The New Rules of Project Awesomeness
Filed Under: personal
Here are the new roles I’ve pinned up beside my desk.
- No more bitching and moaning online. If you don’t have something positive to say, don’t say it at all.
- 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.
- 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.
- Try harder. Fail. Try even harder. Failure is just a word for ‘learning experience.’ It’s not something you can “be.”
- Talent is just another word for skill. It can be sharpened like anything else.
- 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.
- You like working. So it all turns out okay in the end.
- You are not your job. Jobs are clothes we wear, not who we are.
- Stay humble if you do find success. Hubris is unattractive on fat guys.
- 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.
Comments
04-13-2009
Go Project Awesomeness!
04-13-2009
Send me an invite, man; I promise not to hog the keg. :)
04-13-2009
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.
04-13-2009
I will hog the keg. FYI.
04-14-2009
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.
04-14-2009
Cool!
04-21-2009
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.
04-21-2009
Thanks!
04-22-2009
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. ;-)
04-27-2009
[...] 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, [...]
05-14-2009
[...] 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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