I haven’t read or practiced Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way but I’ve heard about it from a ton of folks, the most of recent of whom looked into my tired face back in August, a face not yet recovered from a grueling month+ of putting up a brand new, live and in-person show for the …
Muppet Theory Someone close to me shook me to the core this week. It started as a casual conversation about Muppet Theory. The theory is based on Jim Henson’s The Muppets and the gist is this: there are chaos muppets and there are order muppets. Order muppets like things tidy and predictable, ie Kermit or …
There is a moment when we are each ready to create. For me, that moment presents itself like a toddler, full of Need and Now and Let Me Goooooooo. If I’m ready to write, perform, or in any other way create something, I want it right that second. I’m an adult human who works in …
As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus once said (allegedly), ‘change is constant.’ Theater makers track change through story arcs and character arcs. Video game designers focus on interest curves- tracking player engagement over time. Larps often contain scenarios that escalate in tension and stakes, while role-playing games follow a similar structure to theater, relying on character …
This post is a counter-point to the last where I talked about my evolving relationship to procrastination. This post is about the opposite of that: Precrastination. My friend M is a classic procrastinator. We co-work together a few times a week and while I was writing the talk I was going to give later that …
I wrote the talks for the last three conferences I’ve spoken at the night before the talk. Sometimes the day of. Even if I’m “done” the day before, I almost always make tweaks the day of. I am… a procrastinator. Ugh. I hate saying it. I feel like such a failure when I can’t nail …
Every group of tabletop game players needs a Rules Person. Exactly. One. One person who loves reading the rules, keeps them beside them during gameplay (just in case), and gets low-key anxious when someone else asks to see the rules because then they have to give up the rules sheet. More than Rules Person per …
I’ve spent the last year and a half reading a *lot* of books about business and entrepreneurship, listening to podcasts of the same ilk, and thinking about high-performance output and metrics for success. I began working as an entrepreneurial coach and have increased my consulting practice considerably. A few of the many branches of self-growth …
“Songbirds don’t sing to be the most accomplished songbird. They sing because it’s an innate thing that songbirds do because they’re alive.” One of the speakers at a conference I attended this month said this during his talk. I was struck by how it removes intentionality from a core action of being a bird: to …
The last thing I remember before blacking out was taking a sip of water and thinking “huh, I’m glad it doesn’t usually hurt this much to drink water.” Next thing I knew I was flat on the floor, glasses askew, blood dripping from my temple. I didn’t know it at the time but I’d just …
