The Myth of One Perfect Pot
I’ve been speechless for months now. As far as this blog goes, I stalled and lost all momentum. Which is not at all what I intended, because I fancy myself a writer.
In last week’s episode of Celebrity Apprentice, mannequin-faced comedienne Joan Rivers served project manager Claudia (aka one of the models with a briefcase on that Howie Mandel game show) tough criticism by calling her out as a “musher.” Aparently this is Joan’s term for a weak leader who seems solid at first but then turns to mush when pressed to deliver. Lately I feel like a musher myself. Weak. Unreliable. Not the strong, creative leader I want to be. Not a value-adding contributer to the online universe.
How I Lost My Super Powers
What caused this Super Apple to turn to a puddle of apple sauce? I suppose it started with a few bruises career-wise that weakend my confidence. I was one of two finalists for a really great (read: challenging, well-compensated) job, but didn’t get it. I submitted a proposal for a marketing contract that got rejected. And then I allowed myself to be soured by crab apple thoughts. “Those short-sighted jerks. I got shafted. Why me? I hate where I am. I give up.” It’s hard to fly with thoughts like those.
I softened myself further by keeping company with fear and perfectionism. I’d think about blog post ideas, or sit down to type, and the inner critic would shoot poison darts. “Your writing sucks. You suck. You don’t know what you’re blogging about. Your voice is too personal/formal. Your subject is too trivial/serious. Your relatives, your clients, and potential employers are all listening and they will probably disown you, fire you, and add your picture to America’s least-wanted list.”
I succumbed entirely to the food mill when I lost my self discipline. No more Friday deadlines. No more getting up to my alarm in the mornings. No pushing through the shitty first drafts. I let them go after a paragraph or two, justifying my weakness with some lame excuse about the topic being wrong, or my knowledge being incomplete.
How I Will Get My Super Powers Back - Help From My Friends
Now it’s time to put the shoulder to the flywheel again and begin the long, slow steady trek in the right direction. And I’m doing it with a little help from my friends. I read some Havi posts, and some Pam Slim. I also tried Penelope Trunk for the first time. I appreciated Penelope’s ruminations on her name change, her advice about starting a blog, and that she writes about her personal life in her blog about career advancement.
I would like to follow her lead in keeping my blog personal, however I will not be writing about my sex life. Ms. Trunk is one of those female writers who baffle me with their level of comfort writing publically about the intimate details of their relationships - Anne Lamott & Elizabeth Gilbert are also in this club. I’m much more uptight and private than they are, but I still need these women and their writing. They make me laugh. Their incredible openness about their humanity and their own failings helps me cope with my own stuff.
The 50-Pounds-of-Pots Story
I especially dug this story from Penelope’s blog:
Here’s a story I heard from Alexander Kjerulf, who was talking about David Bayles’s book “Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking“:
A ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of the work they produced. All those on the right would be graded solely on their works’ quality.
His procedure was simple: On the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the quantity group; 50 pound of pots rated an A, 40 pounds a B, and so on. Those being graded on quality, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an A.
At grading time, the works with the highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity.
It seems that while the quantity group was busily churning out piles of work — and learning from their mistakes — the quality group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of clay.
Rejecting the Perfect Pot Plan
Here’s the writer’s block-busting question: What if I swapped out the perfect-pot plan out for the 50-pounds-of-pots plan? What if I stopped trying to produce this one perfect blog post - the post that has not been written for the last three months because I am paralyzed by my own stupid expectations?
What if I instead gave myself permission to write imperfectly, but required myself to crank out a lot of blog posts each week? Say, 200 or so over the course of a year. That adds up to around 4 posts per week.
A lot of those posts will probably be crappy, just to warn you. I will be self-indulgent, or boring, or inaccurate, or use horrible cliches. But I will be writing, and my voice will come back. And maybe I can share the good ideas I’m finding, the hard lessons I’m learning, and the helpful friends I’m meeting along the way. Maybe all my reading and thinking will be useful to someone else. Maybe I’ll find my right people, my tribe.
My Three Step Plan
So now I have this plan I’m piecing together - a plan to get my Apple back. The 3 steps are:
1) Find my core.
I need to put in some hard work if I’m going to be a crime-fighting super hero writer/teacher living out her true purpose and values, instead of a puddle of fear and indecision. I need to know my strengths. I need to know what I believe. I need to know my purpose and where I’m going.
It’s not good enough to wander lost through life, thinking I have potential but not doing anything about it. Therefore, I will spend one half hour every morning reading wisely, praying/meditating, and building up my core. Then maybe I’ll have the strength to do what’s difficult, but possible.
2) Develop a thicker skin.
I really need to stop assigning too much importance to what other people think and start doing stuff. Their comments are information. Criticism is a tool for growth.
Rejection, failure, and pain are part of a bigger plan. They are a means to growth if I stop hating and fighting the very idea of failure. Perseverance. Resiliance. Loving one’s enemies. Patience. Humility. Life is full of lessons that can’t be contained between the covers of books and have to be learned by enduring tough situations.
3) Firm Up.
Self discipline is hard. Of course it is easier to be lazy, to stay in bed, to avoid the blank screen and inadequate adjectives. But rituals and habits can be anchors, and buoys. Friends and critics can be editors, teachers and encouragers. There is no excuse for being a flabby writer or, worse yet, a silent writer - letting the years slip by as I fill rooms with dusty blank pages. In my obituary I hope they write “prolific.”
Here it is, imperfect post #1. Please hold me accountable. If you think I can stick to my plan, clap your hands and believe in the resurrection of Super Apple. She only has 199 posts to go.
