Do It All

Or maybe, don't.

What rises up in you when you hear the phrase ‘Do what feels right!’?

Here’s mine:

• As a child of the 80s, raised by educated and sometimes judgmental parents, it sounds like some kind of touchy-feely hippie idea.

• As a mom, it sounds irresponsible. And expensive.

• As an engineer and program manager, it sounds flippant.

• As an individual constantly seeking to increase my self-awareness and acceptance of myself and others, it sounds wise. But only when it comes to thinking through relational type issues. Or perhaps in making decisions, but only the type that don’t impact anything that starts with a dollar sign.

But for all that pre-programmed tendency to plan and do things based not solely on feeling, but on something quantitative - it’s been a little over a month now since I’ve had a paycheck a full time day-job. And I’m doing… pretty ok.

Photo by Nick Karvounis on Unsplash

It’s not as if I’ve never had a break away from aerospace, I certainly have.

But this break feels different.

This time the break is both definitively intentional and frighteningly unstructured all at once. What I’ve been telling people is that “I’m going to be working on some of my own entrepreneurial ventures!”

While this is completely truthful, I don’t always explain the rest of the story, which is that I have somewhere around 75,461 entrepreneurial ideas and who knows what I’ll actually end up focusing on.

The Book, which is the prominent 1 in 75,461 has been waiting for its moment to be written for over two decades. And in the past year or so I’ve had a palpable sense of It’s Time to Write. So I need to get my act together and simply make that one happen at some point, no doubt.

The other 75,460 ideas are the fruit of 1) Being a generally creative person, 2)ADHD (‘nuff said) and 3)I like money. But for anyone who has started something new, you know all too well that ideas in themselves don’t-make-money.

The distinct itch that has been rising up in me to create may well extend beyond The Book. But aside from that one project none of the other ideas have seemed necessarily essential in their own merit such that I have yet felt absolutely compelled to save them from an early grave and develop them beyond ‘only an idea’.

I admit I’ve been somewhat reveling in my newfound freedom to think freely and explore any idea at all that interests me, so much so that I wasn’t certain if I should put any focus at all on writing right away. I didn’t want to limit myself. And, I wondered if I should first try to go spin up one of these aerospace or other various start-up ideas that I have constantly buzzing around my head like summer flies.

As I considered my options I thought perhaps the best plan would be to spread myself out and do just a little towards a lot of these ideas, and see what shakes out. This isn’t a terrible plan in and of itself, but I don’t mess around when it comes to hyper-focus and I found myself up all hours of the night, every night, making notes and thinking of more and more new things. Again, this wasn’t all bad and I may give it a shot again in the future - but I wasn’t getting any sleep at all or making any real headway on any given idea. I was simply creating more ideas.

Photo by JACQUELINE BRANDWAYN on Unsplash

I finally realized, much to my chagrin, that that I might drown in a sea of' ‘really good ideas’ if I didn’t just pick something and run with it.

“Know thyself,” they say.

But how to decide what to focus on?

• First, I considered the potential monetary return of a number of ideas, along with the potential for success of each.

• Then, I talked to my son about it who encouraged me to “just do them all, ma, why not?” (Certainly my offspring.)

• I asked my partner who said, “I don’t know babe, do what makes you happy.”

• My daughter didn’t seem excited by any of my ideas and suggested I write a romance novel.

• I told my mom about my quandary, but she only responded with, “Let’s talk about it more later this week,” (which only meant she knew this was going to be a long discussion where I talked in circles to myself and she didn’t feel up to it).

After all of that I remembered that the best remedy for many problems is to simply ignore them until they go away. So that’s what I did.

With no decisions made about pretty much anything, I thought about what I wanted to do. Not the big official “What. Do. I. Want. to. Do??” question. More in the realm of “hmm what do I wanna do while I sit here on the couch and eat my ice cream?”

I realized that what I wanted to do was to work on The Book. So I did, and it felt good. It felt sweet. It is not an easy book and it is difficult to bring myself to the places I need to be to write this book. But it still felt… right.

It reminded me of how insistent and consistent the nudge had been over this past year to write The Book. And it reminded me of something that I know with an unusually high degree of certainty. That whether I become a best selling author of a book that turns into a blockbuster movie or I print one copy of it to display on my bookshelf and email the manuscript to a few family members… either way, nothing will have been wasted.

It’s not that I hate money. I most definitely do not. And I’m not so independently wealthy that I can sit around while casually writing with tropical drink in hand and make no money into eternity. Absolutely not. It’s that there is a pull to write this book that I can’t quite explain. It is something that it seems I simply must do.

The pull reminds me a bit of how I’ve always gravitated towards aerospace. It has long boggled my mind as to why anyone would go to all the trouble of getting an engineering degree and then decide to work in any other industry besides the space industry. (I recognize that may sound pompous, but doesn’t passion have the tendency to introduce a degree of bias?)

I’ve spent years practicing my ability to answer the common question, “But why should we spend so much money on space when we have so many problems on earth?” I genuinely, deeply believe my own answers, and that the pursuit expanding our abilities in space is very much for the benefit of humankind. But my closest friends and family know that my personal drive in this area is actually powered by something much more fundamental to who I am, almost rudimentary.

And with that, I’ll do what feels right, and work on The Book. I’m sure I’ll continue to dabble in other things because I’m me and I can’t help myself. But I have more peace in not trying to do everything at once. At least for now.

~ Rose G.

Photo by Tirza van Dijk on Unsplash

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