For the past couple of weeks. Hell, I lie. For the past month or so I’ve been craving and experimenting with coffee. It’s my new love and I don’t think it is something that is going away. Not only do I benefit from the great and sometimes horrible coffees that I taste, it’s the process of figuring out what I like, with what device, that is allowing me to explore a place that was so exotic to me. See, here is the thing, I’m a lover, a big lover of tea. I love the shit. I can drink green tea (Gunpowder from Adaigo Teas is the best) any part of the day. One of the reasons why I love it so much is because you can steep it up to three times and still get similar characteristics from one steep session to the next, but what I truly love about it is how different I can make it from time to time. It just depends how I want it during that time of day. I’m comfortable and loving the tea making process just as much as drinking the damn stuff. But the thing lately is that my big ass tea bag is still a big ass tea bag because I’ve been in love with coffee.

Just like with anything, it’s a process that goes along with it. No matter what it is, especially in the beginning, you will fuck up. You have to allow yourself to fuck up and get frustrated. It is the only way that you will grow.

Last month I had a crazy challenge to out do my day gig with my side hustle. I failed. It was ambitious and I worked my ass off. Just ask my wife on how many hours I spent either away from home or making boxes or in my phone answer customer emails. It was and still hard work and I know that I’ve devoted so much time to it, but I’m seeing the process and progress through and things are happening. One of the biggest change that I have started to do is making this process as easy for me. So now I’m changing the way I’m doing it, making it run more efficient and decreasing my time. It’s a so so process and it is working for me, I just have to convince my dad this way works best for me. I guess what I’m realizing is that I’m okay with change. Some people aren’t. Whatever the case, the system is different and getting better with my side hustle and I know when I look up from a month from now it will change again for the better.

So, why all this talk about coffee, tea and side hustle? Well, they have something similar to each other which is the process of doing things. You are never going to be good at something unless you get frustrated and keep going. Try it differently, but keep doing that thing. Over the Christmas break my wife and I watched an amazing documentary called “Jiro Dreams of Sushi”. It was the best documentary I’ve watched in a while. I highly highly recommend it. The cliff notes of it is that you first find your passion and you keep getting better at it every day. I’ve done that in many parts of my life and didn’t realize it until watching the film. Constantly doing and doing and learning and getting frustrated brings experience. It’s quite an amazing thing if you think about it.
This year is no exception. I took the break to look at myself and figure out what I wanted to do for the year. My mind wasn’t as clutter as previous years. I guess I’m getting better about cutting shit out. There were two things that kept creeping up and I thought about how the hell I was going to do both of them. Both require so much time from me in different ways and could easily interfere with the other. It’s interesting having two things still makes things complicated. But that is what I have on my plate.

In all that I have planned for the year, there are processes in place for me to succeed. Here is an example of that and tying this blog post together.

Writing is a big part of my life. It’s been four years since I took the oath to myself to write everyday until I die. It’s been going well and I love and hate the experience and something that I crave and feel it is a burden. But it brings me joy because of the power it allows me to have over myself. Late last year everyone knows that I wrote a second book. I’m sure the purest out there would call what I wrote wasn’t much of anything (110 pages)–but I don’t give a fuck about them. The most important thing about the process is that I wrote it for myself—long-hand. I was laughing and had to pause a couple of times thinking about what I wrote. Writing the novella took 11 days. But I planned for 30 days before I wrote it. However, thinking about how I wrote and planned for so short of a time, it took some years for that story to come out of me. I had to live and be and allow life to come to me.

So I put the story down for 3 months and wanted to get as far away from it as possible. One of my goals for the year is to publish the book myself. I have so many ideas of making that happen, but the first thing I have to do is do something that has frightened me for a long time. To edit the damn thing. The first book I wrote was a good attempt to write a story. But I never got back to edit it because it was so hard to me. It was easy to just put it down. But I have challenged myself to get the edit done this month. Everything is going well and I’m learning more about myself with the process. I’m falling in love with the story even more and looking forward to ironing out the loose ends of it.

What I’m doing with the book many may feel that it is hard work. I don’t think of it as hard work. The main reason is because I’ve been writing every single day for 4 years. Every single day. Think about that. That is a lot of practice of just writing for the fuck of it. That is the beauty of doing something repetitively and not looking for a sign that I’ve arrived at the finish line, simple always chasing that carrot.

This is the start of my exploration of getting my book published. This is going to be a hard journey and going to let everyone know of the process and all the stuff I’m planning on doing in order to make this a true reality.