Ah, the new year. I realize we’re almost fully a month into it, but I try to make that attitude of renewal and optimism, introspection and reflection, dreaming and reality-checking, etc., last for as long as possible. I find it so inspiring and invigorating to check in and try to optimize for the future. What if we approached the beginning of every month with the same celebration and thoughtfulness that we reserve for January 1? Don’t you think we would all be happier, fitter, more productive?
What are your resolutions for the New Year? I’d love to hear how other No Mappers are approaching 2010. A close friend told me recently that I’m too abstract in the way I think about my own projects—that I need to be more concrete if I want to really accomplish what I set out to do.
So I made a resolution to be less abstract.
Then, in the spirit of that resolution, I struck it from the record and made some very concrete goals for myself. I am feeling brave in this moment, so I will share them. Hopefully that makes them more real, and makes me more likely to succeed in carrying them out.
- Finish the BeBe documentary. Submit it to film festivals in the fall.
- Get my next project off the ground—a series of short films about gender roles and creative leadership that I will shoot in Sweden.
- Win my first grant.
- Win my first artists’ residency.
- Apply to graduate school (and find a way to go for free).
- Establish a better bookkeeping system for my projects.
- Establish a better system for keeping up with email.
The last two are pretty sexy, no? But the truth is, you need to have a stable foundation from which to try to accomplish your dreams. Speaking of stable foundations—I made this list on the first of the year, and I notice now that it says nothing about making more money, when maybe that ought to be a priority. I’ve been getting all my tax stuff together and the bottom line for 2009 is pretty darn horrifying. And yet for some reason I’m not panicky. I see everything that I’m doing right now as a real investment in my earning potential for the future. I am at a gear-shifting point in my life, and sacrifices simply need to be made.
But one can’t live on multivitamins and mac & cheese forever. I really hope a commercial production job books in soon. Or that I find a big bag of money.
Emily Branham is a filmmaker living in Brooklyn, New York.
Hi Emily,
Reading your post, it occurs to me you might love a blog I came across a while back:
http://www.fluentself.com
Actually, it’s much more than a blog, as you’ll see. Havi Brooks has a gift: helping people break through their own limiting fears … especially creative people. As she puts it: “The Fluent Self is a complete system of how to learn stuff about yourself so you can rewrite your patterns and do things differently…. My duck and I help bright, creative, kooky people destuckify their stuff so they can do the thing.”
Her site is packed with stuff both brilliant and hilarious, and the kooky spirit resonates. With me at least.
(Check out the blog roll in the site’s sidebar too. There’s a cool community of off-kilter entrepreneurs out there doing some amazing stuff in really interesting ways.)
Mike