There’s a significant callous on the back of my right middle finger. The finger where I learned to balance writing implements last century when people used such things.
I’ve always been a gripper. I would hold my pencil so tightly that it deformed my finger. Even now, decades past my time in school, the callous remains.
I started learning guitar years ago, struggling to learn to switch between notes as I would try and play a song. My hand would get so tired, my instructor said, “don’t try to choke the guitar neck.”
It seems that every time I’ve picked up a hobby where I needed to hold onto something, I would hold onto it like it wanted to flee my grasp.
A death grip. I have a history of using a death grip to hold onto things.
Sometimes this carries over to me and ideas.
Writing was only supposed to one piece
I started my efforts to add value in the world about 6 months ago. The plan back then was to work start working on a set of productivity tools that would help me and others with a brain like mine get more out of their life.
I added writing to the mix so I could start to ‘build a following’ and pick up a side-hustle level of income. Medium first, Substack second and then who knows, Tiktok? YouTube? I was certain growth would be somewhat faster and that income would be more obvious.
Three months and I had ‘exploded’ on Medium, by my reckoning anyway. When I hit one-thousand followers, it seemed like it would maintain that pace. After another month showed that number slow, and more alarmingly, the income from Medium falter as well, I started to have doubts.
What should I have done? What do people do when something appears to not be working? Re-evaluate and buckle down on a new plan. Me? I stomped around. I moped. In general, I got wrapped around the axle on how to make the writing work.
When the writing wasn’t working, I didn’t dig back into the other core value I had started with. No, instead, I just stopped paying attention to that other thing.
Hear me out though, I knew there was a danger in spreading myself too thin, so I was actually trying to hone in on one thing at a time. I don’t think I did anything wrong. The problem was that the original plan slowly faded.
The new idea, that was the original idea to begin with
Over the summer, I’ve made many new friends in the writing space. I’ve connected with people trying to do the same, or similar, things in the world. I’m lucky to have these new friends in my life because they notice things that I don’t
When my friend
heard me talking about my love of tools (digital and physical) and saw it was a passion of mine, she asked why I didn’t have a section of my newsletter to talk about that. Little did she know how it would upset the apple cart in my head.As I noodled over this suggestion from her, I was also lamenting to my friend Tyson that when I tried to work out a course to teach people my ideas, my brain would freeze. Seriously, I couldn’t think sentences.
Somehow, I had forgotten about my desire to create a system to help with prioritization, another system to help with task management and a final system for managing knowledge. I forgot I had a “Whole Life OS” in my head, aimed at people with ADHD, or who just didn’t resonate with the countless other productivity and life management tools out there.
So, between those two and then finally getting challenged by
to actually identify what I wanted from my business, my brain finally returned to my original goal… but with so much more vigor and clarity.It takes a village, virtual villages count
Between the people I mentioned above, along with several others in my writing groups or that I reach out to in the newsletter and entrepreneurial community, I finally found this clarity that I’ve been advocating for since February.
Since my post last Wednesday about tools, I’ve had so many more realizations about what fires my engine up and how I can contribute to the world. I did also get a callout that my last Channeling Chaos post was more of a ‘Note’ than an actual newsletter or blog post. So, people aren’t letting me slide in how I get the word out, either.
My weekly gratitude is pretty obvious, the previous section expresses the why of it. I’m thankful to peers, friends new and old and generally the universe for placing ideas before me, or bringing things back around.
This week’s planning
With my new clarity, I feel like I have more things I want to write about than I have time. If you visit my page on Substack directly at mindfullish.com I’m adding sections that won’t necessarily get emails when I update them. I’ll also be recording my first voice-over for a newsletter, probably Tuesday morning when the world is quiet.
I’m also working on cleaning up my journaling template for Notion, so I can get back in the groove of capturing ideas and journaling more meaningfully. I plan to have that fixed this week as well.
I have some interesting thoughts about the whole “too many tabs open” topic that I will explore on Wednesday, be sure to tune in for that update.
For now, thanks for following along on my journey.
Namaste!