IT is nice to be back in my St Albert Office moving toward productivity again.  Have you noticed that transition time theses days seems to be getting longer.  Flight delays, weather delays, fatigue from traveling and all the catch up means it takes me until Wednesday at around noon to finally feel like I can sit down and tackle one of my many projects.  And before you know it I might have to take off again for the weekend and a gig in Canmore so the travel and transition times suddenly overtakes the time dedicated to the real WORK.

I think I am getting tired of the need to move and I never thought I would hear myself say  that or watch myself write that.  I like what I do because it is varied and I get to move around a lot. Suddenly the ROI for travelling and weekly relocation has dropped and I am seriously reconsidering where and when to do this work.

By work I mean writing, and product development.  I have a new sign in my office that reads “Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money…. ”  I am struggling with that.  Writing is an honourable profession and sharing your thoughts and research and stories takes courage. Not everyone will like what you have to say and even more will dismiss it or never read it at all.  It is true vulnerability. “Here I am… What do you think?”  Crazy really….. but it does deserve compensation from a society that benefits from the sharing.

Even Malcolm Gladwell, one of my favourite writers, gets criticized.  I am about to do that.  I will apologize ahead of time but the mistake that he made with this new book “David and Goliath” is that he wrote his previous books so well.  This one needs ONE MORE EDIT to tie the ideas together in a coherent way.  It is a great concept and a wonderful message but is sometimes lost in the paragraphs he wrote to pull the thoughts together.  It becomes confusing.  It might had been better had he left it to the readers, and his readers will be discerning, to figure out the connections that he tries to make obvious in obscure, confusing paragraphs that seem to come out of nowhere.

I learn content from Gladwell but I also learn process.  I am grateful that he continues to have this wonderful curiousity to find out about things and the courage to capture his thoughts for the rest of us to consider. And I understand what it takes to put a book together and how the pull of family, friends and other obligations can overwhelm and interrupt the flow of the writing.  It is still a great book and it is on the shelves while mine are not.  Kudos