:
“I am excited to see what happens next. It’s like the way I think now about writing books. The journalist and novelist Laura Lippman once told me that writing your first novel is like riding a bike for the first time: You can’t believe how free you are. And now I see that the subsequent books are the understanding of the bike as a vehicle. Learning what it can do.”
(Thanks to Kase Wickman for sending this my way!)
What’s on My Mind Today
Do you “clear the decks” this time of year? Do you have a year-in-review system? Do you make New Year’s resolutions — or intentions? Do you choose a “word of the year”?
Thinking about all the different flavors of saying goodbye to a period of time and how best to enter a new phase with a refreshed spirit.
What do you do?
Eager to hear your thoughts if you’d like to share!
Clearing the decks? I tend to have a pretty quite week between Christmas and New Year's, so I use that time to pull up every sticky note, flip through every notebook page that has yet to be torn off and filed, and scroll through every Wordpress draft and un-filed Evernote note until I start to see patterns. (Pattern recognition is a professional organizer superpower!)
There are the things that I can delete because, even without seeing those reminders, I wrote about them or acted upon them. There are other categories that start to come together, and I get to move notes (tangible and digital) to drafts where ideas from 5 separate places begin to blend under overarching themes.
By the time I've hit everything, I'm seeing trends that weren't obvious to my conscious self during the year — what was important but didn't fit into a framework, what I feel passionate about now, and what's been hanging over my head that NEEDS to get done if I want to achieve my brilliant dreams. (For that last set, I get my Mastermind group involved so I have accountability, and then I scheduled it all for January so it won't be forgotten.)
I still have my year-end reviews and year-coming plans for the past umtpy-um years, all tucked together in the same notebook. Looking back at all the wins from this year, plus all the wins from years prior, help me appreciate just how much I do. And I rarely get all the things done in a year that I say I will, but still having that impetus and list makes me feel like life is possible. And a few things do actually get crossed off by Dec 31!