Finding Success By Giving Up

It’s only after you let go of your plans that you can breathe life into your efforts. Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit.

Hugh McLeod draws cartoons on the back of business cards and gives them away for free. Sounds like an unusual business plan, right? He explains that, after seeing too many of his Big Plans fail to materialize, one night, “I just gave up. Sitting at a bar, feeling a bit burned out by work and life in general, I just started drawing on the back of business cards for no reason. I didn't really need a reason. I just did it because it was there, because it amused me in a kind of random, arbitrary way.

Of course it was stupid. Of course it was uncommercial. Of course it wasn't going to go anywhere. Of course it was a complete and utter waste of time. But in retrospect, it was this built-in futility that gave it its edge.”

He found it liberating to do something just for himself, without trying to impress anybody. “And of course, it was then, and only then, that the outside world started paying attention.”

Check out his blog where you can see more of his cartoons, read all about his peculiar business philosophy or order business cards with his cartoons on the back. I found him through his How to Be Creative manifesto, which I highly recommend. If you like PDF files (I don’t), a slightly different version is available for download at Change This.

©2006 Dixie Darr. All rights reserved

Heaven, I’m in Heaven

Don't let worry kill you -- let the church help.

Church bulletin blooper

Check out an irreverent look at religion in the online sitcom, God, Inc. Described as The Office in heaven, it portrays heaven as a corporation complete with departments like customer relations, where prayers are filed; population control, the department that gleefully plans disasters; and miracles. “Is that like seeing Jesus on a tortilla?” asks a new intern in episode two. “That’s Publicity,” she learns.

Paradise as a cube farm? Sounds like hell to me.

©2006 Dixie Darr. All rights reserved

Tell Me a Story

Tell me a fact and I’ll learn. Tell me a truth and I’ll believe. But tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever. Italian Proverb

The way we communicate with and learn from one another is by telling stories. When we get together with friends, we swap stories. Daniel H. Pink points out in A Whole New Mind that the way we get trained on the job is through stories. The veteran will tell the newbie, “Once I did that and got in a lot of trouble. Mr. Hanks had to call the fire department…” and so on.

One way to improve your communications skills is to learn how to tell stories better. Lucky for you, there are tons of information available to help you do just that. Here are a few of my favorites:

Maybe the best book ever written on crafting stories is Story by Robert McKee, which is actually about screenwriting. His analysis of the minute details that go into putting together a good solid story will also work for writers, speakers, and teachers.

WikiHow, a website filled with free short tutorials on a mind numbing number of topics, offers How to Write a Short Story. Its sister site, eHow, offers advice on How to Generate Short Story Ideas.

Professional storyteller Chris King publishes a free enewsletter and articles about storytelling. If you get interested enough to immerse yourself, check out the Society of the Muse of the Southwest, which offers a storytelling festival in Taos, New Mexico, every fall.

Spend one day writing down all the stories you hear throughout the day and you agree with poet Muriel Rukeyser, who said, “The universe is made up of stories, not atoms.”

©2006 Dixie Darr. All rights reserved

Telling Stories

“There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.”

Ursula K. LeGuin

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the art of telling stories. At the urging of my writers’ group, I started writing short stories. It isn’t as easy as it looks. Because I couldn’t seem to think up story ideas from my own imagination, I found myself listening more carefully to the stories other people told me about their lives. These became fodder for my attempts at writing fiction.

On Palm Sunday I participated in a performance of the Gospel of Mark at my church. We broke the book into 1-3 minute chunks and more than a dozen of us took turns telling the story of Jesus’ ministry in the oral tradition, much as it must have been told and preserved in the first decades after his crucifixion before it was written down.

In the summer, I took a class in storytelling offered for United Methodist lay speakers. The book we used, Dancing with Words by Ray Buckley, focused on the legacy of storytelling in the Lakota tradition. “Storytelling affirms for us the memory of our people,” he writes. “We are people of the story, and we seek to identify and tell our stories in nearly everything we do.”

In his book, A Whole New Mind, Daniel H. Pink lists telling stories as one of the six competencies we need in the conceptual age, because computers can’t do it for us. This book was so full of good ideas that I had to buy my own copy after I returned the library book.

When I started teaching a course in cultural diversity, I had my students share their culture by telling stories to one another, a very popular activity. Whenever we get together in groups, the way we communicate is by telling stories. Start paying attention to the stories you hear and those you tell. What do they tell about you?

More on stories tomorrow.

©2006 Dixie Darr. All rights reserved

A New Year, A New Direction

“Learning a little every day soon puts you far behind whoever’s learning a lot every day.” Ashleigh Brilliant

Acute observer that you are, you probably noticed that I changed the title of my blog from The Art of Self-Employment to The Constant Learner. After much gnashing of teeth and mental anguish, I decided that this name better represents me and what I want to write about.

Even in the first 40-odd postings, I had a hard time sticking with the topic of self-employment. That’s because I am what Barbara Sher calls a scanner—a person who has too many interests to focus on just one thing. Sher’s book, Refuse to Choose and Margaret Lobenstine’s The Renaissance Soul caused me to reconsider and ultimately abandon my quest to find my One True Mission in Life. Instead I embrace the idea that my mission is to learn about a wide variety of topics. The fact that I had six majors* in college before I finally earned my bachelors degree should have been a clue.

So the truth is that I get bored easily and, as passionate as I am about self-employment, that isn’t the only thing I want to write about. Other areas include:

• Writing
• Presentations
• Creativity
• Critical Thinking
• Teaching adults
• Adult College Students
• Non-retirement
• Reading
• Decorating
• Bookbinding
• Spirituality
• Walking
• Weightlifting

to name a few.

I believe that we were all born to learn. Learning is what brings me joy. My favorite activities all have a learning component to them, so in this blog I will suggest many resources for learning because being a resource person is what I do best. But I believe that the whole world is a learning resource and I’m giving myself permission to explore whatever topics strike my fancy and I invite you along for the ride.

Enjoy!

*art, philosophy, sign language, psychology, anthropology and sociology

©2006 Dixie Darr. All rights reserved