Big Projects, Big Freakouts
I used to struggle with Finishing Things. I would get really great ideas, start to act on them in the thrill and excitement of starting something new, then I’d get distracted by a new shiny object, and the original project would slide by the wayside. Every once in a while I’d pick it up again and examine it. wondering whether I should start the work on it again, which I might do for a day or two, but invariably just as I was nearing a good completing point I’d quit.
This became so much a part of who I was that I knew before I even began a big project that I wasn’t going to follow through on it. Now, in fairness to me, that’s not entirely true. I did some cool things in my jobs, including creating a living history day at the museum I was a student docent at. But those projects succeeded because there were outside forces holding me to account. A boss was expecting something. A project needed to be turned in to a teacher for a grade.
Something that was just for me, though? No way. I had amazing business ideas – like NomadChick, a travel website and community for solo women travelers that I started creating back in 2001 (there’s still a NomadChick meetup in London, of all things). I’d work on them for a few months, start to get momentum, and then get scared and quit.
Every once in a while I followed something through, and it scared the crap out of me. Opening Night of the Vagina Monologues, which I had produced in my hometown, and sold out with a line around the block was petrifying. But the one thing that kept me sane was that there was an entire team of people involved – it wasn’t just me. I didn’t feel as exposed as when I was doing something completely on my own.
The idea that I could take a personal passion of mine, create a project and see it through its natural progression, watch it come to a conclusion, and do it all without any external forces acting on me? Uh, yeah. Not possible.
Really, that’s been the biggest thing about the past five years that I have accomplished – seeing one project after another go from a small seed in my head to an actual project for others to participate in. This first happened in 2016 when I got the idea for the Tudor Planner, self published it, did some Facebook ads, and sold over 300 in a month. Now I work with a printer, have warehousing and distribution set up, and it’s just a thing that I do each year without even thinking about it.
Then came the Tudor Summit in 2017 – bringing together Tudor authors and historians in a big two day online summit. That morphed into Tudorcon, which happened in person last year (when things actually happened in person) with 100 people who traveled from around the world to converge in Pennsylvania for three days of Tudor learning and entertainment. And now, because Tudorcon isn’t happening in person this year, we’re doing it all online.
Live on the internet. For three days. There are about a million things that could go wrong, and this weekend I had a massive freakout and spent my time playing online puzzle games rather than work on what needed to be done. That, my friend, is how you sabotage yourself and your projects. Plus, when you’re not working on your projects, you’re giving yourself time to think about all the ways it could wrong, and all the reasons you were dumb to think it would work out anyway.
When you’re on the field playing – working on your project – you don’t have the time to wonder if it was a dumb idea. You’re too busy actually doing the work to think about why it will never happen.
So now I’m writing up a list of all the things that could go wrong, and the ways I will handle them. The main thing for this weekend is that our wifi could go out. In which case I have a backup host, and I can go to a hotel. If a speakers’ internet goes out, I can always fill the time slot by doing a talk of my own. Basically, I’m worried about the internet. But that can be solved. And just knowing that I have a backup plan makes a world of difference in my sanity, and trusting that things are going to work out. You don’t get that when you’re sitting on the couch playing games and avoiding the issues.
The bigger my projects become, the bigger my freakouts. And the more work it takes to talk myself down from them, and get back into action. But I also get stronger from practice on smaller projects. So it works out, really.
The cure for freaking out about any ongoing project is to just get in action on it. Just take one step. When you’re busy taking action, you have less time to worry, and you can anticipate potential pitfalls better. So just take a step. Just one.
