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On Habits and Rituals
By brewmaster | May 2, 2007
Like most humans, I’m a creature of habit. I like routine. I like variety too, but routine is the foundation of what you’re able to accomplish every day. The great accomplishments in life come from good habits practiced regularly - the incremental accumulation of success.
There are times when circumstance forces changes in your habits and rituals and for the most part, that’s good. Four years ago my wife, 1 year old son and I moved across the country to find new challenges. My wife went to work for a big company here, and I continued working on my dream, a freelance web-based worklife that included writing and website publishing. I began new habits, new haunts and new projects. Over the next couple years, at the time, it looked like I was doing a lot of wheel spinning. That was my wife’s opinion, and I must admit for the most part, mine.
But we were both wrong. So wrong. I was immersing myself in what the web was becoming - blogs, social networking and design. I was frustrated with myself because I wasn’t seeing a lot of income, just experience. It seemed like whenever I found a door to open, the room it revealed was far bigger than I could conceive. So big for me to truly, completely get my mind around, I couldn’t possibly explain it to her. So, defeated, I went back to the corporate world I’d spent the past 20 years in, we hired a nanny and I went back to "work."
The good news was that the working world I went back to was a world slowly waking up to the realities of the future I had immersed myself in for those two years. I, happily and luckily had gone on a two-year unpaid sabbatical that would help me develop the very skills I needed to continue to succeed in my industry. In my company (a big one), I’m a guru in social networks, Web 2.0, blogging and creating compelling online content - the very heart of what our company wants to become purveyors of. So, from this vantage point, I was a genius. Two years ago, I was another out-of-work slob screwing around on the computer all day. I didn’t have a clue about how to make a living on the web then. I sure as hell do now, though.
And what brought this little epiphany up today? A simple revisiting of one of my old haunts. I used to hit a bagel store (sometimes) and the next-door Seattle’s Best coffee bar (always), with my iBook in tow, unconnected to the web, but running good old Adobe GoLive. The Seattle’s Best is sadly gone, but the bagel store is here, and on my way to my corporate world workday, I decided to stop by and have a bagel sandwich and see what kind of EVDO signal I could get.
Sitting here drinking iced tea and doing a little blogging, the above story materialized in my head. A little perspective discovered.
The bagel was outstanding, the signal not bad. I’ll be back.
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