To people who have just met me, it might seem that everything I have done seems to have panned out. I wanted to work for myself, and my first few business endeavours didn’t turn out so bad. I wanted to paint, and most of my art has had some gallery time as well as been sold. Same with photography. I wanted to be a good rock climber, and I’m climbing at a pretty respectable level. I wanted to be good with women, and my dating life is respectable right now, to say the least. I wanted to be a good snowboarder, dancer, magician, white water kayaker, adventurer, speak multiple languages, and so and and so forth.
Have I been lucky?
Not so much. Along each thing that works out, there are a serious number of embarrassing failures and a lot of perserverance. I’ve just gotten comfortable with embarrassing failures.
I have a number of shelved paintings that I feel are uninspired, even though I’ve spent countless hours on them. I’ll probably throw them out soon once I accept that they are that bad.
Many of my creative endeavors were canned. Even look at this website, for example, you can see on the sidebanner that I had a writing gap. Risingbean.com had virtually no readership in the first year. And right now, I feel the first few articles I wrote were not particularly well written.
I’m more than sure many of the women I’ve approached in the past thought I was creepy, awkward, or weird. Honestly speaking, 9 out of 10 phone numbers I collected didn’t pan out beyond flirty text messages. Even now, many numbers don’t work out. It’s just part of the game. [click to continue...]
