Joy As a Compass

This weekend I had the opportunity to check out Selena Soo’s three-day virtual conference. Long story short, I had an amazing time, but it also made me rethink about the daily blog, who’s it for, what’s it for, and whether or not it (in it’s current form) is serving me.

A key take-away from this weekend is that so often we use misery as a compass – once something breaks or goes wrong in our life, we take action to course correct. This is fine, but it’s mostly reactionary, and if we’re never pushed, we’ll keep plodding along, potentially being mediocre but not great.

I realize that I’d much rather use joy as a compass, which means doing what bring your joy, and jettisoning things that don’t.

Now this isn’t a cry to only do things that are easy or fun. Joyful things can sometimes also be difficult and tons of work.

Writing is often joyful and difficult, but after celebrating over a year and a half of writing daily, and a year of blogging every day, I find that writing is getting to be an obligation but easier.

Perhaps the reason is that I started the daily blog to see if I could do it for an entire year. The narrative in my head has, in the past, been that I’m a starter but not a finisher. So I took this upon myself as a challenge and perhaps that since I reached it, it’s less fulfilling?

I’m not sure if I’m a better writer now than then (I’d like to hope so), but I do know that I’m also interesting in gaining more clarity around the work I really want to be doing, and in what ways am I continuing to hide in what’s sorta working versus what I truly want to be doing.

I don’t know if my current dissatisfaction with writing is the constraints of the topic, or the medium (I might try more live streaming and video soon), or perhaps that we’re in a pandemic and I’ve been grinding and building things for the past two years without taking much of a break, or that I’m doing more work around identity work and finding things not perfectly aligned, or that I sometimes wonder if this is really all about trying to build an audience more than building meaningful connection.

But I do know that something needs to change.

So.

This isn’t an end to the blog, but I imagine this will be less a “leadership” blog, and become more of a personal one. Maybe it’ll range from political tirades to personal struggles to monsters and NFTs or maybe it’ll just be more of the same?

Or maybe it’ll just become weekly?

Who knows? Not me.

Yet.

Anyway, being that I may or may not be delivering on my initial premise to what you signed up for, I also totally hold no grudges if you choose to unsubscribe.

I do hope that you’re continue with me on this ever evolving ride, and thank you for reading.

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