The Bumper Book Of Stupid Metaphors

When I write blog posts, songs or other things I want to show off to the world, I tend to want to publish them immediately. But is this really the best way to work? I’m not so sure any more.

When you’re in the moment of creation you can feel incredibly passionate about what you’re doing, to the extent that sometimes it can blind you to the imperfections. Many times I’ve uploaded a song and come back to it later with better ideas, or noticed things that I wished I had changed before letting it lose in the world.

Coming back and looking at something with a different frame of mind can be almost as valuable as having a completely different person help you out.

I’ve made a decision, I think. I’ve got a little project brewing. It’s a bit different from the other projects I’ve done so it’s pretty scary, but it’s also only small.

Stop Waiting

With anything scary and with the possibility of failure comes resistance, and wanting to take the “best” or the “most right” or the “perfect” path. And while it’s good to weigh up the advantages of different choices, if there’s no immediate winner it’s probably just best to cut loose and go for it. The only other option is waiting around, um-ing and ah-ing.

From You

This post is me trying to set things in stone. I’m looking to be held slightly accountable (by you guys). I’m also looking for encouragement and support, as well as stories from you guys – are you starting anything scary and new right now, or have you done recently?

Why do so many bloggers live in Portland? Loads of them do, seriously. It must be blogger paradise. I bet they all sit around and have LAN parties and motivational workshops all the time there. Do you think it’s Portland that creates these people or does it attract them like magnets or flies?

What the Pros are Doing

Jonathan Mead has been gabbing on lately about how your environment is conducive to being a success above everything else. He’s been saying it in the context of a new product he’s launching, but I bet it’s just an ebook that says “move to Portland” on every page.

However

The Power Is In Your Hands

Soon I’m going to be releasing a free ebook on how to fuck Portland. If you want to be one of only 293 people* in with an exclusive first view of it, make sure to follow me on Twitter! I’m @neonpaul

Comments? Opinions? Hate Mail? Spam?

Oh wow oh wow, look at all this stuff there is that needs to be done!

And look at all of these people, they’re so excited – they think your Big Thing is going to be AMAZING.

Oh but it’s just a Baby Thing really – you’re going to have to do so much more to live up to their expectations!

But don’t.

If you try to make a Big Bad Beast of a Thing and you run out of energy it will be a half-finished, unrefined giant. Everyone will have heard about it but nobody will be that impressed really. And it may step on you. Wouldn’t that be terrible.

You came here to make a Cool Little Thing, so make a Cool Little Thing. If it works people will love it. And from tiny acorns the world is your oyster.

It’s September, and it’s apple season.

There are loads of apple trees all over Southampton, I headed to one on the East Common, along with a few transition members and Alan Gibson, the Urbane Forager.

Man, there were so many apples! And it was only one tree! I must have enough apples to last me the whole year here. If you like free apples and/or climbing trees I would highly recommend fruit foraging adventures!

I thought I’d write a little post on SU Green Action‘s food co-op and how it all runs.

Infinity pulling up outside my house

What is it?

Okay so our food co-op is just a bulk buy scheme, we currently order our food wholesale from Infinity Foods in Brighton and mostly do dried, tinned and jarred food.  Our members all pay a small deposit to be part of the scheme which they get back when they depart.

Shopping Lists

Generally at the moment, the buying process is kicked off by somebody going “hey I’m hungry can we place an order”.

I’ll send an email out with a link to our current stock and members reply by the next Monday with what items they’d like to buy.

Monday rolls around and I start going through the members’ requests. First of all I need to load up Infinity’s catalogue and our database software so I can add the details of new items that haven’t been requested before, and update prices on existing items. Once I’ve done that, I start entering into the database which members want which items,  and how many.

Putting It All Together

After that’s all done the software will generate an order report showing how much of each item we need, how many are already in stock, and how many more we need to order. Most items need to be bought in bulk, so it shows how many will be left over too – if there are too many leftovers on some of the items I need to find out who requested those items and send them an email asking them to modify their order slightly so that we can minimize leftovers (and minimize the money we need to invest in stock – because the co-op doesn’t have a lot of money to invest!)

Receiving The Food

From there onwards it’s easy. Call the friendly man at Infinity and tell him what we’d like to order. Wait for delivery day.

Volunteer Natalie sorting the food into piles.

When the delivery comes we need to make sure a volunteer or two is around to help unload the van and to help sort all of the items into piles ready to be collected by the members. This is the point we pay for the order too!

Aftermath

The members then come over the next few days to take their items and pay for them if they hadn’t already. Everyone eats well for the next few months and then we do it all over again!

"We're filthy rich! Hehehahahah!"

Hey yo. With all this productivity knowledge from reading blogs and having an awesome slick GTD system in place, why am I not as successful as Tim Ferris or Ryan North already?

Doing Too Much

This goes back to the limes thing. I’m attracted to too many things. Aside from wanting to run a food co-op, I’m also trying to start up a magazine, learn to play guitar, wanting to write stories and poetry, learning to draw, learning to rap, learning about feminism, economics, extreme sports and all sorts of other things…

Not only is it causing a lot of resistance when choosing what I’m doing moment-to-moment (if I do Important Project A today then I won’t have time for Important Project B!) but it means the mental effort I do put into anything I work on is spread too thinly, and the result is sloppy and completely unremarkable.

One Track Mind

I think the trick isn’t to just do one thing at a time, but it’s to do one new thing at a time. Something Leo Babauta’s always harping on about but I never internalised properly. Once you get into the habit of doing something and you don’t have to engage your creative mind every time you do it then you’ve got mental space for something new.

Immersing Yourself

So it can be hard to stay focused on just one thing, especially when you get stuck and there are all sorts of other shiny and far more interesting things floating around.

The way out of this is to externalise your motivation – make it like a current that’s hard to resist, one that drags you along. Find people who are doing similar things, make it into a talking point. Join forums, start meetups, anything you can do to create some feeling of wanting to be working on That Thing.

Communities can be so useful in situations like this. Some of the reasons why include:

• When the discussion is flowing between two or more people, things tend not to go as stale as when it’s just you and your mind.
• If you get into a tight spot, you’ve always got support and a fresh pair of eyes who can help you out.
• Other people can show you the holes in your knowledge that you didn’t even know were there.

Over To You

What projects are you working on at the moment, and what does the community surrounding it look like (if there is one)? Let me know in the comments.

So I have all these limes to hold, right? It’s tough because there are more limes than I can hold in my arms at once.

Seriously, what do you do when you have so many limes?

1. Juggle Them

You learn to juggle. Put the limes aside for a bit and pick up a book on how to juggle limes. I was/am reading David Allen’s Getting Things Done, which is all about creating a system that you can use to juggle all your limes.

2. Throw Some Away

While I’m learning to juggle, maybe it’s best to stick a few of these limes in the compost (or in the fridge and I can get them out later).  Still, there are a couple of fairly big limes that I really want to hold that I just can’t bear to throw away.

3. Give Them To Someone Else

Hey, two people juggling 3 limes each has got to be easier than one person trying to juggle six limes, right?

4. Make Limeonade

If you cut the limes up so small that they actually become liquid you can easily down a glass of that stuff all in one go.

The thing about most of these solutions is that sometimes you just have to step back from your limes and think about it a little bit.

Last weekend I went to Southampton’s Ropewalk Community Garden to pick some medlars. The facebook event extolled their virtues as ingredients for wine, cakes and jam. When I heard of the opportunity one thing immediately sprang to mind:

What the hell’s a medlar?

My medlars in my drawers.

Well it’s a fruit, fairly common on trees in England but not so much in shops. And there’s a good reason for that – before you can eat it you have to let it rot.

Now that doesn’t sound too appealing, and if I was somebody else I probably would have passed up the opportunity. But this sounded like a little bit of an adventure, and besides free fruit is not something at which to turn up one’s nose!

To blet the fruit you have to keep them in a cool dry place, and not piled up on top of each other. I chose my bedside draws, but right now everywhere in my house is pretty much the same temperature. Leave them there for a few weeks, checking them every 2-3 days until they’re soft and brown-red-purple.

Then you can eat them, or cook with them, or throw them at people. I’ll be doing at least two of those things.

A ripe medlar such as this one is difficult to eat.