I'm on holiday for a week - which is going to be interrupted by a course in Auckland (at the other end of the country for those who don't know our geography) which will take four hours, but will cost me an entire day tomorrow. I'm going to take next Monday off in lieu.
The course was an afterthought: I'd been due to go on holiday for a few weeks, but the course notice arrived in my email last week - about Thursday, I think - and foolishly, instead of ignoring it, I showed it to my colleague (my de facto boss) and within a zippity doo of an hour I was booked to go to Auckland and had someone available to pick me up at the airport, transport me to the course site, and bring me back again. (A free early evening meal is now being thrown in as well, so I can't complain.)
As to the holiday, I've now had two days of it, and yesterday wasn't too bad weather-wise, although it got very cold in the afternoon. My wife and I got up early and loaded up the van with accumulated rubbish (accumulated and smelly) and headed out to the tip. The dog came too and was not impressed at being kept in the vehicle while I unloaded it. Frantic was the attitude he assumed.
Then we went and picked up a trailerload of soil/compost from 'Designer Trees' and rejoiced in the fact that the trailer was thrown in for free...for an hour. Back home, and over the next hour we slaved away at emptying the trailer's contents into a couple of our raised gardens. That's hard work when you haven't done it for a while.
While it was still fine we went down to the nearly new Bunning's Warehouse (my first trip - it looks almost identical to Mitre 10 to my jaded mind) and bought some items for the garden. But by the time we got home the weather was turning off rapidly, and none of the plants have made it into the garden yet.
Today's plan was to replace some of the glass in the glasshouse. We measured up, and my wife had some thoughts about perhaps it would be more economical to replace some of the glass with a firm plastic, so that required another trip to Bunning's where we found the sort of thing we needed. We also got some glass for the missing panes out of the roof - the glasshouse had suffered quite a bit of damage in the terrific wind that we had a few days after Christchurch had its awful earthquake.
But today the weather wasn't going to give us any clemency whatsoever, and most of the glass replacement was done in the freezing cold, or with snowflakes drifting down onto us. We got the roof sorted but nothing else at this stage. I spent the other part of the day inside, getting warm again, and avoiding wasting my time looking at sites like those called acne treatments reviewed or how to gain a six-pack in three minutes a day, and worked hard at getting notes typed up for the Varsity course I'm doing. I had to tell myself severely that I wasn't allowed to do any music writing today; the course has been suffering a bit of late because of that.
So I guess you could call it successful, in spite of the weather. I had been hoping for lovely sunny days over this week, but it doesn't look as though my hope is going to be met. Pooh.
Showing posts with label bunnings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bunnings. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Friday, July 09, 2010
A genius at your own level
The other day, Seth Godin wrote: If you're waiting for a boss or an editor or a college to tell you that you do good work, you're handing over too much power to someone who doesn't care nearly as much as you do.
rs: a kind of self-criticism that says what I do isn't good enough - because so and so does it so much better. The fact that so and so is some kind of genius has never impressed the self-critic in me. Because so and so is great/good/capable, I must therefore always be on a lower step on the rung.
It's nonsense of course, and what's worse it makes me criticise others, both those who really are better than me, and those who plainly aren't (though of course the critic doesn't let me say that without feeling guilty).
I realised the other day, after having discussed this at length with my supervisor on several occasions, that there really isn't some kind of magical 'bar' just out of reach that I'm always striving for....one that someone else has placed there. The only bar I need to worry about (if worry is the right word) is the bar I'm prepared to climb up to. If what I'm doing isn't good enough the bar is the one I set in place myself to make sure that what I do is good enough.
I need a bar, a kind of level to strive for. Otherwise, 'okay' is good enough - and of course it isn't; it's usually second-rate. But the other side of this is that when I do do well, or write something that's good, then that sets the standard for future work, and also satisfies the inner critic.
Furthermore, as Godin says, I don't need 'permission' from someone else, approval that says what I've done is good. Of course we all like to hear that other people appreciate what we create - equally we don't like to hear other people saying they don't like what we've done. However, reliance on that approval (or disapproval) is, in the end, counterproductive. It tells us nothing except that someone liked or disliked something.
The person who needs to like or dislike it is the creator of it. Ultimately I'm the judge of the work. If I think I've done my utmost with it, then that's the place to sit and be satisfied. If I realise that I can improve it (see the previous post) then I need to knuckle down and improve it. Until it's at that 'level,' that 'bar' I was talking about, it will make me feel dissatisfied.
But at least that dissatisfaction is within my own sphere, not 'created' by some false sense that someone else would/could do better, and that I'm a fraud to pretend I can do as well.
On an entirely different note, because different notes give variety, and monotonal music/writing is a bore, I have just discovered what pop displays are. I thought they must be something to do with pop-outs. Nope. The 'pop' stands for 'point of purchase' - that's not what we call them here in NZ where the term is more often 'point of sale display' - and it means all those little things you (or worse, your kids) can pick up at the last minute and throw into the bunch of stuff you've just spent an hour buying around the supermarket, or Bunnings, or The Warehouse, or wherever.
Bunnings opened its new store in Dunedin a few days ago - tonight they had about five minutes of full-scale fireworks blazing throughout the night sky, the second such display in a few weeks - the last was for the last match at Carisbrook, the famed sports ground that has been dumped in favour of the new Stadium Dunedin is building at enormous cost to the ratepayers - even though initially we were told it wouldn't cost us a thing! That ridiculously long sentence, with its muddled syntax and cluttered phrases is a prime example of something that should be fixed up (my inner critic is doing a poor imitation of weeping), but since the bar for this paragraph is just where I'm sitting already, I'm not going to do anything more about it!
[Picture of Mozart - a genius - for those who didn't recognise him.]
We spend a lot of time organizing and then waiting for the system to pick us, approve of us and give us permission to do our work.
rs: a kind of self-criticism that says what I do isn't good enough - because so and so does it so much better. The fact that so and so is some kind of genius has never impressed the self-critic in me. Because so and so is great/good/capable, I must therefore always be on a lower step on the rung. It's nonsense of course, and what's worse it makes me criticise others, both those who really are better than me, and those who plainly aren't (though of course the critic doesn't let me say that without feeling guilty).
I realised the other day, after having discussed this at length with my supervisor on several occasions, that there really isn't some kind of magical 'bar' just out of reach that I'm always striving for....one that someone else has placed there. The only bar I need to worry about (if worry is the right word) is the bar I'm prepared to climb up to. If what I'm doing isn't good enough the bar is the one I set in place myself to make sure that what I do is good enough.
I need a bar, a kind of level to strive for. Otherwise, 'okay' is good enough - and of course it isn't; it's usually second-rate. But the other side of this is that when I do do well, or write something that's good, then that sets the standard for future work, and also satisfies the inner critic.
Furthermore, as Godin says, I don't need 'permission' from someone else, approval that says what I've done is good. Of course we all like to hear that other people appreciate what we create - equally we don't like to hear other people saying they don't like what we've done. However, reliance on that approval (or disapproval) is, in the end, counterproductive. It tells us nothing except that someone liked or disliked something.
The person who needs to like or dislike it is the creator of it. Ultimately I'm the judge of the work. If I think I've done my utmost with it, then that's the place to sit and be satisfied. If I realise that I can improve it (see the previous post) then I need to knuckle down and improve it. Until it's at that 'level,' that 'bar' I was talking about, it will make me feel dissatisfied.
But at least that dissatisfaction is within my own sphere, not 'created' by some false sense that someone else would/could do better, and that I'm a fraud to pretend I can do as well.
On an entirely different note, because different notes give variety, and monotonal music/writing is a bore, I have just discovered what pop displays are. I thought they must be something to do with pop-outs. Nope. The 'pop' stands for 'point of purchase' - that's not what we call them here in NZ where the term is more often 'point of sale display' - and it means all those little things you (or worse, your kids) can pick up at the last minute and throw into the bunch of stuff you've just spent an hour buying around the supermarket, or Bunnings, or The Warehouse, or wherever.
Bunnings opened its new store in Dunedin a few days ago - tonight they had about five minutes of full-scale fireworks blazing throughout the night sky, the second such display in a few weeks - the last was for the last match at Carisbrook, the famed sports ground that has been dumped in favour of the new Stadium Dunedin is building at enormous cost to the ratepayers - even though initially we were told it wouldn't cost us a thing! That ridiculously long sentence, with its muddled syntax and cluttered phrases is a prime example of something that should be fixed up (my inner critic is doing a poor imitation of weeping), but since the bar for this paragraph is just where I'm sitting already, I'm not going to do anything more about it!
[Picture of Mozart - a genius - for those who didn't recognise him.]
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