The New Rules of Project Awesomeness

Here are the new roles I’ve pinned up beside my desk.

  1. No more bitch­ing and moan­ing online.   If you don’t have some­thing pos­i­tive to say, don’t say it at all.
  2. Pretend to be pos­i­tive until you are pos­i­tive.  I hear good things about “Fake it til you make it.” We’re gonna try that.  It is not my nat­ural ten­dency to see the pos­i­tive.  Change your nat­ural ten­dency. Hey, you learned to eat some veg­eta­bles, so this can’t be that hard.
  3. Nobody owes you any­thing, so don’t ever act like it.   You are not the cen­ter of the world.  You are not a unique snowflake.  No big deal.
  4. Try harder.  Fail.  Try even harder.  Failure is just a word for ‘learn­ing expe­ri­ence.’  It’s not some­thing you can “be.”
  5. Talent is just another word for skill.  It can be sharp­ened like any­thing else.
  6. You will not wake up one morn­ing and mag­i­cally be more awe­some.  You are good enough to do what­ever you want, but it isn’t going to come with­out tremen­dous work.
  7. You like work­ing.  So it all turns out okay in the end.
  8. You are not your job.  Jobs are clothes we wear, not who we are.
  9. Stay hum­ble if you do find suc­cess. Hubris is unat­trac­tive on fat guys.
  10. Laugh!  Life is about laugh­ter and joy, not sor­row and self-​​pity.  You have a sense of humor.  USE IT!

To those of you who I’ve frus­trated or upset with my atti­tudes lately–I will try harder. Thank you for stick­ing with me through my roller coaster of emo­tions.  I’m deter­mined to make it worth your while in the future.  I must be kinda awe­some for you to put up with it.  So I coin this attempt in self-​​improvement “Project Awesomeness.”

Project Awesomeness is now  in alpha release.   We’ll call it beta when I think I’ve installed half the rules/​features into who I am.   Then we’ll have a party. A big one.  With stream­ers and balloons.

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    11 Responses

    1. Charles Tan says:

      Go Project Awesomeness!

    2. Send me an invite, man; I promise not to hog the keg. :)

    3. The whole “fake it til you make it” thing has def­i­nitely done won­ders in my life, for what it’s worth. Truthfully, I shud­der to think where I’d be with­out it.

    4. Roy Huggins says:

      I will hog the keg. FYI.

    5. Jeff says:

      I went through the same thing after the dot-​​com crash. It took a lot of soul-​​searching and a lot of doing things I hated (like learn­ing how to mar­ket and sell myself) before I man­aged to pull out. Frankly, you’re learn­ing this stuff a lot faster than I did…

      Besides, your writ­ing and pho­tos have already achieved awe­some­ness. The rest can’t be far behind.

    6. Jeff VanderMeer says:

      Cool!

    7. C. S. Inman says:

      I don’t know how I missed this, but this is an EXCELLENT list of rules. I’m going to send my friends here when they’re down.

    8. Jeremiah Tolbert says:

      Thanks!

    9. I approve. Worst case is that you fail and are mis­er­able, which isn’t any worse than fail­ing to try and being mis­er­able. Lots of out­comes bet­ter than the worst case, and learn­ing to enjoy the ride means you can’t lose.

      And the fact is that you’re pretty awe­some already and about time you started act­ing like it more regularly. ;-)

    10. […] affect things on the blog, but I was really strug­gling, so I turned to my blog for cathar­sis.  Project Awesome is still in effect, and so far, it has really had an impact.  Let me quote from my first post,  […]

    11. […] Project Awesome launched a month and a day ago.  Since then, I have had no more suc­cess in find­ing a job than before, but every­thing else has improved dra­mat­i­cally.  Freelancing is going very well, with enough work to cover a cou­ple of months, and I haven’t even mar­keted myself. […]

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