Standing in Your Own Light

First: Thanks to all of you who have said kind, supportive, wonderful things about my 1,500 blog posts. It feels big and I’m proud. There would be no blog without readers and those who leave comments.

For about 12 hours yesterday, WordPress was not accessible to me–I couldn’t get to the blog or read the comments. So I’m a bit behind. Yes, there will still be a drawing, it will still be tonight (if I can get to the blog) but it will take a few days to answer all the comments.

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Many of the people who leave comments are artists. All of them are creative, even if they don’t believe it. My first reaction, when I finally could read the comments, was to explain to everyone who said something nice that they were wrong, that I don’t have a lot of energy, and I’m just a creative stumbler with a sense of humor.

And that would be a mistake. The same mistake many artists make. It’s hard to admit to your creativity. Hard to live up to big ideas. Strenuous to live up to your own expectations. But it’s important that you stand up and represent your own creativity. That you stand in your own light.

Never say “just” when you explain how you do your work. If you are a photographer you don’t “just” use a digital camera. If you are a book binder, you don’t “just” stitch folios together. Those are skills you learned and got good at over time. Don’t diminish your skills. You worked hard for them. Explain them with dignity. Your soul deserves that.

When someone offers a compliment, don’t talk about your mistakes. So many artists I praise, immediately show me the mistake in the piece, the error in their plan, the flaw in their thinking. Those mistakes, flaws and error made that piece the thing of beauty (is a joy forever, thank you John Keats). You did all the work–from concept to final polish. The mistakes you made are your private learning tool, and don’t need to be shown to everyone who likes the final product. Knowing your mistakes doesn’t enhance their experience.

Work deeply, learn about yourself, and be proud of what you’ve learned. That’s the difference between an artist who keeps going and one who quits, disappointed in life.

—Quinn McDonald is a writer who is working on her second book, The Inner Hero Art Journal: Mixed Media Messages to Your Inner Critic.

Knowing When it’s Time to Quit

There’s a mistake I make over and over in my life–I don’t know when to quit. I’ll press on with a project even though I’m tired, cranky, and no longer paying close attention.  It’s the road to perdition, clearly marked, and I’m driving the express train. But I won’t quit. I keep thinking that in the next minute, I will finish the project, solve the problem, complete the task.

A badly tangled thread diagram from an H-P article entitled, Ropes, Strings, Threads,

It doesn’t work that way. Right at the moment when the end is brushing my fingertips, almost in my grasp,  something goes wrong. Tonight the just-repaired part on the sewing machine failed again. I was stitching the last piece of a card I had promised to get in the mail tomorrow, and the needle flew out of the holder, followed by the thread manager and the entire chunk of sewing machine that holds the needle and the thread tender.  It tore a hole in the card. The one I’d been working on for two hours. The one you are not seeing a picture of.

I could give you a hundred other examples. When I made jewelry, I would press ahead to finish a clasp, even if I knew it required more thought than I had left. The instant I focused on the clasp, something would go wrong, and the necklace–a piece of intricate engineering–would be ruined. I did this more than once, more than a dozen times. I’d recognize the situation and think, “it will be different this time.” It was not.

It’s a combination of wanting to complete something ahead of deadline, the need to be done with a project I’ve been working on too long, and the bad decisions made when I’m overtired. It’s rooted in the idea that if I push harder I will do more than if I go to bed. It’s the nasty Catholic-school idea that you don’t rest until your work is done, no matter how tired you are. And I’m not even Catholic.

I want to find that moment I need to quit. Because I keep overshooting it,

Susan Long from Momma Mindy's Moments.

wasting too much time doing over what I should have quit doing while I was ahead.

Tonight, I think I found the answer. The time to quit is long before I make the mistake. I keep thinking I need to stop right before the mistake. But that’s not it. The time to stop is while everything is still going well. Before tired becomes exhaustion. It’s so counter-intuitive. We don’t go to bed when we are tired, we fall asleep in front of the TV and get up at 2 in the morning, drag ourselves to bed and find our eyes open and our weariness gone. The next day, our eyes feel like they’ve been rolled in panko crumbs and placed on the grill.

The time to quit a project is while it’s still appealing, before it becomes a chore. Yes, there are times to press ahead, but when you grimly fixate on getting it over and done with, you have jumped the shark. (Another example of not knowing when to quit.)

And instead of finding the perfect ending here, I’m going to bed. Before I wreck it. Feel free to give an example of your own.

–Quinn McDonald is slowly learning when she’s had enough and needs to quit for the night. Slowly.

Making the Same Mistake

You’ve heard it a million times: “It’s OK to make a mistake, but never make the same mistake twice!” Or “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” One of the giant myths we love to believe is that we make a mistake only once.

Buster no longer eats flowers. Why not? Because I no longer put flowers anywhere he can find them or climb to them. I finally changed, as he would not.

It’s simply not true. We not only repeat mistakes, we repeat them most of our lives. We all know the woman who has dated the same kind of man all her life. Falls for the same type, the same profession, the same opposite-to-hers values. We wonder why she does that as we stride into Starbucks and order “the usual.”

We are creatures of habit and most of us don’t like change. We do the same thing over and over because we know how to do it that way. Even though we know the definition of insanity, we keep hoping for different results.

Change is hard. It’s great the first three days when we are filled with resolve and motivation. Then our friends begin to tell us they like us the way we are. Or our family hurls the ultimate insult at us: I don’t know who you are anymore, you’ve changed!

Well, I hope so. I’d be really bored with someone who didn’t change over a whole life. I sincerely hope we grow, we learn, we adapt, we re-invent. Because making the same mistake over and over again, and hoping for growth anyway is a new definition for insanity.

We are going to make the same mistake over and over unless we take a look at the reason for the mistake, and change our habits. It’s hard, really hard to stop making the same mistake over and over again.  But it also painful to keep making the same mistake–even if we do it in new and inventive ways.

That’s why having a coach is useful. They encourage you to create a new vision and a new way, and they hold you accountable for walking toward the goal. And then, they walk with you, because change is not easy and making mistakes is painful.

–Quinn McDonald still takes on too much work and needs more sleep. She and her coach are working on it.

Mistakes: Face, Fix, Grow

We make mistakes. We hide mistakes. We lie about mistakes. And they grow bigger and bite us back. Instead of  spinning, hiding, or rationalizing a mistake, make it serve you. It’s not easy, but we can face and fix mistakes, then grow from them.

Here’s the step-by-step to face and fix mistakes:

1. See the mistake. This sounds obvious, but the reason we make mistakes is because we don’t know what we are doing is going to result in a mistake. Often, when we notice a mistake, we immediately stop thinking about it, and focus on hiding it or blaming it on someone else. That’s the dangerous part. See the mistake for what it is–a slip up you made because you drew the wrong conclusion, thought something wrong was right, or raced ahead too fast. If you don’t know what you did wrong, there is no second step.

2. Acknowledge your mistake. First, acknowledge that this is your mistake and own it. You can’t fix it if you don’t own it. Take a look at the root cause of the mistake–was it sloppiness, overwork, the wrong process? Find how it went wrong and you’ll know why it went wrong.

3. Develop a solution. You know how and why the mistake happened, figure out a solution that solves it. You get to fix all your own mistakes. In fact, you are the only person who can do the best job. Because it was your mistake, you have more information than anyone else. This should take minutes, not days. The solution may have several steps that need to take place over days, but you have to have a reasonable fix in place quickly.

4. Alert your boss first, team members second. Your boss needs to know about major mistakes before your team members. Smaller mistakes that your team members can fix in their normal workday can be fixed at that level. Going to your boss isn’t a fun task, which is exactly why you developed the solution before you left your office. If you go to your office, dump the problem on the boss’s desk, you will be creating a panic situation and you will be responsible for using the boss’s fix. Your answer, because you are closer to the problem, is going to work better.

5. Know how to prevent the mistake. Besides acknowledging responsibility and knowing how to fix the mistake, you have to know how to prevent it from happening again. If your mistake is an emergency, this step needs to happen after the emergency is over. Preventing mistakes is the part where overwork– too many projects to be completed in not enough time–comes in. You can point out that you are concentrating on too many priorities and ask your boss to prioritize your workload. If you think everything is the same level of importance, you are headed for trouble. And you’ll be wrong. Not everything is equally important. That’s the short answer that leads to a big failure. Whether you need training, better communication, more responsibility, more authority and less responsibility, this is the time to point it out in a clear, tactful way.

–Quinn McDonald develops and runs business communication workshops.

Perfectionist Burns the Jam

Figs are fragile fruit. Birds love them as a source of food and water. When they ripen here in late June, birds that weren’t interested in our yard for months gather to chomp away. The tree is too tall to net, so for two weeks or so, I engage in the dance of the fig protection lady. I never win. I’ve tried scaring the birds, I’ve tried sharing–I’d be thrilled if they ate all the figs at the top of the tree. But nope, they eat a quarter of all of them.

We’ve had a few weeks of fierce heat, and the figs were starting to scald from the sun. I picked as many as I could to make jam. Some riper ones, and some not quite ripe, but fine for jam.

After they are washed, I removed the stems and cut them into chunks.

Into a pot they went, with the juice of half a lemon, some lemon zest and water enough to almost cover them. Sugar gets added later. I simmered them down, then added about a cup of sugar. Simmered again.

They  were getting close, so I added a bit of honey for a deeper taste. Honey burns easily, so I set a timer. I was also doing laundry, watering the plants, and catching up on email, so setting a timer is vital. Too easy to forget what’s on the stove till the smoke alarm smells it.

The timer hadn’t gone off when I smelled scorching fruit. I raced to the stove, but too late. An entire batch of fig jam–probably the only one we’ll get this year–ruined.

It’s hard for a perfectionist to deal with making mistakes. Doesn’t matter that I set the timer, I should have set it for a shorter time. Fig jam is not to be trifled with. Then I had a thought. Of all the tutorials I’ve seen, both on art and on cooking, I’ve rarely seen a mistake posted. Julia Child was calm when she made a mistake, but I haven’t seen a mistake posted in any tutorial I’ve seen.

Here’s mine. In all its burned-on glory. Much as I hate to admit my mistake, I think it’s important to other perfectionists to see that even experienced cooks, successful artists, and practiced experts mess up, ruin the jam, tear the page, use a hideous color, and the project doesn’t work. It happens. The important part is what happens next. A few years ago, I would have burst into tears, threatened the timer, bemoaned my fate. Not effective. Won’t bring the figs back. We learn more from our mistakes than we do from success. Learning to deal with failure is an important part of learning to deal with success.

Here’s the great tip. I learned this from a wise friend: Put cold water in the pot, add about half a cup of salt and a quarter cup of baking soda, but the pot on low heat and let it slowly boil for about 20 minutes. Pour the mess down the drain, and the pot will be easy to clean–no hard scrubbing.

And I’m back outside, watching for a few more figs to ripen.