Tuesday, February 13, 2024.
Yesterday's "Colony Assessment Form" about which I am feeling embarrassed. Download here:
After posting yesterday's survey form, I felt embarrassed about wanting something so tightly tuned to my own desires...I just can't get over the feeling that I'm being too selfish. While I think that it's important to maintain a healthy priority one's own interests in an endeavor, for my own comfort I think I want to scale back the scope I had in mind.
Instead of building The Colony in all its teeming glory, maybe starting with an outpost is more realistic.
The Outpost (or whatever I end up naming it) is more of an outgrowth of this website that will help build up to something grander. I'm thinking of it as a microcosm or 1/10th scale model of the Big Giant Thing that is The Colony. Besides, I never really liked "The Colony" as a placeholder name.
I'm aware that maybe I'm letting my "outsider syndrome" trigger anxious feelings, but I think it's prudent to modulate the amount of emotional turmoil. As a Solo Creative Adventurer of the D-RankAside: For fun I've been thinking of myself as a creative adventurer with some ability but not really tested; the ranking system borrows from Japanese RPGs which itself might be based on the Japanese school system; in any case, it's a popular ranking trope in the anime I watch. S-Rank is the top, after A, while D is one of the lower ranks., perhaps I should play it safe until I have another party member or two. I'm also avoiding the mis-step of making the challenge so small that it's no longer interesting; "The Outpost" as a strategic goal is plenty big enough to hold my interest.
The New Scope
Here are my initial conditions:
- The Outpost is now sized for Sri, not many people.
- The Outpost is still intended to be a welcoming place for people to gather and transact.
- The Outpost still needs to provide goods and services that appeal to others, but they are more on a personal level.
Additionally, a big part of The Colony challenge was developing its culture and governance model. With the reduced scope of The Outpost, it is more about how I conduct myself socially and professionally. I'll still be thinking about how to scale that up, but there is less pressure to write an enormous charter. No one is attracted by just a charter. There are other salient attractions to build first, I believe.
The New Challenges
While reducing the scope to "just an outpost" feels like a step backwards, I think an important difference between this and my past attemptsi.e. achieve creative independence and find a tribe of people to enrich my life through exploring, learning, building, and sharing. is that the end goal is much more public-facing for the sake of many people, not just me. I know from past experience that I am rather unmotivated to do things for myself, but I get a huge burst of energy when someone else is excited with me!
The challenge, in general, is to continue the conversations with as many people as possible, which includes reaching out to my friends and friends-to-be to find out what's going on.
- The Outpost is always reaching out to collect information from others to pass that vibe along.
- The Outpost is always producing something, and this is a regular publication to help support reaching out to other creative adventurers.
- The Outpost also has unique takeaways to trade. This requires that the goods and services are stocked for visitors.
- The Outpost is Sri and Sri is The Outpost! I can continue to act as a diplomatic envoy of the Outpost, actively seeking mutual beneficial trades with others.
- The Outpost can have a systematic trading culture based on how I handle Requests for Proposal and Statements of Work; this I have experience with.
And lastly:
- Talking about The Colony and workshopping its systems with other people is always in the scope!
What I'd be concerned about is falling into the trap of being "all talk" and not getting anything meaningful done, so I'd want to set up some meaningful metrics for this. Making a variation of The Concrete Goals Tracker probably would work out.
But it's getting late...tomorrow is the last day of my 12 DAY BOOTUP so that's when I'll make the lists of what I want to focus on for the next 2-3 months. I did set up a new section called "The Outpost" in the navigation system, so I have no excuse not to put something in there.
INDEX of GHDR 2024 POSTS
This year's single goal is Building The Colony!
Made a simple "functional area" diagram using Whimsical to help gather my thoughts.
I converted the Whimsical doc from yesterday to Affinity Designer.
Created new subsite at /the-colony/
Wrote stream-of-consciousness "vision statement" for later cleanup
Convert stream-of-consciousness into a "phrase cloud" for further deconstruction
Artifacts of The Colony: Pebbles, Seeds, and Rings
Created a "refined phrase cloud" grouped into five categories, based on boot 05's work.
Extracted "foundational" statements from yesterday, but they didn't leave a strong impression. Punt "why" to tomorrow's post.
Created a "Selfishly Sri" printable assessment to gauge outside interest.
Reducing scope from Colony to Outpost.
Desired results are distilled down to two main ideas, which will cover the next couple of months.
A slow start to the year, as I focused on paying work for most of the month. Set four directives to achieve this mont
The set of analysis notes that I authored with ChatGPT4 to refine my understanding of "prosocial motivation"
New goal is to start connecting with future chatty collaborators, as my brain runs on "prosocial motivation" and meaningful human connections.
Delving further into my "predominantly-prosocially motivated" profile (PPMP), and how to turn this into action given the dilemma of "needing the energy from a group to start a task" being at odds with "needing to start a group so I have energy".
The task of "talking to someone in-person about PPMP-based community" didn't happen. Happily, I had several empowering insights along the lines of wealth, doing what is good, and accepting myself that I think will help with that.
A new approach to "reduce uncertainty" instead of "pushing through" tasks, I take the time to define the mission and audiences more carefully.
Change of emphasis to All The Animals Are Friends as the anchoring concept for communicating my ideas!
Recognizing the seemingly-impossible task of doing tasks that no one else is looking at with me, I recast writing as the primary goal. Without the camaraderie of connection, I just am unable to motivate.
August sucked. I had no energy or drive. Perhaps I need to prioritize my own communications and work needs for once.
September was really low-energy and sluggish again. Rather than worry about sustainable systematic productivity, I should just admit that I'm lonely and let productivity handle itself?
The depression of September faded as I visited family in California. I theorize 6 "rules for surviving loneliness".
An unexpectedly productive month as I applied several of the "rules for surviving loneliness". My outlook for 2025 for personal productivity feels positive.