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by Oto | Jul 23, 2012 | Concepts, Creativity, Design, Inspiration, Musings

I’m designing again. I woke up today, and I didn’t feel like a knife was being pushed through my brain every time I thought about design or I sat down by my desk. I actually felt like creating.

So yay me!

The past two weeks I’ve done nothing. Well the odd tiny design here and there, but more or less nothing, except chill and drink…some days excessively, but I’m calm now. I lost both my phones, and as inconvenient as it was, I wasn’t that sad about it. In fact, I was pretty relieved. I had a valid excuse to not take calls, detox from crackberry addiction and just plain avoid people. Finally, I was on vacation. The first 24 hours were rough. I grieved so hard like I lost a dear friend. Day 2 I felt lost, adrift at sea, cut off from everyone. By day 3, I was all good. It felt like my fantasy of walking down the streets of a remote town where no one knows me had come true. It was awesome.

In the past 2 weeks, I’ve read a few things, watched a few videos, had a few epiphanies, gone for a photo shoot, thought about life, what I’m doing, where I would like to take things, etc. Couple of things I learnt.

1. Be Happy: I have stripped away all my goals and only defined one objective. Be Happy. Simple, wake up, follow my bliss, be happy. Done.
2. Stop working/Start playing: I mentioned in Nothing that I didn’t really enjoy designing anymore. I sometimes take things too seriously. I desire success, I desire growth and so on, but life is life. I have to enjoy it. I’m experimenting with the idea of playing with my work. This means tinkering with new ideas and techniques and just having fun with it and doing as good a job as I can. I’m hoping that coming to my work with the spirit of play will allow me to be vastly more creative and have more fun.
3. Do less. Now this one is going to be really hard, because as I write this I have a pile of work I’ve ignored waiting for me. But I’m trying to do less. If I could only work on one major thing a day, that would be great. I want to extend The do less philosophy to life in general, especially with media consumption. I have the habit of always reading something, a book, a blog, a magazine, twitter feeds. It’s information overload. And this is not just fluff stuff, I am constantly reading articles on creativity, self-improvement, ideas, books on success, books on social dynamics, psychology, etc. It is a bit too much. I’m doing my best to cut down and focus on a few books at a time, or only a couple blogs in a week. The idea is to consume less, do less, but do that little very well.
4. Life-Expectancy: There is the idea that the universe arranges itself around you according to your expectation of it. If you expect getting what you desire to be a long and arduous strenuous road, then it will be that. If you expect the process to be fun and easy, then it will be fun and easy. Quite interesting because we are so conditioned to expect success to be difficult to achieve, and while some effort is required, perhaps there are always easier more fun ways to get what we want. Or maybe not. But it’s a cool experiment for me to go forward in the rest of the year with the expectation that school and work would actually be pretty cool and fun to handle as opposed to a hard grind.

All I’m saying is that I want to have fun with life. I’m tired of stress. I know we all think its impossible and that’s not how life works. I’m saying screw that. I’m going to try it out and see what happens. I’m going to practice following my bliss, which is kind of like following your passion, but with an emphasis on joy. I choose to do more of the things that bring me joy, that make me come alive, and less of the things I don’t like to do. And to bring a spirit of joy to every part of my life

This experiment is how I can make my entire life as fun and playful as possible. And it starts by watching more Community and Parks and Recreation. #TroyBarnes #RonSwanson