From Manchester, NH to Cambridge, MA – my go-to place of inspiration, is about an hour by car. The drive passed by quickly thanks to a phone conversation with my son. And now I’m here – French Roast in cup, croissant in it’s temporary brown bag – it’s time to tap into the 1369 Cafe well of artistic waters and transform them into my own. So familiar, the sounds of alternative punk and progressive anger sprinkled with an angelic voice. The scent of brewing coffee and about 20 people who have chosen to be alone in a group setting. Perfect.
Tapping into creative waters can be difficult enough. We’re often trying to extract music, prose, photography, etc. from what sometimes feels like a muddy, or even dry, stream. So it’s a brilliant feat of magic when we can see our inspirations and artistic ideas come to fruition. But what happens next can determine whether we create art, or turn away from it.
As artists, we often have the desire to share our art – sometimes to get feedback or an opinion from someone we trust, or someone whose perspective we value. Whereas there’s nothing wrong with asking for feedback, how many times have we shifted our creative process, approach to the piece, or even abandoned it altogether when that feedback is negative? In that case, we have taken our highly personal statement and convictions and replaced it with a desire to please. Or worse yet, that feedback made us stop believing in our original artistic idea. Great art can be reflective of many things, but we must not allow it to be so fragile that it can’t survive a critical blow. Some of the most successful artists had to endure reviews and critics calling their art “bad” or worse. If the extremely successful band Black Sabbath listened to their nay-sayers, they might have never left Birmingham.
We are reluctantly evolving beings. Creatures of habit. But, there comes a time, even with the most stubborn among us, to shift gears and turn the wheel. Sometimes, that new direction feels dramatic and revolutionary – into unfamiliar and uncertain territory. Other times, the change is subtle and feels almost “corrective” – like staying in your lane. And, of course, there are all points in-between. For me, I felt the need to re-invent myself. Nothing major, just a slight update . . . Mike Pascarella 2.0, if you will. Cool, right? Well, sometimes new versions attempting to fix bugs and introduce features can introduce new bugs – or worse yet – crash the entire system.
What is it about us humans? Can we convince ourselves of just about anything? Let’s look into one of the biggest lies we tell ourselves: “we are great multitaskers!” Before we get going here, let’s define multitasking as more than just walking and chewing gum, or listening to the radio while driving. What I’m talking about here is the attempt at juggling important tasks – each deserving our full attention – and maintaining the fiction that we can do them efficiently and effectively. We can’t. And as a result, all of the tasks in question suffer.
The most successful people I’ve met in the business world seem to share one important quality – the ability to leverage the talents and experiences of others. This applies to businesses of all sizes. But for sole-contributor entrepreneurs and small companies, that quality can sometimes be elusive. I’ve heard many reasons, or excuses for it. The most common being a rather limited resource pool. But is it? What’s the real problem?
For many entrepreneurs, the concept of working overtime is a contradiction of terms. Some of us are seemingly always working. When 5:00 PM rolls around, we’re just getting started. If you’re a sole proprietor, chances are you’ve experienced this on a regular basis. We convince ourselves there’s always something to do and it’s always urgent. The problem is productivity.
