So I’m back in the UK after an awesome week in Austin, Texas, at South by South West interactive (SXSWi). And I’ve finally come out of a time of intense busyness. Today is the first Saturday in … maybe a year? … that I woke up after 9am.
During this quieter week and a bit, I’ve been thinking about happiness. One of the first talks I went to at SXSWi was a talk/book reading from Gretchen Rubin of The Happiness Project. And that, along with being around some wonderfully happy people like Pace and Kyeli, has pushed me to start giving happiness a bit more thought. What makes me happy? What makes you happy?
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Back in January, I regaled you with some of my goals for this year. I included this ambitious little template of my novel plans, explaining that I wanted to get Draft 2 done before going to SXSW:
Well, I’m happy to report that the bit circled there in red happened. As you may have noticed if you follow me on Twitter, I’ve finished Draft 2 of the novel (clocking in at 176,000 words). With two whole days to spare. Success! I’ve even made copies on Lulu for myself and a couple of friends who’ve offered to give feedback on the whole thing. It looks like this:
(I should’ve made my name bigger, damnit! Oh well…)
Happy ending? Sure. If you don’t count the blog posts unwritten, the friends neglected, the wedding unplanned…
Okay, I’ll be upbeat. Yeah, it’s a happy ending. I did succeed in something which I really wanted to do, and managed to get over my usual hang-ups about its lack of meaning to others. (Frankly, the world would be going on quite happily today whether or not I’d scrawled THE END on draft two yesterday.)
So am I a success? Hell, yeah. 
… But, seriously, that’s not the way to look at it. I succeeded at meeting a target I set for myself. It had a lot of meaning to me. I could have failed, but even if I had, it wouldn’t really have mattered: I’d probably still have got close to my goal.
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by Ali on February 25, 2010
I don’t all that often post reviews straight to the blog, but I started digging into the Premium Planners earlier this week and they’ve got a lot of relevance to much of what I’ve been writing about on Aliventures: like not taking on too many goals, keeping track of your progress, staying focused and avoiding succumbing to impulses.
On a more personal note, I used them to got through some resistance on thinking about the year after April-ish – and realised that I definitely err towards packing in too much (and inevitably failing to get it all done). I’m not sure this was exactly a fun hour of realisations, but I suspect it’s going to leave me a bit more sane this autumn.
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by Ali on February 22, 2010
If you’re following me on Twitter, you’ll know I’m doing a lot of creative work at the moment. The next few months are a good time for me to focus hard on my novel, and I probably sound quite obsessed at the moment – with word counts, hours spent, plot problems resolved…
So I’ve been thinking about (mainly creative creative) work and obsession. I wrote about this last week, in Loving Your Work: Don’t Be Obsessive, Be Tough. Several people chimed in with comments, particularly about this paragraph:
Although we have terms like workaholic to describe people who fall into this trap with career-related work, I’m not sure that we have a corresponding way to talk about artists and creative types who succumb to obsession. We might feel that musicians, painters and writers should approach their craft in an obsessive way: we think this is good for them and for the work.
And then, basking in the glow of everyone agreeing with me (ah, if only this would always happen in real life…), I read Jonathan Mead’s post How to Make a Living Out Of Your Obsession (over on Productive Flourishing), where he wrote:
Each day now, I actually wake up excited to start work. No, I’m not kidding. I eat and breathe what I do. For me, there are no boundaries. And the only way I’ve done that is by being obsessed with what I do.
And this is supposed to be a good thing? There were plenty of comments over on Jonathan’s post in favour. But I’m still very unconvinced. Yep, I can see why Jonathan’s touting obsession (aside: is this the new “passion” in the personal development blogosphere?) but I’m not with him on it.
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