An Accountability Focus
In late 2023, I stumbled upon “6 harsh truths that will make you a better person” on Sunshine Jones, which itself was a repost of an article by David Wong at Cracked.com, many years prior (2012).
The TL;DR, the six harsh truths, and I want to clarify that I don’t explicitly agree with all of these 100%, but they are:
- The world only cares what it can get from you
- The hippies were wrong (ie. that being merely a nice person is sufficient to be valuable)
- What you produce does not have to make money, but it does have to benefit people
- You hate yourself because you don’t do anything
- What you are inside only matters because of what it makes you do
- Everything inside of you will fight improvement
This is perhaps a very cynical take on humanity. Like I said, I don’t know that I agree with it completely. The original author quotes Glengarry Glen Ross multiple times, and I hardly think the characters in that movie are necessarily people we should aspire to be.
However, I read this at a time when I had been thinking a lot about differentiating myself in ways that materially matter. I have a zillion hobbies (this will hopefully be apparent as I work through this project), but I’m not always great about shipping (delivering, completing, finalizing, etc). I’ve finished stuff, but it always seems like I have more WIP (works in progress) than finished goods.
So, like in Glengarry Glen Ross, I am going to try to keep my works focused on “Always Be Closing Shipping”.
Which led to this project.
Objective
I want to ship / deliver / showcase 12 Works, 12 “things”, over this year. A Work can really be anything that requires sustained effort and focus and polish. It can be a song, an art piece, a performance. I’d like to to feel like a significant amount of work.
Originally I was thinking this would be constrained to a single month, but knowing how I work I will likely need to jump around a bit. So while “1 month of effort” will be the aspiration, I’m not going to limit myself to calendar-constraints, which may need to be violated by things beyond my control. (ie. if I am dependent on a collaboration or similar)
Work that had been previously started isn’t out of bounds, but if I choose it it would be because I feel inspired to work on it. In those cases (for example if I had some unfinished art pieces) I would want to consider completing multiple pieces in tandem.
The other aspect of this is what is being delivered. I’d like to try selling stuff. If I finish art piece(s), I want to make them available to where prints can be purchased. If it’s a song, I want to make it available on some online place. No one is under any obligation to buy anything, but I want to feel the pressure of finish something to the point where I can bring it to market, if possible.