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Thoughts

Patience, no thanks!

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Patience is not one of my virtues. Living in a microwave world, many of the things that we have in life acquired instantly doesn’t help.
If you view the success stories of many, it appears that they became successful overnight; au contraire mon frere! It takes hard work and perseverance to become successful at anything. What we see many times is simply the end result of much hard work. We see articles titled “Overnight success” and “Instant hit”, but the real truth is deep within the article.

Haste makes waste

Typically I have found, if I do a project without the proper planning, I end up having to do much of it over again. This isn’t to say that some things in life shouldn’t require quick decisions and prompt action. More than not, most things should be like a good stew, taking time to simmer and let all the ingredients work together.

At my age, I feel that a wasted day is one day less that I will have to accomplish a goal. By not taking time to think and have ideas come to me, I tend to chase after ideas that are not well thought out. While I’m at it, I will throw in the word “relaxing”. I’m not good at that either. Combine little patience and not able to relax and you end up with a stress filled life and a nice helping of anxiety. Usually my body lets me know when it needs a break, not physically, but mentally. My body likes to manifest certain aches and pains that tell me, “Hey dude, I’m not enjoying life, and I am going to manifest this X to let you know!”

Chasing after windmills

Like Don Quixote, I am beginning to understand that I tend to chase after windmills.

I seem to be looking for the ever elusive idea or project that seems to elude me. Chasing after it, it seems to be always one step ahead of me, outsmarting me. I have talked to many that have said that their great idea came to them when they weren’t looking. They weren’t out there chasing after it. It was rather serendipitous. Relaxing and having patience are two virtues that I am going to begin trying to achieve. I have chased after these windmills and I keep getting knocked off of my horse.

The harder I work, the behinder I get

This statement seems counterintuitive. I know that multi-tasking has been a buzz word over the past 10 to 20 years, but can anyone really multi-task and do an effective job? There are those that say, the super competent only do one thing at a time, so as to limit multi-tasking to maximize productivity. Multi-task thinking also is part of my ‘no patience, no relaxing’ mentality as well. I want to get much accomplished at the end of each day, so I start multiple projects. At the end of the day, I simply have multiple unfinished projects. There isn’t much of a satisfaction feeling in that.

If you can relate to any of this, I challenge you to start to learn to relax. Allow time for creative thought and then slowly build a good foundation on those creative ideas that do come to you. Patience is a virtue that will help you build whatever that goal is that you have or that you discover.

Thoughts

Is the grass greener on the other side?

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I have come to wonder if I am like the proverbial cow that wants to break through the fence and try the grass on the other side of the fence. Is the grass actually greener and tastier or is it all in my mind? Maybe I have the mind like a member of the bovine family. For the past 12 or 13 years, it seems that after about 4 years, I’m ready to move to a new location and I’m not just talking about the next town. It seems that I become disenchanted with the town, the people, the climate, or any number of things. I love to discover new people and places. It takes a while to get the feel of a place. You can’t really do that on a 2-week vacation. Fortunately, I own a business where I can pretty much work anywhere so this makes it pretty easy to do.

Cow trying to eat grass on other side of fence
Photo credit James Rickwood

This time, it’s a vocational edit

I am trying to break out of my vocation or at least add to what I am already doing. You see, when I was young, I had two dreams; to develop a new form of propulsion for space travel and own my own theme park. These may seem like two entirely different pursuits, but each has similar characteristics.
-Research
-Creativity
-Risk-taking
-Innovation
Both of these pursuits require a good amount of imagination, yet neither is for the faint of heart. One requires a significant amount of brainpower including physics, engineering, and math. The other requires lots of money. Actually both require money but opening a theme park, that requires a LOT of money.

Routine is good, just not for me

Are you the type of person that loves to create, yet wants to leave the daily running of things to someone else? That’s me. I love brainstorming, troubleshooting, and coming up with “What if” type of thoughts.
I’ve done a lot of different things in my life. I have been blessed to have many different talents and have put pretty much all of them to use at one time or another. For many, having to come up with new ideas each day gives them a headache. They are very happy to know what is expected of them each day and they do it well. At the end of the day, they feel fulfilled.

Don’t get me wrong, I have routines. For example, I go to the gym regularly, have my morning coffee, pray, meditate, and enjoy a nice beverage in the evening. I also routinely sit down and write down ideas each morning.

I love big projects and I cannot lie

I’ve always been one for big projects. When I was a kid, I built model rockets. You know the ones where you put an engine in them and launch them into the sky. I quickly built many of the store-bought ones but they just weren’t big enough and didn’t go high enough. One day, I had that “what if” moment and said to myself, “If one engine is good, 3 is better.” I then constructed a rocket that was 3 times as high as the store-bought ones, installed 3 rocket engines that would fire simultaneously, and launched it successfully. Getting that out of the way, I went and got two 12′ carpet tubes to build a 24′ rocket. This time, model rocket engines were not powerful enough so I decided to make my own rocket fuel. Let’s just put it this way, it didn’t end well.

The grass isn’t greener, it’s just different

If there is a zany idea out there, I will come up with it. I just need to find other zany minded individuals like me. I’m not sure where one would find these types of individuals. We should start some sort of club. There must be other “cows” out there like me that are stretching their necks trying to find that perfect clump of green grass. In the meantime, I will come up with more ideas and try and figure out how to implement them. So, if you see me leaning out the car window like a dog licking the air, it’s just me looking for that greener clump of grass.

Dog with head out window
Photo credit Shutterstock