When Days Seem Swift, And Work Seems Slow, And Sleep Is To Be Feared

"Insomnia" - Alex Grey - AlexGrey.com

Exploring the capabilities of Google Hangouts is a perfectly fine thing to do, but 5:30 am after a sleepless night is not the time to do it!

Nor is this the time to post an item on my blog, nor do any of the other things that I want to do right now rather than sleep!

Fear, fear, fear! 

Must work more....must do more...must create value....must get better...must make money...must work more...must do more...must explore more....must find the key, the trigger, the leverage point....must change...must transform...must work more...must do....a little more...must do....one...more...thing....just this...must do this...then a little sleep....as little as possible....because there's so much to do...always...so many promises...so much to say...so many stories to tell...thoughts to share...ideas to manifest....so much to do, always...in all ways....at all times....all the time...

God, I want eternity. I want it now. I want to have forever to work - to dream, then plan, then build and make and do...

Forgive me, God, for I hate time. I hate the finitude of it, the always-running-out of it, the relentless, unceasing disappearance of it.

And yet You placed me in this ....this box, this set of contraints....

Worse, You placed Yourself within it.

What were You thinking?

To demonstrate what eternity expressed in time looks like?

Master, the tempest is raging. How can You sleep?

Because Father neither slumbers nor sleeps.

And now, neither do You. Unresting, unhasting.

And because You do not sleep, I can. It's okay to. It's okay to do only a day's work within any day.

But I feel like it takes me two days to do a day's work.

And there's the rub. It never feels like enough. Always, it's "I should have accomplished more today."

According to whose measure? Who places that burden on me?

The calling is not to wear a cape, nor to have an "S" emblazoned on my chest.

The calling is not to do this or that number of tasks.

It is to do what I can within a day. And to get better at doing what I can within a day.

And on some days that may mean doing more than I did on a previous days

But on some days it may mean doing less.

Because....

Rest is allowed.

Rest is more than allowed.

Rest is where it all begins.

Act from rest.

And from the confidence that all will be well.

Memo to myself, 20130730

Producing a dramatic result often requires diligently pursuing a boring process.

Memo to myself, 20130530

Success requires the persistent pursuit of a consistent intention. Circumstances change. When they do, the intention must remain consistent - and the pursuit of it, persistent.

Persist. Persist.

Persisting in a consistent intention in changing circumstances will require changing behaviors - i.e., adapting.

DO THIS: Create a list of changes you need to make in order to act more effectively in your life environment. Develop the will to adapt, and let the intention to adapt as necessary undergird your other intentions: I will change what I must within myself to bring these intentions to pass.

More simply: I will change myself as needed to make these things happen.

The better you get at adapting while maintaining consistent intentions, the more inevitable your success.

Also: the better you get at adapting while maintaining consistent intentions, the more likely it is that when success (inevitably) comes, someone will accuse you of manipulating circumstances - someone who has no idea how often, to what degree, or at what cost you have adapted to circumstances.

Let them. There's no preventing a loser from saying that a winner has cheated. 

"My name is Elwin, and I'm an...

...entrepreneurial junkie."

I feel like saying that after the exercise I've just completed.

I went to the Pennsylvania Department of State's website, and I looked up all the businesses that I have created.

I had forgotten a few.

Since May 28, 1987, I have created four sole proprietorships, three limited partnerships, two for-profit corporations, two limited liability companies, and one non-profit corporation. That's a dozen entities, or nearly one every two years.

Why? Not just because I keep having business ideas so fantastic that they demand their own entities for execution. No, I think it's more a matter of loving the sense of possibility that comes with each fresh start. That, and the fact that fresh starts are so dang easy.

I love this about America: that anybody with a couple of hundred bucks can create a legal entity for doing business out of thin air, in 30 minutes.

Learning to run a company? An entirely different matter.

I remember reading that successful entrepreneurs start an average of x number of businesses that fail before they succeed. I don't remember what x was, but I think that on that score, I'm well-qualified.

Now to pursue the question, "What can I learn from my mistakes?"