Don’t think too much about your next move

I don’t know about you but I have a tendency to over think things a bit. I don’t know if there is a chicken and egg moment in my life where that tendency started developing but it is definitely there. I remember walking on egg shells a lot as a kid and I remember the insecurity of leapfrogging into a civilian career after I left the Army. Somewhere in between I started to develop a need for multiple contingency plans to slide into in the event that, if one would fail I had another waiting in the wings.

Any good business owner/project manager will tell you that proper planning is the key to minimizing waste in time and money. That’s all good but not everything in life is a project and/or a business. Life, in its purest form, is life. It is for the living and it is meant to be lived. How do i, when I am trying to grow my little business into something that can sustain my family, take the time to plan and prepare and live life the way it is meant to be lived?

So far, all I have come up with is that there really is no way to plan properly, especially in this economy and period of social and political upheaval. I have a day job that pays the bills and I have a steady stream of word-of-mouth commissions that keeps extra cash coming in to pay for guitar lessons for my son, dance and gymnastics lessons for my girls, and chicken feed for my wife’s new additions.

With Facebook and Instagram it is impossible to ignore the incredibly talented leather workers out there and the sheer volume of work they are producing…certainly on a scale that I can’t compete with. I spent many hours, days, weeks, months, and years trying to plan the right way to compete. Too many hours. Too many years. Too much time away from my family. I would spend too many moments at my workbench trying to plan the perfect piece that would capture the attention of the market and lead to a batch of orders that could be mass produced and marketed to stores to build up repetitive inventory. What was popular? What was trending? How can I take the leather beer holster and improve on it? Turns out…I can’t….at least not in a way that produces income worth the effort. How can I do this? Alone?

Don’t. Just don’t. Don’t compete. Don’t try so hard to fit into the box. Life is not found inside a box. Life is everything outside of the box…including the box. I started to look at life and appreciate the beautiful things in it, like my wife and kids, my friends and family, the Earth, Art, Culture, and all of Gods magnificent creation, and my imagination started to lead me. The more I let go the more I saw and, when I got my hands on the material, the leather was allowed to become what it was meant to become. I was happier, my family is happier, and, as I have been told, my art was elevated to another level. That’s a life worth living