A few interesting things have come up in the discussion recently that can be applied to personal growth and I thought I would share them with you today.

The first of these is something  I have been saying about KS for a few months now. It is easy to look at the end of the campaign, when the money has been pledged, and think it is successful. But really when the money has come in you are only half way through. The campaign is not successful unless you are able to deliver the promised product, hopefully in the time frame you promised.

Like I have said before in the area of personal growth, we have to be able to make it to the finish line. We have to be able to maintain our focus after our first success.

Another thing that has come out of all the KS discussion is an idea of trust capital. Here the idea is that you have to have developed a level of trust, or let’s say confidence in your audience, in order to get them to back you. We have to develop this same kind of confidence in ourselves in order to make change happen in our own lives. Confidence is a commodity. We can spend it by letting ourselves down or we can grow it by meeting our own expectations.

So there you are – a few lessons for Kickstarter and life all at the same time.

I was reminded of the importance of this yesterday reading a comic called Bearmegedon. It is a comic about mutant bears vs. humans. It starts slowly with a group of college age friends fed up with society making a booze and pot fueled decision to go live life like the guy from “Into the Wild.”

While off in the wilderness and being attacked by bears, they run into a mountain man who saves them. In the latest issue the mountain man not only explains to them the foolishness of chasing your dream when you are unprepared, but also that dreams have to be balanced against values.

If all that is important to us is success, we will not be good people. We will do what we have to succeed and, as we can see by the actions of companies that only value the bottom line, that mentality is not good for society.

Success is not just living the dream, it is living the dream in a way where we do not have to sacrifice our values.

I hate that song. The radio station that gets played at my day job has it in heavy rotation. Let me put it this way, the switch to Christmas music is a happy change from listening to this song. Or I thought it would be, but still they work it in.

Now, I do not hate it just because it is played ad nauseum, but because it gives a horrible message. It tells us that we should just look at what is good, that we should shy away from pain and sadness. It says we survive by being happy.

This is not only unrealistic, but unhealthy. We need to feel, we need to be aware of our own mental state and not hide from our unpleasant thoughts. If we do not face our emotion, face our sadness, face our anger then we hold on to it and it grows, spreads and corrupts other things. It can steal our joy.

So this song that tells us to be happy all the time is telling us to do the worst possible thing for ourselves. It tells us to annihilate our only chance to actually be happy. If we want happiness we have to find the things in our life that make us happy and do them, enjoy them but when things go wrong we have to be brave and let ourselves feel.

Early in the week I knew that Friday was going to be a busy day. What I should have done is taken the time on Wednesday or Thursday to get the blog ready to go so I would not have to worry about it when Friday rolled around. But I did not realize that Friday was going to be as busy as it turned out to be.

So what made Friday so busy? I was buying a company.

My partner over at Occult Moon wanted out and we were going through the handover of passwords, accounts and all that good stuff that made me the sole owner of Occult Moon. Once that was done I had to learn a new job, catch up with what was going on in the company outside the Toys for the Sandbox line and figure out how all the tools work on my new web store.

Did I get all that done in one day? Not a chance. I am still getting up to speed but figured I would take the time today to let folks know what is going on.

For a lot of us this means dealing with loved ones while we are stressed, they are stressed and while there is always something else that needs to get done. How are we going to survive?

I will be honest, I have no idea. I have a great family who is fun to be around, good friends and when I’m at their house I’ve even got a decent place to work. Still it will be a wild ride. I do, however, know one thing that will help make things a bit better.

Communicate. Do not expect to know what other people want. Do not expect them to know what you are playing and most of all take the time to listen to what they are saying.

It seems simple, but it is so easy to go running off tying to do too much, thinking it is something that is needed for the holidays when in reality it is just more work.

For example our family used to have onions in a light cream sauce every Thanksgiving. Most Thanksgivings I would take one and put it on my plate with no intention at all of eating it. It was a Conklin family tradition to have them, but I was never that trusting of cream sauces so there it would sit. Still my mom would go through the work of making the onions every year.

Last year my mom asked my dad if he really wanted them, he being the Conklin and all, and it turned out it was a non-issue. She could have saved the work, and I could have stopped wasting that one onion every year if we had just talked about it sooner.

Now the onions were not much work, but still the point is, when we don’t communicate we do not know what is important to those around us.

I could have sent it off like that. Al I had to do was put the cover together and order the proofs. Then a little voice inside my head kept telling me, “Those tables look bad. You can’t let it go out like that.” I tried to ignore the voice, but it would not let me, so I saved a copy of the work I was doing, changed the name and started tinkering with the tables. Somehow this led to a change of typeface, the loss of columns in the main body of the document and an index of characters going away.

It also gave me better looking tables that now feel like they are part of the document rather than just something tacked on at the end.

Yes, I could have left them and it probably would have been ok, but now I have something I am proud of, something that I can go out there and tell people to buy without feeling like I did a half-ass job.

Sometimes we just have to trust our instincts and go for it, even when it means more work. Sometimes the lessons we have learned need to be ignored. Sometimes the rules have their exceptions. We need to remember that.

Being wrong is not the end of the world. As a matter of fact it is part of life. We will screw something up. This is not a license to run around making mistakes willy-nilly. Instead it is a shove for those moments when we are hesitating to act because we are afraid of being wrong.

We learn from trial and error, experimenting and guess work. Think of the little babies who put anything in their mouths. They quickly learn what tastes bad and after a while figure out what is good and what is bad. And it is not just little children who have to make errors in order to learn. Thomas Edison is famous for using trial error. In an interview with American Magazine in 1921 Edison shared the fallowing story.

“After we had conducted thousands of experiments on a certain project without solving the problem, one of my associates, after we had conducted the crowning experiment and it had proved a failure,expressed discouragement and disgust over our having failed to find out anything. I cheerily assured him that we had learned something.For we had learned for a certainty that the thing couldn’t be done that way, and that we would have to try some other way.”

Once we understand what does not work that gives us broader hints about what will.

First off is the story of Bob’s Red Mill. This natural foods company has been around for a while and makes some good products. What is happening over at Bob’s that makes me happy? The owner has decided to give the company to his employees because as he puts it, “I don’t think there’s anybody worthy to run this company but the people who built it.”

While it is a great thing to do, it is not the mere fact that he is doing the right thing, but it’s why he is doing it and who is acknowledging it. His reason is because it is the right thing to do based on his Christian beliefs. I found out about this through one of my associates over on G+ who happens to be an atheist. He had seen it on an a website he reads, written by an agnostic who was able to put aside the things that separate him and Bob and still be inspired by what this man is doing.

You can read the full story here.

The other thing I saw this week was a little thing that the Occupy Wall Street folks are up to.

They are calling it the Rolling Jubilee and the idea is simple to buy dept like a creditor for pennies on the dollar and then rather than collecting on that debt, forgive it. This is a rent party on a large scale, people coming together to help those who need it. This is community in action, folks.

You can learn more about the Rolling Jubilee here.

Both of these stories made me proud to be human, made me thankful for others out there who value and work to build and protect communities.

To begin with being thankful should not be a year-end practice, but be a daily practice instead. I have a few people in my circles who make it a daily practice to share three thankful things. They may be minor, or seem minor, things like fuzzy sweaters still warm from the dryer, or big life changing things like friends giving them a place to live.

In doing this, in practicing awareness of the things they are thankful for, they are doing something special. They are turning their vision from the things that frustrate, depress and otherwise fill their day with clouds of distress and focusing instead on the things that make life better.

It may not seem like much, but the negative is easy to dwell on and being actively aware of the things that are good in our lives is one of the best ways to refocus ourselves to think about what it is we have vs. what we don’t.

Change Your Self Image: Statements like, “I can’t do that, I’m a slacker,” just reinforce the idea that what you want to do is impossible. This vision of ourselves as someone who cannot start or complete a task despite our ability is one of the biggest obstacles to overcome.

The first thing we need to do to change our self-image is change the way we talk. We need to stop reinforcing the slacker self-image with our language. We also need to change the way we think. We must police our thoughts. We may think to ourselves, “I should go change the light bulb in the den.” This sort of thought carries an implied, “But I am not going to do it cause I’m a slacker.” Beyond that it also incriminates. It says it should already be done.

When we catch ourselves thinking like this we need to respond with, “I will do it now.” We get up and we change the light bulb, we write the blog post, we contact the artist. Whatever it is that should be done, we do it. If we can’t do it right away we need to change the “should“ language in our brain to a “need” language. I need to change the light bulb in the den when I get home from work.

This brings us to the next way to stop being a slacker: Set Deadlines. It is not enough to be able to do what we dream of doing. We need to be able to do it in a consistent fashion,  especially if what we want is to work creatively. Art, writing, editing all these thing s are often being brought together to make a finished project. It is not just about being able to do them, but to do them in a timely and reliable fashion. Simply put, these are skills that we can all train ourselves to have.

Like any skill hitting a deadline takes practice and we practice by setting deadlines on our personal projects. We train ourselves to make the deadline and turn things in on time. If you are still in any form of school and want to work creatively in the future, getting assignments to your teacher on time is one of the most valuable lessons you will ever learn.

Lastly, you need to Learn How to Manage Your Time. Find a system that works for you. It may be a to-do-list, blocking out a few hours on certain days to work on a certain project or something more complex like GTD. The important thing is to figure out how your creative work fits into the rest of your life and how it balances against other things in your life like work, family, friends and gaming.

Hope that helps some of you out there.