As many of you know, I have a bazillion projects that I never quite get around to…but this is changing.

My new site, Deeper Motive will be the place where you can track my progress on whatever project — creative or otherwise — I’m working on. I see it as a place to explore my own creative process, share my thoughts about engaging in creative work, and talk about whatever goal-setting, self-improvement thing I’m struggling with. I know I could post this stuff here on my personal blog, but I also know I’m not the only one that struggles with trying to make time, and find the courage, to work on creative projects. Not everyone wants to know what I did over the weekend in Tulsa, or where Cindy and I ate last night. So, I thought it would be better to have a separate place that focused on being creative and productive.

In keeping with the Kaizen philosophy, I’ll be adding pages, pictures, posts, podcasts, and design elements to the site over the next couple of weeks.

I’ll post the first entry on July 1, 2009.

I hope you come over and check it out.

I was reading Seth Godin’s blog last week and he had posted this video:

Here’s what he said about it:

My favorite part happens just before the first minute mark. That’s when guy #3 joins the group. Before him, it was just a crazy dancing guy and then maybe one other crazy guy. But it’s guy #3 who made it a movement.

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been taking one hour a night and devoting that hour to working on a project. I have about a dozen projects, and, all totaled, I believe they can be completed within a year.

Many of these projects are creative ones. Doing something creative, and putting it out there for the world to see can be scary. After watching the video, I found myself thinking about what it was like being on stage at USAO.

Our drama department put on some pretty damn good shows. They didn’t start out being damn good shows. Usually, they started out as awkwardly-delivered lines and half-understood scenes. But we would stop, re-read the lines, pick apart the scene, the words, we would try saying the lines a different way maybe, we would try out different blocking to see what worked best. We devoted ourselves to understanding the story, and the characters. And, by the time opening night rolled around, we knew what the hell we were doing. We knew how to make the audience laugh, and we knew how to make them cry.

And the reason the performances were good was because a group of people agreed to look foolish together, and to say that it’s okay to look foolish. This permission to look, and act, and be foolish is why members of an acting troupe can be so close to each other. Only by being willing to suffer through looking foolish can we develop our skills.

If you want to learn how to roller-blade, you have to be willing to look foolish. You’re going to scream, flail your arms about wildly, and fall flat on your ass. Somebody will laugh. You might be tempted to give up, but you shouldn’t.

Give yourself permission to look foolish, and over time, you’ll scream less, you’ll perform fewer gravity-induced gyrations, and your bruised ass will heal.

Now, that first guy in the video? He’s brave and/or crazy. The second guy? He’s also brave and/or crazy. But that third guy, the one Godin says turned crazy dancing into a movement? He’s the tipping point, the one that gave everybody permission to look foolish, to do the thing they wanted to do when they saw Guy #1 and #2, but couldn’t because they were too afraid. He’s the one that gave them permission to express themselves, and have fun.

But it all started because Guy #1 didn’t quit, and we need to remember that. So, if you have your own creative project, you and I, we’ll be Guy #1. Our friends? They’ll be Guy #2.

And let’s keep going until Guy #3 shows up, okay?

I took the idea of the grape soda Ellie Badge (if you’ve seen Up, you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t seen Up, go see it…take tissue) and changed it to better suit me and Cindy. I think Moxie is more fitting for us. Not only is it one of our favorite drinks of all-time, but it’s a quality we strive to bolster within ourselves.

And we’re going to need a lot of it to get us through the next couple of years

Last month, Todd and I ran across this article (via Consumerist) about how Charlie Munger, the Vice-Chairman of Warren Buffett’s investment company Berkshire Hathaway, used to set aside one hour each day to work on personal side-projects for himself. I like this idea for a couple of reasons:

1. One hour is about all the time I can spend on a project right now.
2. It’s such a small amount of time that the pressure of producing something “epic” is kept at bay.

Over time, these little actions will yield big results. It’s not a new idea, I know. But it’s easy for me to get caught up in a mental gumption trap, believing that I shouldn’t or can’t start something right now because I don’t have the time to give it the attention I feel it deserves or needs. Of course, that is complete and utter bullshit.

Over the past week, I’ve been trying to keep this in mind, working on various side projects I’ve intended to get around to someday. Not surprisingly, at the end of each hour, it’s satisfying to have been able to work on something that’s been sitting around in my head for weeks, months, and years.

After doing this for just one week, a couple of things become obvious:

• I still watch too much television.
• I don’t get enough sleep.

And these two things greatly influence how well I do other things throughout the day. I need to fix that.

As the article asks

“…if you aren’t satisfied with your current situation, why not work for yourself an hour each day? Instead of just idle dreaming, set aside specific time for action. Perhaps the key is small chunks of time, but at regular intervals.”

How very Kaizen. How very Bird by Bird.

At the end of the month, I’ll have a better idea of which projects I’m actually enjoying spending time on, and which ones I’m better off ditching.

Seriously, it’s taken over a year to get this done? Yep.

We had so much stuff from years ago when we lived in Stillwater and the northwest side of Oklahoma City, that when we moved to Del City, into a house about half the size of our previous apartments, everything we had (including ourselves) was just crammed in, put somewhere to get it in. This doesn’t mean it was out of the way; just that we had successfully moved everything from one location to the other. Then, after my dad died, we moved from our tiny house into only two bedrooms with limited space for anything we had in the garage, kitchen, or living room.

As I started working on the office a year ago, I would get close to getting things more or less organized, when something would happen and I would move more stuff in, undoing everything, and restarting the whole cycle: we had to clear half the garage because my mom wanted to park the jeep in the garage, we had to move stuff out of the other half of the garage because we needed to park the scooters there, we had to move stuff out of the old shed, and then we had to move stuff out of the old garage. A lot of this stuff flowed from their original storage places right into the office.

For me, getting rid of a lot of this stuff comes down to figuring out what the real important areas of my life are now and for the near future. Sorting out what I truly want in life from a great number of any-given-moment passing interests is helping me ditch the material things that don’t really help me shape the life I want.

This is where I was:

De-Crappifying My Office – April 19, 2008 – Before from numskullery on Vimeo.

And this is where I am today:

De-Crappifying My Office…For Real This Time from numskullery on Vimeo.

It’s a good start, I think. But there’s still lots more to do.