At any given time there are thousands of ways for me to communicate my message to the public over the Internet. So if I consider my options between two platforms like WordPress and Medium, I think that it actually makes the most sense for me to just use both. Aside from personal taste or legal restriction, I don’t foresee too many scenarios where I would be forced to choose one platform over another. With that said, a similar question of choice still remains… Where to start? For this question I like to personally assume that I have already begun work on both platforms, as well as every other platform for that matter.
I am a firm believer that self awareness is key to answering a lot of these kinds of questions… Who? Me and my audience. What? Shared interests, beliefs and passions. Where? Here and everywhere. When? Now. Why? Love and empathy. How? By any means necessary.
Now most of these questions are not too personal and can be answered specifically. The exceptions are the broader and more vague questions of Where? and How? I believe that these later questions require answers with a different level of self awareness that translate to pure initiative based on instincts and accumulated experience. In other words, taking action that feels right, eventually developing a sense of what is actually right and then having faith in the whole process.
Laozi is a Chinese philosopher and founder of Taoism that teaches conformity to the tao by unassertive action and simplicity (c 604 — c 531 BC). Laozi is well know for stating that “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” There are many ways to perceive and interpret the concepts of Taoism and of this proverb. Personally, I appreciate the importance of subtlety and simplicity in Taoism, and how it applies to my creative process. I also like to perceive and interpret Laozi’s thousand mile proverb as a retrospect and a reverse engineering of scale. This way for me the question of where to begin becomes the more digestible question, What’s next?
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
-Laozi (c 604-c 531 BC)
So if I assume that I have already taken my first step on my personal and professional journey, then in retrospective I can reverse engineer my first step to be something as simple as a note, a sketch or an emotional connection. This helps me to align all of my past intent and experience to plot out an idea of what should come next, then using resources that support that next step, I can take action.
Now in mid stride towards my goals, I still won’t know where my foot will land with 100% accuracy. However, 100% accuracy has never been my goal. Even a misstep in the wrong direction is still progress, if only for the experience and realization to not repeat the same misstep. My hope is that my instincts and experience will eventually develop enough to no longer need a filter of simplification for every step that I take. The irony is actually having an extra step in my creative production process to help me simplify the process itself. However, I believe this counter productivity is worth it in the short term if it helps to remove enough fear and doubt for me to become more self aware and self reliant on my instincts and experience over time.
This over complication of my whole creative process may become a future retrospective misstep that develops a self awareness that leads me to personal and professional happiness and success. In the meantime I just have to have faith that my current step will land on a solid foundation for the next. As Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” So this post is published simultaneously on my WordPress blog (MrGlasco.tv) and on Medium (Medium.com/@MrGlasco), and I have faith that I will continue to grow, develop and learn something from this and future actions.
“Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”
-Martin Luther King, Jr (d. 1968)
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