“Human beings act, feel, and perform in accordance with what they imagine to be true about themselves and their environment. What you imagine to be true becomes, in fact, true. Hold a given picture of yourself long and steadily enough in your mind’s eye and you will become that picture. Picture yourself vividly as defeated and that alone will make victory impossible. Picture yourself vividly as winning and that alone will contribute immeasurably to success.”
Thinkertoys by Michael Michalko
I woke up the other morning realizing that I have had a fairly consistent dream over the past several years. While i can’t completely understand the associated timing, I am starting to understand the meaning of the dream.
First, let me share some brief background.
With very few exceptions, I have always considered myself to be a good student. I love to learn and school has always been a place of pure enjoyment for me.
Ironically enough, I was never interested in my English classes. I completed my assignments, read the books and participated in class, but frankly I was never enthusiastic about being there.
Not surprisingly, my dream involves my time spent in this class – or, more accurately, my time not spent in this class. For some reason or another, I either chose not to attend class or I simply decided that the assignments could be left until the end of the semester.
As the dream progresses, the semester eventually comes to a close, and you can imagine my emotional state as I quickly realize that I haven’t done anything and I am left wondering how I am ultimately going to succeed in a class in which I really haven’t participated. The realization of potential failure turns the “dream” into a nightmare.
Fortunately, the dream always seems to end with me successfully completing the class although it also omits the details regarding how.
As with anything in life, this dream is subject to interpretation. My interpretation of this dream is that I may be associating success with the existence of a plan. This dream seems to tell me that I can still be successful without one.
Right now, I really have no other choice but to believe.
While I unfortunately haven’t been able to spend too much time writing over the past several months, a lot has happened. Fortunately, I am starting to see things come together the way I had originally envisioned and I am excited to convey a few key highlights here:
Big Generator:
Site Redesign – When I launched Big Generator earlier this year, my primary objective was to keep the design simple and focus most of my attention on the graphic design portfolio. While I was pleased with the look, organization and intent of the original site, it had a number of design challenges that required attention – one such limitation was the lack of a formal communication channel. You can see the new design and read about the rest of the limitations here.
Content Separation – When I launched my fictional blog (Microcosms) in 2009, I did so to maintain some degree of content separation from Incubator. I decided to do the same for my business. While I’ll still post ideas that tie into my business here, I want to be able to focus more attention on articles and topics that will interest and benefit potential clients. My goal is to utilize biggenerator.com as a content publishing platform to expand my knowledge and skills in the areas of design strategy and brand development, both of which will increase my business credibility.
Portfolio – While I had compiled a portfolio a little over a year ago, I decided to rebuild the portfolio not only in digital format but in print format as well. The digital portfolio is organized by year, and the most recent work can be seen here. For the print version, I decided to purchase two 11×17 “screw-post” portfolios which tied everything together quite nicely.
Web Site Redesign: If you’ve visited the site in the past, you’ll notice that I’ve refreshed the site using a new WordPress theme. I’ve searched for many months searching for just the right theme and am really pleased with the functionality and straightforward design of this one – ironically called “Basic Maths“. I am also starting to introduce additional WordPress plugins to make the site more SEO friendly and easier to navigate.
Cintiq: While I’ll continue to do a lot of my drawing using traditional media, I will be starting to use Wacom’s Cintiq tablet to do much of my rendering. This is an area that I am really excited about.
“Begin with the end in mind” is based on the principle that all things are created twice. There’s a mental or first creation, and a physical or second creation to all things. – Stephen Covey
One of the many things I’ve learned in project management is that “starting with the end in mind” is one of the best methods to ensuring a successful outcome. When your team has a clear sense of what need to do from the beginning, task definition and assignment activities come naturally and the team is able to spend more time focusing on the “day-to-day” issues vs. continuously wrestling with an ever-changing scope definition.
A similar approach can work extremely well when envisioning your future.
An article in the Futurist magazine entitled “Envisioning your Future: Imagining Ideal Scenarios” suggests that:
… having a vision is to be an idealist. This idealism should not be confused with unrealistic ideas; it should be used synonymously with having “a standard of excellence”. A person that is by nature a visionary looks into the future as though it is filled with possibilities, not probabilities.
If I look at my future based from who I really am, and document a clear description of what that future looks like, my life starts to become what I’ve created for myself.
After much thought, I came up with the following personal vision:
“My vision for the future is comprised of positive experiences that intertwine my ‘personal’ and ‘professional’ lives into a single life structure. Because of this, the long-held notion of “work-life” balance is lessened, and at its extreme, no longer required. By thinking strategically, I am able to spend my energy on activities that pay dividends over both the short and long-term. A continuous and purposeful stream of explicit and implicit challenges allows my mind to expand at an accelerated rate. With this expansion comes possibilities, and possibilities spark further action towards an ideal state called “Ultima”. My relationships are continuously expanding, but only at a rate where the relationships themselves are developing at a natural and lasting pace. My ability to see the unique qualities of each person and strive towards relationships that are, at their core, genuine, helps build strong partnerships that ultimately become central figures in a life structure built around growth, energy, complexity, awareness and intensity.”
Fortunately, I think this is fairly representative of what I want my future to look like. The next step is to take this concept and apply it to my design firm.
What does my business vision look like? I’ll talk about that in my next post.