99 days of solitude, attitude, and fortitude
I originally wanted to commemorate the first 100 days of true freedom on Monday, but seeing that my wallet is empty and it’s still not ATM day, thus facing the prospect of having nothing to eat (or having my wife buy me lunch..) I changed my mind.
I’m going to commemorate, or more accurately raise my own alarm bell, on the 99th day. Previously I thought self-employment means no savings, but now the prospect of a real cash-flow crunch is actually possible, seeing that I’ve had a great decline in income that has been tapering slowly from previous deeds, and new sources are not yet flowing in quick enough.
New things takes time, music needs to be written, software needs to be built, customers needs to be courted, eyeballs need to be sustained. With all my focus on delivering music on time, other items, unwittingly, suffer. It’s not that things are not done, but they are not done at the fervour and speed of a startup.
And that has to change in the next 99 or 100 days, or I’ll be too deep into the jungle and would have spent more than half the year not scaling up as planned, but only running around like a chicken who lost its head.
I recalled an old article saying something like don’t multitask if you’re trying to focus on delivering creative work. Now I see this hurts. Normally I perform very well in a salaried job, typically being an administrator, because the job is primarily routing messages and keeping dozens of threads running in parallel, making other people do the creation. However, when I do creation, the world vanishes and I exist only for the music.
Another way probably is to tag team with someone who’s willing to do the rest of the work, but at my current scale that doesn’t really work yet. It might also be another excuse to delay following up critical matters.
Nevertheless, 99 days is a milestone for solitude, attitude, and fortitude. Celebrating it must mean looking forward to the next 100 days at a much higher level.
To a more productive and focused tomorrow. Cheers.
