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Last year, my kid’s school district decided to shift their two-week winter break by a week. Instead of it starting the third week of December and ending just after New Year’s, it now starts as close to Christmas Day as possible and goes through the first week in January.
It is the worst.
I’ve decided my 2019 Year of Making (it’s my sixth YoM, and I’m kind of incapable of even making sense of that) will be dedicated to putting in the time to learn new things. Not just to try out things I’ve never done, but to put in the time to really learn.
Of course, my kid’s stupid winter break has eaten up the first week of the month in a mess of playdates, errands, work, and many children coming in and out of my house.
Alas, my fantasy plan to dive into learning a new skill on January 1st was sacrificed for making whatever it was I was making, without a plan. (Which didn’t totally suck, because what I made was gingerbread cookies with the kid, everything bagels, some knitting, some doodles.)
The first thing I want to spend time learning: Hand lettering. After following along as lovely newsletter reader Kat worked through lettering drills last year, I had signed up for the Show Me Your Drills program, then never did it. But I have all the lessons so I’m all set to go.
Only thing is, the daily exercises are organized by day of the week, starting on a Monday. Obviously, this is hardly something that needs to be stuck to – who cares if I start on a Wednesday and cross out all the days of the week on the exercises? But it did take me a couple of days after New Year’s to make it to the art supply store to get the right kind of paper. And then I was excited about a new knitting project, so…
This is to say, it’s January 6th and I haven’t started my drills yet.
There was a time when I would have tossed my whole plan out the window because of this. I would have thought, “Well, I missed January 1st, and the 2nd and 3rd-6th for that matter, so I should just call it quits now and wait for another right time to start. Maybe February 1st, or maybe New Year’s Day 2020.”
That time, though, has passed. Because waiting is no way to start something, and dates are arbitrary.
I’ve decided I don’t want to rewrite the days of the week on my drills, so I’ll be starting my hand-lettering practice on Monday. Good old January 7th. Twenty-eight days of drills don’t care when they’re done. I do care that I do them at all. So I’m going to do them.
For years, I’ve talked to people who struggle like I do with schedules and time management and failing before we start. I didn’t set out to have a part of my work be a focus on habits and habit formation, but it’s become one of my favourite topics. Probably because when I finally figured out what I needed to do to make a habit for myself, I realized it’s more about what I didn’t need to do, and sharing that with others is deeply satisfying.
You deserve to feel happy about what you make. You deserve to let yourself off the hook and not hold yourself to an impossible standard. You deserve to decide that success is most certainly something to strive for, and that success can still be messy, ugly, or profoundly imperfect.
In other words, success should not, under any circumstance, equal perfect. Perfect is dumb, and perfect is uninteresting. Be smart, be interesting. Be rough around the edges, be grateful for the messes you make.
January 1st, 2019, has come and gone. If you started on a Year of Making already, good for you. If you haven’t started yet, who cares. Start today. Start right now.
PS This was originally written for my Friday newsletter. Get it here!