The Steve Jobs Garage Phase

It’s not for everyone. Many people are incapable of having a point like this in their life, simply because they have obligations that do not allow it. For many others, such a phase is unnecessary: the life they want and have imagined is accessible to them without growing pains, an uncharted outcome, fear or doubt. Some of us, however, are not so lucky: we are the chosen few that cannot seem to take the easy way in.

Yes, it’s true: I make my life harder than it needs to be. I feel a need to find a path that has not been tread before; that is barely visible through the underbrush; that many can’t see at all, and that even those with a decent weedwacker would avoid. Yes, it’s true: I want to be Steve Jobs, and develop a fantastic idea in my garage.

Okay, maybe I won’t be able to invent the next big technological breakthrough. Maybe I’m just fooling myself that my ideas, my drive and my dream will get me anywhere at all. Maybe I’m not the next Steve Jobs, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a right to the Steve Jobs Garage Phase.

The SJG Phase is where you’re hunkered down with your project. To passerby and people listening at the garage door, it may not seem like there’s much going on. They may not realize that you’re asleep at 10 a.m. because you were up until 4 a.m. agonizing about the next step; that you’re working weekends and strange hours with little to no pay to try and coax your little dream to life. They don’t realize that your dream is finicky and you haven’t figured out what to feed it yet; they may not know that at the slightest upset, it will retreat into its shell, never to be heard from again.

The most dangerous part of the SJG Phase is the mailman; the friend, the family member. They knock on the garage door, hear nothing, and enter. They see nothing they understand, shake their heads and proclaim that you are not making headway. The tiny dream is hiding from them, so they cannot see its glimmer of intelligence or potential for growth. All they see is you, in the middle of your garage, surrounded by pizza boxes, insisting loudly that you have not lost your mind, that they would understand if only they could see.

This well-meaning person cannot understand, but they try to make you understand that there’s an easier way out. You don’t have to live in the garage, they say. Come out into the light.

At this point, you have a choice. You can turn your back forever on that tiny idea and let it die alone in the garage, or you turn your back on your well-meaning friend and let them think you’re crazy. It’s not an easy choice; some have waffled back and forth, running back to the garage to search for the tiny dying idea, others burying the memory deep because it hurts too much to think about it in the light of day.

If you choose to remain in the garage, you shrug your shoulders, wish your well-meaning friend a good day, and close the garage door behind them. It may not be the most hospitable of places, but the garage is nevertheless home to your idea. For what it’s worth, you’re going to feed that idea and watch it grow into whatever the heck it wants to. When its limbs are strong enough and its little heart beats furiously at its own accord, you will follow it out of the garage, and into the light. 

Love and dingy garage kisses,

Morgan

Procrastination vs. Priorities

I know this statement is going to incite hate mail, but here goes anyway: I can’t procrastinate.

In college, I turned in my honors thesis a month early, while many of my friends stayed up the entire night before the deadline to get theirs done. I also got all my homework done before it was due, and never crammed for tests – I studied during the semester instead and got the normal eight hours of sleep the nights before finals. When I did an internship at a newspaper in Guadalajara, I didn’t know the meaning of “on deadline;” all my stuff was turned in hours if not days in advance.

Despite what you think, I am not saying this to brag. I am in fact somewhat envious of people who can procrastinate, or at least people whose heads are not torn apart thinking about what they have to do before it actually needs to be done.

You see, the down side of the anti-procrastination gene is that you are constantly trying to get EVERYTHING done: you make a list and think, “There’s no reason why I can’t get all 35 of these things done today.”

It’s easy to forget what little things might get in the way of finishing off your checklist in one fell swoop: eating, sleeping, exercise, personal time, and oh yeah, the time it actually takes to complete a task. When I think about completing a task that will take a fair amount of time, I resent it, and I start it, even if it doesn’t need to be started yet. Suddenly I am up to my eyeballs in things I’ve started that I can’t finish, because I couldn’t prioritize them – I was too busy worrying about procrastinating on them. (If you start it, you haven’t procrastinated on it…right?)

I may be unable to procrastinate, but I am also unable to prioritize. Often, I get sidetracked working on a project that is not as pressing as others on my list, or does not need to be done at all. I get worked into a flurry thinking about all the things on my list, without actually going through the list and moving the things that can wait to the bottom. I set incredibly ambitious goals for myself, and I am inevitably let down when I can’t meet them.

Thankfully, there is something I can do about this: I can learn the difference between procrastination and prioritization. This means writing it on my list, but picking 2-3 things off the list to do a day, and letting the rest shuffle up the list until I can get to them. I can remember that it’s ok to only do so many things a day, a week, a month, a year, or a lifetime, and that if I do it this way, I will be healthier, happier, and most likely, a lot more productive.

I am learning that nothing is a failure if you learn something from it. Therefore my über-busy, burned out past does not mean that I couldn’t hack it; it simply means that I couldn’t prioritize it. When I think about it, I can’t say that I know what the hurry is with many of my tasks – what would happen if I didn’t get my list done in a day, a week, a month? Oh yes: it would mean I was human, and doing the best I could while continuing to enjoy the process of living.

Love and procrastinated kisses
Morgan

Making It

This weekend someone asked me what I did for a living. I cannot even tell you how satisfactory it was to say, “I’m a writer.”
I’ve written about this phenomenon before, but at that point being a writer wasn’t something that brought me even a little bit of money. While I have to admit that I am still not fully able to support myself on my writing, it is now without a doubt the number one thing that I pour my energy into in exchange for money.
This may be confusing to some – after all, I quit my job in Bellevue more than three years ago, and since then I’ve mainly been working on my writing – right? Yes, but until this point I was always either living off my savings or working other jobs to supplement my writing and support this crazy idea I had to write for a living. As of this month, however, I have had to put away or quit all those other attempts to supplement my income because I am getting so busy that I simply don’t have the time to mess around working for someone else to make my money. That’s right: I’m at a terrifying point in my life where I have to invest all my time in making money without having any solid proof that I will make it.
Yes, of course this is petrifying. No, I haven’t been sleeping like a baby at the thought. Yes, this means that my life is perhaps more unsteady than it’s ever been before. At the same time, however, it’s also the only step I can take that is in the right direction – if I don’t give myself the room to succeed, there’s no way I will.
This has lead me to wish sometimes that there was some magic genie that would tell me that I will make it, but then I think, “What exactly is making it anyway?”
Maybe making it is when you decide that you make enough money to not have to worry anymore, but then again, most people I know worry about money regardless of how much they have. Perhaps making it is when you get to do whatever it is you want, regardless of the income, but if that’s the case, then I’ve made it already, even if I’m not quite financially solvent yet.
When I graduated from high school, my parents gave me a card with a poem on it called “Success,” attributed (perhaps incorrectly) to Ralph Waldo Emerson. (You can read the poem if you click on the name of the poem; most people have heard it at some point in their lives.) Based on this and my continuing effort in trying to define “making it” for me, I have reached a conclusion: I have made it. Despite the fact that I don’t yet make enough money doing it, and that I have no idea if I will ever make enough money doing it, I have decided that I have made it for many reasons. I get to spend every day working toward my own success: if there’s a step back it’s mine, but all the step forwards are mine too.
I get to cook delicious meals again and again to perfect them for my cookbook. It’s an important part of my job, and one I truly enjoy. I make money because I do this. How awesome is that?
And the best reason, in case you forgot? I get to call myself a writer and know that it’s true.
Having decided that I’ve already made it, I’m now letting myself off the hook. There is no failure if the experiences come with life-changing lessons. My life has changed and I can let go of the idea of making it because I already have. This doesn’t mean I’m going to stop trying, but I am going to stop worrying about reaching a goal that I haven’t even really defined. Even if the world blew up tomorrow and I never sold another book with my name on it, I still get to apply these experiences and their rewards to the rest of my life. If that’s not “making it,” I don’t know what is.

Love and made it kisses
Morgan

Progress Report 2011

On February 18, 2009, I wrote a blogpost. It was the beginning of the year off I had taken to write a book or six, and it was called A Recipe for Disaster. When I read that post, I almost don’t recognize the down-trodden, aching soul who wrote it.
Two years ago, I had just quit a job at a company that I no longer believed in and ended a relationship with a man that couldn’t make me happy. In the midst of a lot of personal disappointment and waning self-confidence, I am at least proud of the fact that I recognized that I was the only one who could correct my situation: that it was going to take a major shift in my thinking to start putting myself first instead of hoping other people would do it for me.
Two years ago, I had little more than an idea that I could take a year off to write and recover emotionally and physically. Two years ago, it took everything I had to get out of bed and do something for me. Two years ago, I was plodding toward my own happiness, knowing it was out there and taking the small steps I needed to take to find it, but having no idea whether I could reach it or whether in the long run it would be worth it. Two years ago, I could only think a year ahead, and a year seemed like a really long time.
It’s hard to measure how much you have changed in any amount of time unless you can go back and find evidence of the person you were before. I haven’t read that blogpost from two years ago since last year when I wrote my progress report of my first year of writing. I don’t remember being as surprised then as I am now of how much different I have become.
Let’s start with the obvious first: I have published a book! Savoring Chelan is doing better than I anticipated; I am about to reorder for the third time, and I expect a lot of sales over the summer. Every single horrific, middle-of-the-night worry I had about publishing Savoring Chelan has not transpired: no one has told me that it is an ugly, stupid book or that the recipes suck – at least to my face anyway. In fact, I just recently found out that I was the second bestseller for the local bookstore for 2010, right behind Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – and my book came out in the end of October. Of course not everything came out exactly as I envisioned, but a lot of it came out better; the point is that I was still my own worst enemy but it ultimately didn’t matter.
I am still working on numerous fiction and non-fiction projects, but I have given them less priority as I start working on a second cookbook for the Leavenworth area. This isn’t to say they’re less important: I have simply decided that it is to my advantage to build up a name for myself first and then use that name to publish the works that are closer to my heart.
The most important piece of progress, however, is the improvement of my emotional state. At the risk of sounding like a self-aggrandizing asshole, I’m so proud of how far I’ve come! Perhaps the shift was subtle to the outside world, but my state of mind has done a 180 in the past two years. This doesn’t mean that I don’t still subscribe to some very limiting behaviors and ideas, but for the first time in my life I am able to catch myself before my own fears overtake me. I’ve been able to focus on being healthy, both physically and emotionally, and I actually want to be instead of just complaining about how bad I feel and feeding off the attention others give me for feeling that way. It’s not always easy, but I’m starting to learn to trust others like I never could before (without even realizing it), and I’m able to finally act on what I know will make me feel good instead of going along with what will make me feel bad. To me, at least, this is no small feat.
So, now that I’ve gotten all that off my chest, let’s go through the list I made on my progress report a year ago:


1) Confessions of a Travel Addict – done. Needs to be sent to more publishers/agents. UPDATE: on hold. May self-publish later.
2) Started a serious novel that I got the idea for while traveling through Australia. Have now written 48,000 words – roughly 162 pages. UPDATE: Finished. Needs to be edited.
3) Started a funny novel about dating in your twenties. Have written about 19,000 words. UPDATE: Still in progress.
4) Wrote a short story called Jim’s Wedding, about 22,000 words.
5) Started a project to create a recipe book that pairs local wines from the Chelan Valley with recipes from the area. UPDATE: DONE! New one started!
6) Joined a writers group. UPDATE: Still in it; love it, can’t wait to go every month!
7) Trained for 2 half marathons. UPDATE: no more half marathons…but still running (much shorter distances) on a regular basis.
8) Ran 1 half marathon. (see above)
9) Took a week-long road trip to see Jasper and Banff.
10) Went to Oaxaca (Mexico) with my parents and managed to get myself a 3-month house sitting gig there for this coming summer. UPDATE: Best 3 months of my life! Going back in May!
11) Have already skied more this winter than I have in all other winters put together, minus the winter I was a ski instructor. UPDATE: Must. Ski. More.
12) Realized that a year is not enough time to finish all these projects that I’ve started. UPDATE: And neither is two years, apparently. Moving in the direction of making it a lifetime project.

Love and progressive kisses
Morgan