It is scary the inches between thought and action.
I mean it has never been a strong point for me but now I have fine tuned how I track things and I am it scares me how often things just miss the ship point.
I often talk about how nice the 48 people were who lent their insight to my “Bernie Superpower questionnaire” (inspired by Christina Canters) – the part that I glossed over and has come up from more than one person I have collaborated with is about – my reliability.
One sentence stopped me dead – and she knows who she is – was “fuck me Mitchell, you are so cool – if you could also be on time you’d be a millionaire” that was about three years ago as I was on the phone running through Camden to arrive just on time for my own event.
Then more than one person from the OuiShare community and my coworking community has brought it up in feed back and many others who are in my “circle of trust” have taken me to one side for a hug and a word in my ear.
The icing on the cake was when someone very cool said “you are great at what you do but we don’t think you are 100% reliable” – far from making me cry, well it did a bit, it landed as inspiration.
I think I have finally grown up, for whatever reason. Diet, agony, therapy, being a father, mid life crisis is just about to pass – who knows.
Think about it, if the ONLY think you needed to fix was being reliable that is easy. Well it is now anyway.
Why am I telling you this?
Because after a good two years of saying no I have got to the stage where I have enough time, space, resources – money is ok – it is not flowing as freely as I’d like it to – part of that is the seemingly never ending aftermath of being depressed under my duvet for four years also fully committing making this blog you are reading central to my work is like bootstrapping a start up.
I need to add in there a ‘don’t feel sorry for me clause’ I am especially aware that when I write like this one or two of you might feel an urge to scramble around and try to save me, that is not what I need or why I am telling you this.
I just like being open and honest and I found a hugely more deeper level of connection with people when I write like this than when I dish out advice I have read in someone else’s book and pretend it is mine. (Please see early posts for examples of this)
You can climb back out of hell one inch at a time
Somewhere on this blog is a post called the “inches are all around us” which is based on Al Pacino’s dressing room talk in “Any Given Sunday” – this kick is that everything we need is around us and we need to pay attention.
That is where I am now, paying attention for me has never been easier and between OuiShare and my coworking community both in London and online I have everything I need.
So that is the tricky bit, well not tricky – the fine tuning bit – to ship things to get to the next chapter.
The talk that inspired me most at New Media Europe was Jonothan Tilley talking about failure, it was not in that usual “failure porn” way that is always dripping from the start up / VC world. Part of his point was about the amount of effort and that is where my effort is now. Getting to the finished product.
Workflow, Fancy Hands and the inches in my postcode
The last few weeks I have fallen behind because #Babybernie has been doing half days at school for the first two weeks. Rather than this be the end of the world I have busted a gut to do what I can right where I am with what I have. This included joining the Library by his school so I can work from there in the afternoon before I pick him up – see I told you the inches are all around us.
This then highlighted the gaps in my workflow because not everything I needed was in the right file or able to do on my mobile device.
The massive road block is getting all the jingles and then podcasts and the file in the same place and ready to ship. From this I also realised that it was not organised enough to send to Fancy Hands to post, of course they can support me but it is does work to send them eight different files and say sort this out.
It is like turning up at your new accountants with a sack full of invoices and receipts forty eight hours before the end of year report is due and saying sort this out.
So that is the main reason for this blog and podcast and periscope – I am not looking to impress, be the next mega blogger or keynote Inbound16 – it the the “hit publish muscle” I am building and going deeper into the craft. With more focus and intensity I am capturing more and more inches everyday.
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