List

Creative Challenge 14: Local List

| Mac

Spring is here gang! The spectre of snow dissipating, courses wrapping up, either with whimpers or bangs, and the budding of summer plans.

There’s no better time to start creating a list of local experiences you’d like to take in over the coming months. That’s your challenge! Mine includes authors, libations, shopping, arts and more.

If you start looking around you might be surprised by all that’s out your own backdoor. Be sure to share!

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Local Author – Reading List 

  1. Bill Gaston – The Order of Good Cheer
  2. John Gould – 7 Reasons Not to Be Good 
  3. Carla Funk – Apologetic
  4. Jack Hodgins – A Passion for Narrative  
  5. Yasuko Thanh – Floating Like the Dead
  6. Lorna Crozier – The Book of Marvels

Local Libations

  1. Beaufort Winery
  2. Schramm Potato Vodka 

Local Arts

  1. Art Gallery of Victoria – Traces 
  2. Belfry Season Ticket renewal

Local Groceries

  1. Dan’s Farm 
  2. Root Cellar 

Locally Owned Spots

(in a shrinking downtown core)
  1. Brasserie L’ecole 
  2. Outlooks 
  3. Belmiro’s 
  4. Only Human 
  5. Munro’s Books 
  6. Russell’s Books

There’s my list of local amusements for the summer months ahead – make a list and share!

Personal Credo and Commitments

| Mac

I’m reading yet another personal improvement book, similar to my adventures with The Happiness Project and The Element, this one is called the Speed of Trust and is written by Stephen M.R. Covey, the son of the gentleman who wrote The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

The Speed of Trust contains a number of exercises for the reader. I will share some of the results of these exercises over the next several months here at exploring-art.

The first exercise is to create a personal credo then make and document some personal commitments to yourself. The Speed of Trust approach to these commitments is simple, so it captured my attention after the somewhat convoluted exercise of resolutions, goals and strategic outcomes that I proposed earlier this year. Basically the Speed of Trust way is to start with small, simple commitments that you actually 100% intend to fulfil, slowly train yourself to keep those commitments and build up to more challenging commitments.

This could potentially have been quite a dry, boring and un-visually appealing post. In an effort to avoid that, I took some photo’s from Photo Excursion 2, Posterino software from the Mac App Store and mashed up my very own Personal Credo and Commitments motivational poster.

Final Happiness Project Rumination

| Mac

Now that I’ve identified an additional shortcoming in my set of 2012 resolutions and established a new framework to fix it, it is time to further detail my resolve. Also I am inverting my modified Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs because a foundation must come first.

I’ve also generated a mission statement for my mini happiness project:

Pursue my happiness by being attentive to my vitality, my wife and home and by creating an atmosphere of growth in the pursuit of writing.

Vitality

Resolutions

  • Drink a litre of water every day
  • Wake up before the alarm
  • Exercise daily
  • Restrict myself to two cups of coffee a day
  • Weigh myself daily

Goals

  • Lose 10lbs

Strategic Outcome

  • Increase my energy

Home

Resolutions

  • Do kitchen clean up every night – Don’t procrastinate
  • Set the coffee pot auto start every week night
  • Complete one thing from the backlog task list every day
  • Make the bed everyday
  • Buy my wife a romantic gift every month

Goals

  • Keep a structured, tidy living space and a jubilant wife

Strategic Outcome

  • Increase my happiness

The Element

Resolutions

  • Write everyday (Journal, Blog, or a Project)
  • Read everyday
  • Read one page of the dictionary every night

Goals

  • Promote and maintain Exploring-Art.com
  • Distribute 100 Exploring-Art.com business cards before the end of the year
  • Starting immediately personalize every Exploring-Art.com “publicize” tweet
  • Get published in another format
  • Take Creative Writing 100 @ Uvic next year
  • Find my tribe

Strategic Outcome

  • Increase the quality of my writing

Conclusion

From time to time I’ll post an update to how I’m doing living up to my new mission: Pursue my happiness by being attentive to my vitality, my wife and home and by creating an atmosphere of growth in the pursuit of writing. I believe this concludes my rumination from reading The Happiness Project. Exploring-Art.com will now return to it’s regularly scheduled posts.