Month: February 2023

My liminal space is someone else’s home.

I know I might be using “liminal” in the wrong sense. I’m using it as “the space between permanence.”

And I’m on the road. In a hotel, wandering the streets, doing things I’m supposed to do. And doing things I feel like doing.

Garmentoville Manhattan.

I love this life. I float above everything, lightly belonging, yet not belonging. Everything is familiar yet strange. The convenience store. The restaurants. I don’t know them. Are they good? Should I try it? non of these places will matter to me a week from now.

Yet this is where people live and work. Lifetimes happen here. These places matter deeply. The police station halfway down the block. To me, it’s an interesting side-note. To those who live here, vital.

Like almost every trip I have made in my adult life, I have thought, “Oh, I could live here.” (Except Riyadh. I have no desire to live there.)

Can I make this happen? New York — especially a neighborhood like this — would be interesting for a short-long stay. Let’s say six months. But the next city on this trip . . . that would be the bee’s knees. As I would say if this were 1923 instead of 2023.

That requires re-engineering two lives and two businesses. Not impossible. Maybe do it the reverse of how it’s done now. Live here with occasional week-long trips back to home-home. Rather than be at home-home with week-long trips to hither and yon.

Body: Seat 2C, above the planet.

Ears: Eric Hilton in the headphones.

Eyes: Twitter. (@saschachapin is right to liken it to smoking so you can hang out with the smokers).

Nothing feels real, except the urge to pee.

Awake every hour on the hour until 2 am. Then awake. At least I didn’t miss my 3 am alarm.

Get up. Coffee alone in the quiet, dark house. Write five minutes, then I will shower and . . . off we go.

The Liminal Life. That’s what I have to look forward to.

Trivial tasks (mostly “Be present at a specific location at a specific time”) become momentous. Routine events (“What shall I have for lunch?” or “How do I get to where I want to go?”) become novel explorations of the barely recognizable but sometimes wildly different.

Writing is done. Coffee is done. It is 3 am. Let’s go.

Should not be asked at night when tired, discouraged, etc.

Go to sleep. Tomorrow is a big day of travel.

Asked.

Answered: “Change.“

Start where I am with what I have at hand.

• At least don’t make the problem worse. New customers for the business are vetted and accepted correctly.

The two that are eager to hire but unwilling to spend? You know what to do.

After that? Demand clarity from yourself and others. Make it uncomfortable to stray from the path and hard to stay on the path—the kind of hard, for example, from pushing yourself on a run because you demand it of yourself. “I wonder what I can do? No. I will run hard until the finish line and not allow myself to walk it out.”

Write like a son of a bitch. And publish. Publish. Publish.

My calendar is awash with Zoom calls today.

Individually, each is “needed.” (Reaaaly?)

Collectively, these Zoom calls create a day of treading water, struggling against the surging current.

Fortunately, today is the last day like this for a while. Deliberately created change.

Individual calls can be canceled or change. The weekly team meetings. What are we doing here, and why? Individual 1:1s. What am I doing there, and why?

Customers. Of course. (But why me on the call and not someone else?) Prospects? Of course. (Remember how it was startling to me to hear that Dan did sales calls at this stage of his business? Why did he do that? Should I be doing most of the sales?)

Maybe if you want to talk to me, you will find me at a table at my regular cafe. Because the life I want to live is there. Coffee. People passing by. A friend to talk to. A light snack. It’s a sunny day and it’s enough.

When the treadmill aspects of work invade your dreams, night after night, you might have a problem.

Employees. Would I, on my last day on earth, want to be having one-on-ones with them, cajoling them to get done the tasks that they must get done? Would I want to be constantly feeding them tasks so they don’t just down-tools and do nothing? No. Self-evident.

Would I, on my last day on earth, want to work on the type of projects I worked on yesterday? Sure. Hyper-deep look at a blocker to a client’s forward motion — and that work yielded concrete direction for us to follow.

Would I, on my last day on earth, write what I’m writing in my giant self-assigned marketing project? Yes. But I did zero of that yesterday.

It’s time to change up work I am putting into The Business.

I have to save it here because otherwise it’s gone.

When most people look at their risk, they basically look at it from the inside out.

They look at it like a passenger on the Titanic.

They’re only worried about falling overboard.

Seldom do people look at it from the outside in.

The ship going down.

The higher order risk.

https://twitter.com/paulportesi/status/1625041291464826881?s=46&t=vaH1mvM_0eTL9UkcABDhow

To which the provocative reply is:

Invert. Imagined not viewing as the passenger. You’re the captain.

https://twitter.com/grantssc/status/1625042051963428865?s=46&t=vaH1mvM_0eTL9UkcABDhow

I often think of the systemic risk but am unable to see what I, a passenger on the S.S. Federal Reserve (for instance) can do to mitigate the systemic risk.

But I always saw myself as a passenger, therefore largely helpless. The best strategy I could imagine is to stand near the lifeboats and have a backpack of emergency supplies. Metaphorically speaking.

Better thinking is required. The reply changed my frame.

. . . somehow landed a little different today. Something must change, and it is changing, and I am changing, and everything around me is changing.

Directionally productive.

Productive implies an aim. True, and in this case the aim reveals itself as I walk toward it.

What needs to change? It’s not (necessarily) a baby/bathwater solution that’s called for.

Dreams last night were a loop of a work topic, never moving beyond the start of the loop. Ugh.

I’m in a different place this weekend. It’s the weekend. I’m doing non-work things here. Yet the brain is stuck in a loop. Even in dreams.

This means slow, steady change in other aspects of my life—not just work. Here is a trivial one. I can run up the miles on my car before returning it on the lease. Why not a big road trip? I’m only half facetious. Where could I go for a few weeks for a break?

The part I don’t particularly relish about this idea is the butt-in-driver’s seat time it takes to drive 2,000 miles. No road trip. Because really I don’t want to travel to (random place). I want to *be in* (random place). Better to cash in a few magic airline points to go somewhere and just be.

What this points to, though, is the need to make a more portable life for myself.