Day 191 Week 29 Q3 Sunday July 10, 2022
Engineers used to have trade shows when their products had to be introduced. Some still do but many now have virtual product introductions . And performers still have a curtain going up which is most certainly an unambiguous deadline to be ready. And politicians have elections. And mothers give birth. SO the show goes on and there are deadlines that just can not be avoided and they are really helpful because no one is ever thinking they are ready to be a parent, perform a piece or ship a product. Well I guess politicians may always be ready to give a speech so three out of four is not bad.
Seriously as an involuntary innovator creative outlier I can find more listing options to try to pack in st the last minute in every situation. Like oh there is some space in my suitcase and I do not need to leave for the airport for twenty minutes….
Well you get the message, where would we be without deadlines? Well, we would not be finished with much. So I am grateful for unambiguous external deadlines like the one I am facing right now. I have to perform some live music at an event today and am rapidly running out of time to be ready. Oh sure there is still gear to pack and driving to the event and there is the locating of some of this gear still not done, and then there is what to play and which instruments to play it on and to sing or not, as there are so many options. And unfortunately having been doing this literally for decades one would think it would all be routine by now. But it most certainly is not because not only do I have too many options and too many ideas but I can not stop creating more options and considering more combinations.
I am embarrassed to admit that I have many different sound systems, many different guitars, basses and keyboards, many different microphones, many different styles of music, many different ways to figure things and worst of all I am in charge so I have carte blanch to spin around forever with no eternal force of convergence.
This is why many creative outliers have agents, managers, and even sometimes perish the thought bosses. We all have the problem and the gift of too many ideas. I even wrote a song about its few weeks ago which was performed in Manhattan at reading at Juilliard.
We all seem to want more creative freedom and some of us even do get it. But then we have to become our own force of convergence and this can be much harder than running a company or leading a team.
There is the special case where you are the company and you are the team and you have managed to engineer things so there are no or few external constraints whatsoever. And this is where I find my self this morning which is why I just took the time to write these words to eliminate the remaining degrees of freedom and stop creating options for I am now actually completely out of time.
Gotta Go and pack and leave.