by Ben Toalson | Apr 28, 2014 | In The Boat
A time comes for all when a new course must be set in our creative and business pursuits. It could be a new passion, a better job opportunity or it could even be that where you are now is no longer livable. The way that you go about setting yourself and the people in the boat with you on a new trajectory is immensely important.
Below I’ve outlined 7 steps to take when setting a new course.
1. Set Clear Goals
Enough cannot be said for the importance of setting goals for your new venture. It’s hard to know which direction you should go if you haven’t even set a destination. Sometimes the goal is getting away from where you are right now though you may not yet know where you are going. That’s okay too, but choose a direction on purpose.
2. Come up with a Plan
So you know where you are going, how do you get there? Just turn the boat in that direction. How do you turn the boat? You’ve got to take the helm and steer. Can we go straight there or are there rocks, islands etc. we’ve got to navigate? One of the great things about setting goals is that it begins to force you to ask real questions about how you will accomplish them.
I like to think of this stage like I am preparing a business plan for a presentation. I like to pretend that the success of the new venture depends on how well prepared I am and how well the presentation goes (which is not too much of a stretch).
3. Talk to Your Spouse
Remember those goals and that plan? Now is a great time to share them with your co-captain. I have found in my experience that sharing my goals and plan before setting a new course goes a lot more smoothly than after having set the course. The buy-in of your spouse is the single most important asset to your new goal.
Your first goal is not to convince or persuade, but simply to inform. The less you can make it a sales pitch the better. Talk about the pros AND the cons. In fact, maybe talk about the cons even more. My instinct has been to try to conceal the possible negatives of a new idea in order to get it to “pass” but the truth is, talking openly about the cons fosters trust. It shows that you take your goal seriously enough to foresee the challenges ahead. It’s a way of demonstrating that you are both on the same side and that you value your spouse’s problem solving skills. It assures your spouse that you can work together to solve problems and overcome challenges.
4. Talk to Your Kids
Anytime you change course, the people in the boat with you are going to notice. There may be huge changes to routines, schedules, etc. or the changes may be very subtle. Sharing your goal and plan with your kids is a great way to demonstrate a healthy approach to setting goals and making plans. Through the conversation you may uncover new challenges that you had not seen previously. Through conversations like these, our kids, at just about any age, come to understand and believe that they have a voice and that their voice matters.
What if your kid is too young to have any clue what it is you’re talking about? The exercise of talking to your child at any age gives you yet another opportunity to present your goals and plans out loud, further solidifying them in your mind. As you talk through what the long term effects of this goal for your child may be, you might yourself uncover new challenges that you wouldn’t have otherwise discovered. Plus, BONUS: Studies show that talking to infants and babies regularly is integral to their ability to develop language skills. So there’s that.
5. Consider Overlapping
Sometimes the best thing to do is to stop what you are doing right now and move on to the next thing. It may be possible, however, that you need the thing you’re steering away from to carry you some of the way to your new goal. As a part of the planning process, determine realistically what you will need to “make it” in your new venture. Quitting a job or walking away from steady income to pursue a new passion or goal is a very romantic idea, but not being serious about the question of resources can cripple your new venture before you even begin.
Do you have the financial resources to completely walk away from what you were doing before and start something new, even if it’s not going to make enough money at first? This may be in the form of savings, residual income, a sugar-mama/sugar-daddy, etc. Or maybe you do need to build this on the side while you continue working. Sometimes, having an exit strategy for a job or pursuit we’ve come to hate, gives us enough of a “light at the end of the tunnel” to keep pressing on.
6. Give It Some Time
So you’ve started on your new course and you’re about a week in when you discover that things are not what you thought they would be. Should you quit? What if it persists and you find yourself a month down the road, still not happy with how it’s going? Two months? Six months? A year? Rarely do our goals look in execution the way they did when we first imagined them. Stay the course. What does that mean? For how long? Only you can decide that. Make it a part of your plan to stay for a per-determined length of time. Sometimes, in fact most of the time, you don’t get to the good stuff without going through some rough patches. Now obviously if your boat is about to be torn apart or capsized, you may need to change course. Know how long you are willing to stay, and know what storms you are willing to weather.
7. Hold Your Plans Loosely
As a final thought I would say as I have said before, hold your plans loosely. It’s super important to make a plan, but once you’ve set course, be ready to recalibrate or adjust for unforeseen circumstances. Be flexible.
I wish you success and smooth seas wherever you are in your journey. Thank you for reading!
by Ben Toalson | Apr 21, 2014 | In The Boat
The To-do list
It’s a new week and there is that to-do list staring me down again. I’ve done a fantastic job of breaking it down into categories and further down into tasks so that I actually have some action items. I’ve put times and deadlines and I’ve even numbered them in order of importance. I look at my list of 52 things and say to myself ‘I’ll do it this week. I’ll cross everything off of my list.’
Somewhere between item number 23 and the 7th kid or household emergency that week, I start to realize that it’s not going to happen this week… again. I’m not going to cross everything off of my list and the projects that have been crawling along for weeks are going to show up on my to-do list again next week.
Day to Day Multitasking
There’s a myth that I’ve had a really hard time letting go of, and that is that I can multitask my way through all of my projects. There are two types of multitasking. The first is multitasking in the moment. It the more “zoomed-in” form of multitasking with which we are most familiar. It looks something like setting that file to upload while we switch over and edit a few layers of a design, then switching back to copy the file url to paste it into the css document and setting that to upload and then picking up the dirty plate and mug from yesterday’s working breakfast and bringing them downstairs to drop off at the sink on the way to picking up today’s coffee and working breakfast and briefly checking the food you’ve started in the crock-pot before running back upstairs to answer an email while you listen to an inspiring podcast. I’m not so worried about this type of multitasking.
Project Multitasking
There is a second type of multitasking that I am more worried about. It is a more zoomed out version of multitasking and it looks like having 2 client projects, 3 personal projects, 2 pro-bono projects, 2 blogs, a handful of new business ideas, a struggling dream, and a dozen other personal commitments and the ALL have #1 priority items that need to be completed THIS WEEK.
What I’ve hoped would be true is that if I could jump around to different projects at the right frequency, I could make small progress on each one. Over time it would add up to big progress. As the weeks wore on, instead of feeling like I’ve gotten a lot of work done, all I could see is a to-do list filled with unfinished projects and rapidly approaching deadlines.
My Brain, the Slow Computer
I don’t know if everyone has this problem. I’m sure there are people out there who are really great at juggling multiple projects, but I’m definitely not one of them. My brain is kinda like a computer… I can run multiple programs at once, but each time I open a new program, they all slow down just a little bit. If I have too many open, eventually some program gets stuck or crashes altogether. But even if I had a super fast processor and tons of memory, having more than one program open at a time still slows the machine down even ever so slightly.
Anomalies
In addition to my personal difficulty managing multiple projects there are also five little anomalies (my boys), six if you include my wife, who at any given moment throughout the week could obliterate any margin I’ve built for myself and derail my plans. Last week I had to spend 2 hours cleaning up water from an overfilled toilet, courtesy of one of my two-year-old twins. I checked back and that was definitely not on my list.
The conclusion I’ve come to, not only for myself, but even for the person who has more mental bandwidth and more predictable circumstances, is that project multitasking doesn’t work. We do our best work when we are focusing on one thing at a time. I want to encourage you to take some practical steps toward identifying which project to focus on, and how to ensure that while you are focusing on one, the others don’t get lost. Treat your projects like debt.
Treat Your Projects Like Debt
Regardless of how you feel about debt, many of us have carried debt and had to deal with it at one time or another. When you are dealing with debt and which debts to pay off first, you’ve got to consider things like interest rates and payment amounts, etc. For example, let’s say I’ve got a car payment, a credit card balance and a hospital bill. Assuming I am still making minimum payments on each and I have extra money to pay something off, it probably makes the most sense to pay off the credit card balance first because it has the highest interest rate, the car second and the hospital bill last. But, if the hospital bill is only a few hundred dollars, it might be worth taking care of just to get it off of my mind.
Assigning Values
In the same way, we can size up our projects and approach them based on which has the highest “interest rate” or “balance”. For example, a client project probably has a higher interest rate than a personal project because not “paying off” that bill could cost you in your brand perception, level of trust, or even actual dollars and cents. Below are three values you can assign to help you determine which projects to pay off first:
1. Minimum Payment
On a piece of paper, write out a list of the projects you’ve got going. Find out what the “minimum payment” is on each of your projects. What is the least amount of time you can afford to spend on each project without any of them going into default? One way you can determine this is by dividing the amount of time it will take to complete the project by the number of working days between now and the “complete by” date. Once you’ve done that for each item, you might find that even making the minimum payment on all of your tasks puts you way over on your time. This is a good time to decide whether or not you need to let a project default. Maybe you need to push back the due date or just remove the project altogether for now.
2. Interest Rate
Number your projects in order of interest. Which one’s hold the highest consequences if not finished by the completion date? Typically, client projects, or projects for which you’ve made a big public commitment have the highest interest rates, whereas personal projects, particularly ones you’ve not made public, have relatively low interest rates. However, don’t underestimate the interest value of personal projects that you are extremely passionate about.
3. Balance
Write down the number of hours it will take to complete each of your projects. It may be that you have a really “low balance” project that, though it does not have as high of an “interest rate” as others, you could knock out really quickly. There is profound value in finishing something. Completing a project fuels your efforts for the next project, and the next project, and the next.
I think we have a tendency to be more optimistic about how many things we are capable of juggling and how quickly we can get those things done. The simple act of writing down these values and assigning some real numbers to our projects, at the very least, helps us to be more realistic about what we can and cannot accomplish, and at best, will establish within us a healthy rhythm of paying off “project debt” and help us to work through our project list faster, and more efficiently.
by Ben Toalson | Apr 7, 2014 | In The Boat
The Feast or Famine Cycle
Feast or famine is a cycle with which I am all too familiar. The oscillation between having plenty of resources and digging through couch cushions for spare change is a common experience for many freelancers and entrepreneurs. I told myself for a long time, ‘this is just the cost of working for myself. I have to sacrifice my sense of financial security in order to enjoy the freedom of being self-employed.’ I think I accepted this as truth because I saw so many other people around me experiencing the same thing, even designers and business owners that I would compare as more successful and/or experienced than myself were experiencing it. It just comes with the territory I would tell myself.
Eating Ramen Noodles Was Never Really Okay
Before I had a family, this would usually mean that I would spend a week or two eating Ramen Noodles and hitching rides or walking places. Now, with a wife and five young children, things are not quite as simple. Ramen is not going to cut it and we’ve gotta keep gas in the tank. Fortunately, we have padded ourselves in some ways to not have to take drastic measures during times of famine, but we still feel the anxiety and the inconsistency of it, and because of this we live and plan very tentatively.
The Lie We Believe
I believe that many feel, as I had for a long time, that this is just how it is. You’ll have good months and bad months. While I believe it’s true that client work can tend to come in waves, I don’t believe that our financial security has to necessarily be a reflection of this inconsistency.
Ideas For Changing the Mindset
I’ve decided to challenge this pattern in my own life and am going to try, not only shifting away from some of the behaviors that feed the feast or famine cycle, but the mindset that accompanies it. Here are some of my ideas:
-Celebrate, But Not Too Much
When that big project paycheck comes it feels wonderful. Suddenly we’re rich… we should go out and celebrate, I should buy myself that new tech I’ve been wanting, etc. The “feast-or-famine” mindset says ‘let’s celebrate while we have it because tomorrow it will be gone.’ Our income then becomes a reflection of the way we treat the money and vice verse. We lean into the curve. What if we evened-out our spending during “feast” times and didn’t outspend our actual budget? Maybe we’d find that we have something stored for those “famine” times.
This is not to say that we shouldn’t celebrate when we land a good client or project, but perhaps we can find better ways of expressing our gratitude and excitement that don’t require spending outside of our budget.
-Don’t Over Tighten the Belt
On the other side, we have a tendency to place a moratorium on spending when things are tight. This is meant for our good, but might be part of what causes us to swing too far the other way when the “feast” comes. Sometimes we’ve tightened the belt so much that we end up not allowing ourselves to get equipment we may need to finish a project. Sometimes we don’t afford ourselves the opportunity to get away as needed for clarity and inspiration, or we don’t afford ourselves some of the creature comforts that have become a part of our creative process. We should certainly be smart about how we spend our money when resources are limited, but I believe we can do so without again leaning into the curve.
-Work Personal Projects During “Down Time” as a Strategy for Getting New Clients
One of the work patterns I’ve seen from other freelancers is: market and get new clients, work on projects, market and get new clients, work on projects, etc. In this case the “feast” usually happens during the “working on projects” and the “famine” happens during the “market and get new clients.” I really don’t like making calls or marketing. I would rather the clients just come to me.
One of my strategies for doing this, while getting my income to a more consistent place, has to do with what I choose to do with my time between client projects. A few months ago I made a list of personal projects that I would like to work on. This list includes a couple of art series, one of which I am currently in the middle of producing, a pro-bono logo design for a good friend, and some other long term projects that I am slowly building. Currently I am in a “feast” season. I have a few well paying client projects and we are doing just fine with our budget. When these projects run out, if I don’t have another client project scheduled, I plan on diving into my personal projects.
Out of my art series I can make products that I can sell in an online store. I can post an in-depth case study of the pro-bono logo design which could potentially earn some interested clients. If the client for which I designed the pro-bono logo is really satisfied with my work, he may be happy to refer other potential clients to me. At the very least I can have something strong to show in my portfolio. My long term projects, including blogs, websites, etc. are always worth a reasonable investment of my time and will hopefully, eventually provide a steady income.
-Be Willing to Protect Your Passion
The right amount of financial constraint forces me to be creative and think outside the box. Too much financial constraint, however, can be paralyzing. It is important to be able to recognize the difference and take necessary measures to protect my passion against the defeating blows that money worries can deliver to my creativity. This might mean that I need to get a… gag– job. This is not a cop-out. This is not giving up. This is being smart and strategic about equipping my passion with what it needs to thrive. This is a tough one for me because I tend to run away from the idea of working for someone else, but I would do better to get over my distaste and consider objectively whether or not it’s something that my passion needs today.
-Find a Rhythm and Save Up a Pad
Over time, as I can measure my activity and see patterns in the influx of client work, I can get a sense of its rhythm and begin to establish a complimentary rhythm that allows me to save money. Ideally I’d like to have 6 months worth of income to serve as a padding against those “famine” times, not for security, but for strategy. I can then use this pad as a way of experiencing a more consistent stream of income, or as a means to take a break from client work and pursue a personal projects, or maybe even to take a vacation!
-Price for the Famine
This is another one that is tough for me, but I think absolutely necessary. I use the “value based pricing” approach with my clients, which means that the client pays for the value of the project, not a flat or hourly rate. For example, if a client projects that they will make an additional $100,000 annually because of my design solution, it’s not unreasonable for them to make a $20,000-$40,000 (or higher) investment to see that kind of return. Alternatively, if a client projects that they will make an additional $10,000 annually, $2,000-$4,000 should be a reasonable investment. Either of these examples are reasonable and acceptable, as long as I am making my baseline cost, which is my estimation of how long the project will take, multiplied by how much I need to make hourly to support myself and my family.
So for a 40 hour design project, my baseline is somewhere around $3500. If I have one of those $20,000-$40,000 projects, (disclaimer, haven’t actually had one of those yet) I’d be set, but if for the same amount of time commitment, I’m barely making my minimum, that’s going to possibly leave me in a lurch for the “famine” time. What if I doubled my baseline rate? What if I believed that my time was actually worth THAT much? The truth is, your client benefits from the clarity and creativity you experience when you are unhindered by money worries. Though you may not articulate that value to the client, it’s definitely worth considering for yourself.
A few questions to ask yourself are: If I double my rates will I lose more than 50% of my potential clients? What kind of clients might I be able to work with if I raised my rates? Can I raise my rates and find ways to protect my passion until the work catches up with me?
Say Goodbye to the Feast or Famine For Good
I hope this gets you thinking the way it gets me thinking. I’m excited to work these ideas into my process and hopefully one day soon, say goodbye to the “feast or famine” mindset for good. As always, if you have thoughts or suggestions about “feast or famine” please share them below. Everyone reading this benefits from a wider conversation on the topic. Thank you for reading and sharing in this journey!
by Ben Toalson | Mar 31, 2014 | In The Boat
Writing About Ben… Here We Go
One of the most difficult pieces of content I have tried to produce on my web site is my personal bio. My wife is a writer, has worked for years in journalism and has spent years shaping her creative writing craft, and even she has a hard time writing about herself.
The Art of Curating
Several months ago, when I began putting together the content for “In the Boat With Ben”, I was struggling with how to present myself and my personal brand. There are many things that make up who I am and what I love to do, but a lot of the advice I had read or heard told me to curate what I shared and to limit how I presented myself. I was learning the importance of carefully considering how each thing I shared on social media, each word I wrote about who I am and what I do, supported my brand.
So I scaled back a lot of what I was sharing and really tried to focus my brand expression. This turned out to be a smart move. I found out quickly that when people enjoy your work and know what they can expect from you consistently, they are more willing to become a part of your audience.
Here are some of the things that I consider to be a major part of my life that I haven’t made a part of my brand:
1. My faith – There are a myriad of reasons for or against sharing your beliefs as a part of your brand, ranging from very personal to strictly strategic. Though I don’t take great care in censoring a natural expression of faith in my work, I am purposefully not purposeful about sharing it explicitly. I feel that the lack of nuance in the perception of faith as a part of one’s brand leads to unintended and unnecessary exclusivity. If I wanted to work within a niche faith market I might use this to my advantage, but because my audience is made up of people from many different faith backgrounds, I choose to remove this potential barrier.
2. My family – Though this blog is focused on creative pursuits in the context of family, I don’t really bring them into most of what I share. I do have other outlets where I share more detail about my family life and experience. My family is a major source of inspiration and joy in my life. Some of the most wonderful, hilarious and beautiful things happen inside the walls of our home, but where it’s not applicable to my brand here at “In the Boat With Ben”, I tend not to share it.
3. Music – Music is hands down my first passion. To be completely honest, I am going through a season of mourning right now because my current circumstances do not allow me to pursue music the way I used to and it’s tearing me up a little bit. I have been a singer/songwriter for more than 15 years and have been in 4 different bands. With my bands I have recorded 4 full length studio albums and a handful of singles, I have performed live shows all over Texas and even got to go on a little 2 week tour up to Colorado and back. I could sit and play my guitar, piano, computer midi program all day and never get bored with it. Some of my “In the Boat With Ben” audience might appreciate my music, but that’s not the primary reason they are here. So while I do share about music as a creative pursuit, I do not share specific projects or songs here.
4. Lots of other stuff – I have a list of creative hobbies as long as your arm and would enjoy sharing at length about any given topic if I had the platform.
The Magnifying Glass
The reason I don’t share at length about those things here is that I want people to associate “In the Boat With Ben” with creative pursuits in the context of raising a family. The more it is felt that I am committed to providing content specifically around this topic, the more targeted my audience will be, and the more readily they will be willing to listen to and share what I have to say. It’s like what a magnifying glass does to the sun’s rays. If you are the sun (track with me here) your brand should be a magnifying glass, focusing a part of who you are into a concentrated beam of light, hot enough to start a fire!
Don’t Lose Yourself
As good as this approach is, one of the dangers is that you may begin to creep into the more targeted expression of your brand identity. When what you share publicly is only a part of who you are, it can be easy to slip into seeing yourself as that one part instead of the whole.
Super Ben
For this reason, I try to imagine that “In the Boat With Ben” is one of my super-hero identities and that Ben Toalson, the person, is my secret identity. That’s not to say that I see myself as an actual super-hero, but that, in the same way a super-hero is more than the sum of their super-powers and crime fighting skills, Ben Toalson is more than what I present through “In the Boat With Ben.” A super-hero wouldn’t talk to News 1 about the kind of food they feed their cat after saving their city from peril.
When I look at it this way, I can also feel more freedom to pull in other aspects of who I am as a part of my branding strategy. Who knows, maybe if people knew that I make homemade pizza for my family every week from scratch, my audience would grow exponentially. Maybe not.
The points are:
1. Don’t let yourself creep into a mindset of seeing yourself only as the narrow expression of who you are as your brand.
2. Don’t feel guilty about not sharing all of who you in your brand. Instead, feel the freedom to bring in or leave out any part of who you are as a way of supporting your brand.
Allow it to Evolve
Finally, your brand, by virtue of the fact that it is a part of you, will continue to grow and evolve with you. Don’t fight this natural process, but allow your brand expression to be an iterative process.
Thanks for reading! Please do 2 things for me:
1. Comment below and share your thoughts or opinions. I want and WELCOME conversation here.
2. If you found this article to be helpful and valuable, share it using the social links below.
by Ben Toalson | Mar 25, 2014 | In The Boat
I Broke My Toys On Purpose
I was one of those kids who liked to take things apart to see how they worked. Over the years I destroyed a number of perfectly functioning toys. Eventually, I started paying attention to what I was doing and could sometimes reconstruct the toy to be in working condition again. My parents must have known this about me, which is why I had one of these growing up:
The Erector set was like having “100 Toys in One” according to their slogan. I remember spending hours building things, taking things apart, and doing it all over again.
In a way this has carried into adulthood. I remain ever curious about how things work and I still, every once in a while, take things apart if they aren’t working and I think I might be able to fix them.
Deconstructing Our Dreams
Our dreams are a lot like my old erector set. There are so many possibilities for what we can build, but you have to start with the pieces before you get to see the finished product. If we want to bridge the gap between dreaming our dreams and pursuing our dreams, I think we need to learn how to deconstruct them, to discover what pieces we will need, in order to put them together.
The Challenges
There are many challenges when it comes to staying productive while chasing your dreams. One of them is overwhelm, the feeling that your dream is bigger than your own abilities. Another challenge you may experience is the unknown of your dream, those aspects of your dream for which you have no experience or expertise. Fear of failure is a big one for many. You may fear that you will invest the time, money, or social interest of yourself and/or others and ultimately not realize your dream. One of the biggest challenges I deal with working through the not-so-fun parts of my dream, the monotonous things for which I have no care or energy.
10 Practices for Staying Productive While Pursuing Your Dream
Dreaming big is fun, but dreaming big and not pursuing your dream is life-sucking. In order for us to remain productive in pursuing our dreams, we need to understand the nature of our dreams and how to deconstruct them in a way that allows us to build them piece by piece. Below are 10 practices for understanding, deconstructing, and rebuilding our dreams:
1. Explore Your Negative Feelings
If your big dream feels overwhelming, that’s a good thing. It means your dream is bigger than you, and those are the only ones worth chasing. Fear is a similar indicator of the “bigness” of your dream. If you are feeling these things, allow yourself to find satisfaction in your ability to dream big before you try to “fix” the negative feelings. Embrace them as a way of celebrating the bigness of your dream, then move forward.
2. Embrace the Unknowns
There will hopefully, almost certainly be aspects of your dream that require you to grow and learn new skills. As you break your dream down into projects and tasks, you may find several things you don’t yet know how to do. For that matter, there are parts of your dream that you don’t even know you don’t know. In the early stages this will help you give priority to the problems you CAN solve. The worst thing you can do is to write something off because there is a part of it you don’t yet know how to do. Get started with what you do know. The things you learn, the people you meet, or the resources you acquire along the way may hold the key to solving those unknown problems.
3. Make Failure a Part of Your Strategy
One of the most valuable things I’ve heard about failure is “When you fail, it means you get to do it again, but with experience.” We throw the word “failure” around a lot, and it can mean many different things. There are little day-to-day failures and big failures. If you can accept that at any point in your dream-pursuit things may not go as planned, you set yourself up mentally to have a proactive response to failure that makes it a useful tool instead of a potential dream killer. You may “fail” at realizing your dream as it was when you first imagined it, but that “failure” might set you on the path to a new dream that you might not have seen had you not set out in the first place.
4. Hold Your Dreams Loosely
Sometimes we get so caught up in the idea of our dreams that we don’t leave room for our dream to evolve and possibly change. When we do this, it can leave us frozen when the dream is not shaping up to our original expectations. The truth is you may not be the same person, in the same set of circumstances, with the same resources even a month from now. Don’t make it so much about the end goal, that you threaten your ability to be productive and diminish your experience of pursuing your dreams today.
5. Break it Down
If your dream is to become a published author, writing “Become a Published Author” on your to-do list probably isn’t going to lead to much action. You should definitely write your dream down, but from there, ask your dream some questions… What will it take to become an author? Probably need to write a book. What should I write a book about? Probably need to have a brainstorming session. How should I brainstorm? I like to think on whiteboards. Do I have a whiteboard? No, you should put “buy a whiteboard” on your list of things to do.
6. But, Don’t get Carried Away
You can break it down too far. Sometimes you can make yourself feel productive with the activity of breaking down your dream without actually getting anything done. Remember that the point is to get your dream to a place where there are bite sized pieces with which you can actually do something. Imagine your dream is a steak. You probably need to cut it into smaller pieces to eat it, but you wouldn’t spend all day slicing it down into tiny pieces; you want to eat that steak! Break your dream down into pieces that you can handle, but then eat it!
7. Schedule Your Tasks
One of the really practical things that has helped me immensely is to go through my list of to-do items and estimate how long it will take me to do that task. Sometimes, if I feel like I’m having trouble estimating, it means that I need to break down that item further. After having assigned time values to each item, I put them in my calendar. This helps me to see very quickly how much I can and cannot actually get done within my time constraints. As you go along, take note of how much time each task actually takes to complete… it may help you to more accurately assess similar tasks in the future. If you find that you have completed a task more quickly and have an extra 15 or 30 minutes, go back to your list and see if there are any 15 or 30 minute tasks you can knock out.
8. Group Similar Tasks
If you have more than one task that requires the same kind of action or attention (editing videos, sketching concepts, writing code, etc.) it can be helpful to schedule those together. One of the difficulties I experience in staying focused is when I have to shift mental gears between tasks that, although they serve the same project, are different types of activities. When you stay on a specific type of task for long enough, you can experience flow in your work (the sensation that you are “in the zone” or “on a roll”). But don’t just do this for the sake of doing it. If you start going cross-eyed doing the same activity over and over, it may not be a bad idea to shift gears.
9. Ask For Help
No matter where you are in your journey, there is always someone who is further down the road than you are. Some of the most successful people I know continue to seek help and valuable insight from those ahead of them. Maybe the people you look up to the most seem inaccessible, but you’d be surprised at how open they may be at sharing the things they’ve learned on their journey. Also, you don’t have to reach for people who are a mile ahead… some of the most valuable advice and experience comes from the people who are a few hundred yards down the road. For them, what you are experiencing now is still fresh in their minds.
10. Zoom Back Out From Time to Time.
A healthy interaction with a dream pursuit looks like a steady rhythm of zooming out, examining your dream, making plans, zooming in and working your plans, zooming back out, assessing where you are in your dream pursuit, recalibrating if necessary, making plans, zooming in and working your plans, etc. As you are working through tasks and to-do lists, it may be difficult to have a good sense of how much progress you are making toward your goals. Zooming out helps you gain a fresh perspective on where you are and also gives you a chance to recalibrate if you decide you want to take your dream in a different direction. Sometimes the doing of your dream shapes your dream in ways you weren’t expecting and zooming out helps you to change course if necessary.
This Week’s Challenge
For this week’s challenge I will daily write out my tasks, assign time values to them, and put them in my schedule. I hope that you find some of these practices useful and, remember, it’s not about the practices themselves, but what they are meant to accomplish. You are the builder, so don’t hesitate to tweak something to make it work for your personality and process.
Thanks again for coming along this journey with me. If you’d like to read through the other entries again, here they are:
Week 1: Productivity and Taking Care of You: An Experiment
Week 2: Resting on Purpose
Week 3: Getting Over the Reality Beat-Down and Reclaiming Our Big Dreams
As always, I’d love to hear any thoughts or insights you have to share. Feel free to leave a comment below.
by Ben Toalson | Mar 17, 2014 | In The Boat
A Houseboat with Amenities
When I was a kid, we took a trip out to Lake Powell to spend the weekend with my uncle and some of his friends on his houseboat. It was a blast. There was camping, swimming, speed-boating, jet-skiing, and rafting. I had such a great time that when we returned to our home in Colorado, I spent a few hours making a huge map based on our 20 acre property, including all of the fun things I had experienced that weekend, and some other stuff. It had a beach, river rapids, a natural water slide, rock-climbing wall, a lake, a houseboat (I even made a separate architectural draft of the houseboat and all of its amenities) and a sports complex complete with basketball, football, tennis and baseball. When the map was done I ran and showed it to my mom and she and I sat down and imagined together how we would spend our day.
The Home of my Dreams
Fast forward a few years and I would be sitting in class, completely zoned out in my own world, drawing plans for the house of my dreams. There were several different layouts, but almost all of them had a pool in the main living area.
Amphitheaters All Over the World
Fast forward a few more years and I would be playing and writing music with my friends and dreaming about how we would be selling out shows at amphitheaters all over the world and selling thousands, yes thousands, of albums.
Benland
Rewind to a time before all of this when I was a young kid living in California who loved amusement parks (what kid doesn’t?) and dreamed one day of designing and building his own. I remember sitting in the backseat of my babysitter’s car, sketching out a map of the different attractions and features, and sharing with excitement all of my big plans.
My babysitter, chuckling a little bit, said to me, “Building an amusement park is very, very expensive. You’ll probably never have the money to do something like that.”
I sat for a moment considering what she said, then I thought to myself, ‘I don’t believe you.’
The “Real World”
Today I live in the “real world” and I realize that I can’t just bring the ocean to Colorado and that all of the things I wanted to build there on our property would be extremely expensive and probably not a good investment. Today I don’t know how to design a house and it’s easier to believe that anything I might dream up would more likely sit there on paper than ever become a reality. Today I don’t really see myself playing to more than a room-full of friends and family, if I can manage to get out and play at all.
Today when I think back to the memory of my amusement park plans and what my babysitter said, I believe her. I don’t mean to villainize her… the real villain is this idea that when you dream impossible things, life, experience, reality stops us and tells us that things don’t really work that way. It’s the voice of reason. I have believed this voice for a while now.
Reason, the Friend and the Foe
Reason is not all bad. It’s kept me from making stupid decisions. It’s protected me from coming to financial ruin. It has allowed me to live a relatively safe life. But over the years I have allowed reason to steal my ability to dream big. I’ve traded my big, childish dreams for more reasonable, grown-up dreams.
Reality, the Accuser
When I reflect on my journey to this place of small, manageable dreams, I think about those moments when I allowed my dreams to be struck down by reality. Essentially reality stands pointing his finger and says, “Your dream is a lie.” In the moments where I had a choice to agree or disagree with this accusation, I looked at the evidence; the small, disengaged audience for which we were playing our music; my finances and my circumstanced; and I said, “reality… I think you’re right.”
When you feel hurt by someone or something you tend to not let it be in a position to hurt you again, and for this reason I have been holding my dreams at arms length for a long time. The consequence of this has been a reduction of passion and purpose in my mindset. My daily activity and the purpose with which I pursue dreams is in correlation with the size of my dreams. So I make allowances for all kinds of distractions, I skimp on the details, and I allow myself to be okay with “good enough.”
What if I Dream?
I don’t want to dream that way any more. What if I dream bigger again? What if in doing so I find renewed passion and purpose. What if my dream was so big and I believed in it so much that I could not be bothered with distractions and bad habits? Even if I dream big and fail big, wouldn’t the excitement and shift in my lifestyle and mindset be worth it? I think so.
I am challenging myself this week to dream big. Here are a few of the exercises I am going to try:
Dreaming Session
No details here, just writing down big dreams. And after having written them down, asking myself, ‘How can you dream even bigger than this?’
Sharing my Dreams with My Kids
If there’s an audience out there who will not immediately start telling my why my dreams may not work, it’s my kids. They’ll go along with whatever I say and may just add some valuable ideas to my dreaming process.
Interviewing my Kids
Fortunately “reason” has not set in yet with my children. I can ask them about their dreams and learn from their example.
Designing my House
In the spirit of dreaming big, I’ll do an “architectural draft” of the house of my dreams. I may or may not put a pool in the living room.
Share Your Dreams
Thanks for following along with me on this journey. If you have any thoughts or experiences of your own about dreaming big, please share them in the comments below. Comments geared toward trying to bring me back to reality will be deleted ;). Until next time, dream big. Now dream bigger.