As I close out my goal-setting for the coming 12 or so months*, I thought I’d post a few of the more universally-relevant (i.e., non-private) ones to the blog for the hell of it.

The first one is the easiest (and thus far, most enjoyable): READ 52 BOOKS.

As I noted in an earlier post about goal-setting in general, I lifted the idea (with permission! and encouragement, even!) from Julien Smith, co-author (with Chris Brogan) of the wonderfully-written Trust Agents, the book I most often recommend to people looking to wrap their brains around the whole social media thing. Julien has written several times about his attempts to read more in general, and to read a book a week, specifically. In 2009, he figured out a key secret—read 40pp per day—and broke through to complete his goal for the first time.

Five weeks and change into 2010, I’m pleased to report that it’s working out quite well. I’m 12 books into the goal, with another well underway. I wanted to front-load as much as I could, as I had the time now—you know, bank a few books—but really, the “52″ is just a metric: my goal is to READ MORE BOOKS and READ BOOKS MORE OFTEN. So really, I’m hoping to read many, many more books than those 52; I’m just honoring my theme for 2010 (“MORE ROOM”) by doing a little front-loading. It’s not like I’m gonna stop once I hit that 52nd book.

I went back and forth on whether or not I should share my list of books read. Not that there are any especially compromising choices: mostly, it was about maintaining a level of privacy for myself and a measure of respect for authors in general. As you’ll see from the running list I decided to make public, there are several books I’ve chosen not to review, and I don’t want anyone getting the wrong idea about this. My decision to review is based on a whole slew of factors that have nothing to do with merit, among them available time, alignment with my personal goals for this site and my “brand” (such as it is), and perceived value to the people who read here regularly.

For the same reason, I’ve decided not to keep a running list of books I’m currently reading or that are under consideration. I’d love to read everything that catches my eye, and to finish everything I pick up, but one is impossible and the other, I’ve finally decided, is folly. Every book is not for me just like every person or food or sport is for me. (Actually, almost no sports are for me, but that’s another story for another day.) And even though we’re all grownups, I know I’d probably be hurt if—pardon me, when I write my first book and learn of that first friend or acquaintance or utter stranger didn’t finish it. Ouch. But there it is. So this is my sad little fix for it.

Finally, some books require more integration and/or implementation before I can speak to their utility in a way that’s illuminating.** For example, I could review Nonviolent Communication favorably right now in terms of the value and insight I got from a first reading of it, but that first reading made it abundantly clear that the real value of a book like that is the reward from implementing the system outlined within, and I can hardly do that until I’ve done that. It’s also why I’m very comfortable reviewing really old (but useful!) books like Simple Abundance, Move Your Stuff, Change Your Life or The Little Book of Moods. (Look for other utterly non-newsworthy reviews on The Artist’s Way and Your Best Year Yet in this space!)

That said, I do welcome any suggestions based on favorites I’ve already enjoyed. If you look at the list of books I’ve reviewed, period, you should get a pretty good idea: there’s not a one under 3-stars, and 95% are 4-star and up. So feel free to be my human algorithm!

Just don’t berate me if I don’t choose—or choose to finish—your suggestion…

xxx
c

*I’d intended a January 1 start date, like most of the rest of the goal-setting world. This got pushed to February 1, then Groundhog Day (the 2nd), and now we’re looking at February 15th as a final-final start date. But a few goals are underway, and the “Read 52 Books” launched on January 1st, because I was hot-to-trot for it.

**This is not to say that timely reviews of all kinds of “how-to” books can’t be immensely valuable, just that I’m not the person to write them. I’m very grateful for those early adopters with mad skills in a particular area and writing skills to match who get in there and do the important work of early reviewing.

Image by Photos8 via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

After numerous setbacks—some regular-usuals that I now know to plan for (hello, holidays!), some spontaneous combustibles that required urgent but unscheduled attention—I wrapped up my goal planning for 2010.

Yes, five weeks or roughly 10% of the way into the year I’m supposed to be living, I’m done planning for it.*

It is an easy, easy slide into self-loathing, just taking in that last sentence. It feels like a sentence, when I start to take it in fully: this is your life, loser, and no one to blame but yourself for it. Little Miss Overachiever. Little Miss Fancypants, with your ridiculous notions of time and how many things you can fill it with—or, if you want to dip into that bucket o’ truth you claim such fondness for, how much shit you can cram into it.

So, you see how I talk to myself when you’re not around?** Not nice. Not even helpful. But this is the voice that runs through my head most of the time, or one of them, and it is this voice—or rather, what this voice is doing to me—that I’m choosing to address this year.

Because two very interesting and highly unusual things happened this year during the penultimate phase of goal-planning. They’re embarrassing enough that I’d ordinarily leave them out, but illuminating enough—at least, I hope they are—that they’re staying in.

For those of you unfamiliar with the values-centered goal-planning system outlined in Jinny Ditzler’s Your Best Year Yet, it starts with an inventory and ends with a map, with a whole lot of excavation, grading and other survey-ish/cartographic folderol in between. The inventory is a look back at the previous year’s happenings, divided into accomplishments and disappointments, the better to get a handle on what’s working (so you can feel good about yourself!) and what’s not—so you can beat yourself with a cudgel crafted from your own sodden, misshapen failures. Kidding! Only—well, there’s a reason Ditzler has you list your accomplishments first. It can be mighty dispiriting to look at that list of disappointments. She is fairly adamant that accomplishments be viewed with pride and the disappointments taken as learning, but right there, that’s suspect to self-loathers: wherefore such inequities of discernment? That’s just bad science, lady!

Interestingly enough, in the five years I’ve been doing Best Year Yet, I’ve never once had a problem coming up with staggeringly long lists of accomplishments that even the meanest stranger would affirm as such, while my list of disappointments has been proportionately far smaller. Of course, they’re big honkers, those disappointments—stuff like “only completed 4 out of 10 goals from last year”; worse, they tend to recur. This may not be a big deal when you’re 20 or even 30, but when you’re staring 50 in the droopy, gray-haired sac, you start to worry. Time is, as they say, at a premium. How much more of it can you count on? How much more can you waste on an outright-destructive or even “benign” insalubrious habit? Is there even such a thing after 45? (I’m really asking: is there?)

My own goal-planning process ground to a depressing halt in December not only because the year had worn me down and the holidays weren’t going to let up, but because when I finished up my list of disappointments, I noted that 11 of them—that’s 11 out of 18—were recurring. And big ones, too, like “didn’t write book…again,” where “again” meant “for the third year in a row.” After completing those two lists, I went on to answer the next couple of questions, but really, I knew I was fucked. The only way around this problem was through it, and that was going to require a lot more time than the week I had set aside. And resources, too, in the form of outside help.

Which brings us to the penultimate session I mentioned about 40 minutes ago in this piece.

Up until this year, I’ve mostly done my BYY plan alone. I ran last year’s by my business coach, but only the final plan, and only the business-related aspects of it***. While it makes me cringe with shame now, I realize that I was doing a lot of obfuscating and tap dancing, more plainly called “hiding” when one is not given to obfuscating and tap dancing. If I was going to change my pattern, someone else was going to have to be given root access to the plan, to help keep me honest about what was going on. One of my friends from Success Team (my weekly mastermind-like group) agreed that it might be helpful from an unsticking perspective to collaborate, so we scheduled a work session for this past weekend.

I was prepared for almost anything. A lot of stuff bubbles up during the BYY excavation and mapping process, and for me, that inevitably brings a lot of crying and pain, especially around the Dreaded Chapter Four, where you look at your limiting paradigms. (Trust me, unless you’re Jesus, you’ve got at least one.)

What I was not prepared for was bursting into tears when I looked at my list of accomplishments, which is just what I did when it was my time to go over them. I’d thought, “Oh, I’ll just read the topline from this embarrassingly long list to save us time.” Instead, something told me to read it in its entirety—all 47 items—and when I the last one, I collapsed in a heap of sobs: all of this stuff I’d accomplished, and still I felt like shit? What would it take? What would ever be enough? If accomplishing all of these 47 remarkable things—and my friend assured me that individually, many were remarkable, but taken together, they were REMARKABLE—if doing all that did not fill the black hole inside me and make me feel loved or safe or worthwhile, what would?

The answer—that nothing would, that no external thing would ever be enough—stared back at me, plain as you like. Hence, sobbing. A lot of it. Fortunately, I have loving and patient friends. Who somehow, when I am feeling like it’s anything but possible, can assure me in a way that I actually can hear and almost believe, that I am enough: that I might be lovable just because of who I am, and not because of any list of things I do.

It seems so simple, but trust me—it can take a long time to “get”, even if you know it. Even if you’ve paid your shrink thousands of dollars and wept your way through boxes of her Kleenex to learn the same thing. Learning is not necessarily “getting”; if you’re lucky, I think, you “get” it with enough time before you die to know some kind of peace. I felt one huge shift like this in the past 10 years—when I had my hospital bed epiphany. I had a second one this past weekend, looking at that long list and bursting into tears. I have a little more peace, but I’d also like to get a little more of this music out of me before I die, you know?

The other Very Interesting and Unusual Thing that happened revolved around money and happiness. It also involved a goodly amount of sobbing, and is involved (and possibly significant) enough to cover in depth another day.

For now, know this: next year when I sit down to do my Best Year Yet plan, I expect the list of accomplishments will be far shorter, while the list of disappointments will likely be about the same length as it’s been in previous years, only with a much, much higher percentage of new things I’m disappointed about.

And that, my friends, is an accomplishment in and of itself…

xxx
c

*Hopefully. Because I finished the wrapping-up yesterday, late in the day, and am feeling rickety about it. Plus, you know, shit happens—Q.E.D.

**Obviously, you’re very much around, as you’re reading this. What I mean, which you probably already gathered, is this is the dim chatter that forms one layer of my soundtrack. This is the stuff that goes on that I generally don’t write, or if I do, that I erase before publishing.

***Your Best Year Yet is a whole-life planning system, based on the idea that achieving balance is largely responsible for achieving happiness, and possibly for achieving goals themselves, at least in the “life well-lived” sense. Also, it’s worth noting here that even my coach said my plan was probably overly ambitious. I made changes to it based on her feedback and those changes did work: the four out of ten goals were largely accomplished because of those tweaks.

Yo! Disclosure! Links to the books in the post above are Amazon affiliate links. This means if you click on them and buy something, I receive an affiliate commission. Which I hope you do: it helps keep me in books to review. More on this disclosure stuff at publisher Michael Hyatt’s excellent blog, from whence I lifted (and smooshed around a little) this boilerplate text.

Image by jurvetson via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license. For maximum enjoyment, view in original, huge size.

TOPICS: change, december in january, goals, love.

Once upon a time, I was a medium-big traveler.

I never did it as much as my friends Shane or Chris, and certainly not as much as my father (o, he of the fabled American AAirpass!), but for a goodly stretch of my life—say, 22 – 32, I got around, and when I got there, I parked it in hotels.

I am a big fan of hotel-staying over couch-surfing, even when the couch is a lovely guest room with private bath or a beautiful detached guest house all to oneself on Mt. Tamalpais. (Yes, really. Another lifetime, and of course, friends of my father’s.) Unless my generous hosts are nowhere near the premises, I have problems with staying in someone else’s space.* Real, serious, physical problems.** Travel is hard enough on non-hardy introverts; throw a lot of activities into the mix—even activities you really, really enjoy, like hanging out with beloved friends—and you have a recipe for fried circuits and an exhausted nervous system, especially when you’re talking Virgos with Cancer rising.

What I am not a big fan of is overpaying for comfort. I’m down with comfort, but when it edges into what I call luxury, I get uncomfortable. I like parking my own car, hauling my own luggage, brewing my own espresso. If I had my way, I’d either rent houses or have my own everywhere I went (which is a lot of houses—probably even Oprah wouldn’t want to do that.) And yeah, I know that makes me just as much of a Wussy McWusserton, first-world person of privilege as any fatcat who stays at the Four Seasons on expense account. I guess my style is more “do whatever you can to fly under the radar while still protecting your soft, chewy center.” If there’s a tag like that.

So what I do now when I travel, especially right now, when I’m feeling a little bit tender and I need to travel, is find a great place with the right kind of “luxury” that doesn’t break the bank. This means such critical stuff as clean, safe, sleepy-bye bedding and (premium) cable—basically, somewhere that is at least as nice as my humble little rent-stabilized one-bedroom in an undisclosed area of Los Angeles. (Which, now that I think of it, is exactly what I’ve always wanted from a home-away-from-home, which is why some of those places seemed Saudi-prince-level-luxurious back when I lived with drafts and vermin in my Brooklyn shithole.)

Enter the Hotel Vertigo in just-a-little-too-beautiful-for-me San Francisco.

Named after the legendary Hitchcock classic, the Vertigo is one of a fambly of charming San Francisco hotels, each of which seem to be hipster-rehabbed properties which might have fallen on hard times. It’s beautifully decorated—loads of hipster color combo orange-’n'-brown, furry scatter pillows, and Vertigo art, with wonderful attention to Colleen-crucial details: kickass bed/bedding, non-chintzy bathroom and bath accessories, adequate setup for on-the-road computing. The wise folk who run it are exceptionally blogger-savvy: like the Roger Smith in New York (a place you can bet your ass I’ll check out next chance I get, and similarly tout if it’s great), they go out of their way to accommodate nerds, and as a nerd, I say, It’s about fucking time this got me something!***

But they’re nice to everyone, or at least, they were as far as I could see. Can I tell you what a relief it is to find service that is great without being obsequious or otherwise creepy? Because it is. Like my recent world-changing experience with Virgin America, I now believe that there is some way to staff up with normal, nice, smart human beings, and then empower and treat said staff well enough that they continue to act like nice, normal, smart human beings whose job happens to be helping you deal with life on the road.

Because then, not only do your customers get their reservations sorted out by an actual friendly human when they stupidly screw up their flight plans; not only do they  get their airport transfers handled with something bordering on elegance; you get wild, crazy evangelists to go forth and do all your promoting for you for FREE. ZOMFG, the world may end, it’s such a radical business plan!

In my perfect world, there would be a wonderful little hotel like the Vertigo in San Francisco, or the Camas Hotel in picturesque Camas, WA, or the Jupiter in Portland, OR (only maybe a little quieter, for us fogeys), in every town I ever stepped foot in as a traveler: affordable, enjoyable, accommodating, non-icky.

Maybe there is. But I won’t know about them unless we all start telling each other. How about it, nerds? Give ‘em up in the comments?

xxx
c

*In case you’re curious, I actually have a few outrageously generous and well-to-do friends who offer up their cush cribs to me while they’re on the road, for which privilege I happily run out and buy them all manner of shit for their houses, from coffee machines to designer toilet brushes to wireless routers.

**There were times when The Chief Atheist or The Youngster and I stayed with his parents where I would not poop for a week. A WEEK. Thankfully, The BF was 100% fine with not staying on the family property; that he shared my convictions of “camping” meaning “staying at a motel without premium cable” was one of many reasons we lasted as long as we did.

***Seriously, they could not have been more delightful and accommodating at every turn

Image by karen.tkr via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

TOPICS: Referral Friday, Travel.

Ain’t no trick
to writing
nor magic
in doing it well.

Writing is you
and your chair
and your brain
and your heart
gathering together
for as many moments as you can string together
of work.

Writing is nouns
and verbs
and adjectives
and adverbs,
in that order,
ordered
and then reordered
over and over
and over
again.

Writing is taking
the stories you see
and the truths you hear
all around you
all the time
and letting them sift
through the filter
you have created for them.

Keep that filter clean
and in good working order:

Change it as necessary.
Air it out in between uses.
Protect it at all costs.

Now go
and catch stories
and write them down
or talk them through
or act them out.

Do not be fooled
into thinking
there is only one way to tell a story:

There is only
the best way
and only you,
trying again and again,
can tease it apart
and put it back
together
in a way
that makes sense
and sets hearts
to beating.

Okay: I lied.

Here is
the one trick
to writing
that will take you magically
from where you are now
to the heights
of where you can go:

Do it over and over
and over and over
every day
for as many
as you have left.

Go!

xxx
c

Image by Mike Baird via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

TOPICS: Poetry Thursday, writing.

A mostly monthly but forever occasional round-up of what I’ve been up to and what I plan to be. For full credits and details, see this entry.

Colleen of the future (places I’ll be)

• The February L.A. Biznik Mixer at Jerry’s Famous Deli in Marina del Rey (February 10, 5:30pm—no drop-ins!) My co-host, Heather Parlato, and I will be doing a little “how to start hosting your own Biznik event” thing in the 6 o’clock hour. EVENT FULL. Sign up for Biznik NOW to get advance notice of future events, including other LA-area ones.
• $100 Business Forum call My friends Chris Guillebeau and Pam Slim joined forces to create this smart smart smart class on how to launch a micro-business. (If you can practice with something small, you may be able to graduate to something big with the lessons learned, right?) SOLD OUT. I’m participating in a call about branding; if you’re a part of the class, line up your toughest questions NOW and squeeze every penny’s worth out of me!

Colleen of the Past (stuff I did you might not know about)

• Cornell Alumni Leadership Conference I labored mightily to change my now rather standard social media presentations on branding and marketing into one that would be useful to those interested in building community for a good cause. I’m delighted to say that all my fretting (not to mention my foregoing DC sightseeing in favor of co-working at my friend Jared Goralnick’s HQ) paid off—the programs (I did it twice) went really well, by all accounts: i.e., people had fun, got un-scared of using social media and learned something (even if, in some cases, it was simply a half-grudging, “Okay…I’ll give it one more go.”). One of the best things about this and my recent trip was flying there on Virgin America, speaking of which…
• Referral Friday, Video Edition Yes, I shot an onboard testimonial for my new-favorite airline, Virgin America, 35,000 feet over North America. It’s a departure (no pun intended) from my usual plugs, but well-deserved. And well-received, if the emails and texts I’ve received so far are indicative.
• December in January A few different sources—including my friend, Dave Seah, with whom I’ve been collaborating on a fascinating (to us, anyway) Google Wave experiment—gave me the idea to postpone New Year’s Goal-Setting to February. It was a grand success, if by “success” you mean “relief”; I posted my progress throughout the month, outlining in detail the steps I took towards a plan I could really get excited about. You can read them all here, in reverse chronological order for now.
• Seth Godin’s “media tour” for Linchpin I love pretty much everything about Seth Godin (not least of which how everything he touches so elegantly floats to the surface of Internet consciousness), so participating in his alternative media tour to launch his terrific and important new book, Linchpin, was a no-brainer. So is reading it, if you’re at all the kind of person who enjoys reading here. It’ll shake you up, but (mostly) in the good way.
• Re:WORK, the monthly BLANKSPACES newsletter Last year, my colleague Peleg approached me about collaborating on a relaunch of the newsletter for our friend (and my fellow Cornell alum!), Jerome Chang’s outstanding coworking space in the Mid-Wilshire area of LA, BLANKSPACES. I’m pleased to say that open rates increased immediately and have been rising since, as have click-throughs, thanks to our mutual efforts. If you’re local, you should sign up to get word of all the great upcoming events they host; if you’re not, you should get it anyway, for the articles. (Yes, really. I wrote January’s.)

Colleen of the Present (ongoing projects)

• communicatrix | focuses My monthly newsletter devoted to the all-important subject of increasing your unique fabulosity. One article per month (with actionable tips! and minimal bullsh*t!) about becoming a better communicator, plus the best few of the many cool things I stumble across in my travels. Plus a tiny drawing by moi. Free! (archives & sign-up)
• Act Smart! is my monthly column about marketing for actors for LA Casting, but I swear, you’ll find stuff in it that’s useful, too. Browse the archives, here.
• Internet flotsam And of course, I snark it up on Twitter, chit-chat on Facebook, post the odd video or quote to Tumblr, and bookmark the good stuff I find on my travels at StumbleUpon and delicious. If you like this sort of stuff, follow me in those places—I only post a fraction of what I find to Twitter and Facebook.

xxx
c

Photo of Arno J. McScruff housed on Flickr, where I also occasionally stick pixels.