OK, I actually tried. I actually tried. I finished reading, by the way, The Artist's Way, A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron. And out of the whole book, I'm, by the way, it's a 30-year-old book.
It was, you know, it was... But the one little part that I pulled out of there was the morning pages. This is a practice where you write three pages longhand of your thoughts every morning, three pages. And just whatever is coming to your mind every morning, three pages.
So this morning I got up and I got my yellow legal pad and I sat down. All right, I'm just going to admit I was wrong. I thought it'd be cool. I thought it'd be a great idea.
You know, I thought it'd be a great idea. Took my legal pad. I had three pages I was going to do. I was going to sit down and I was going to go at it.
And the premise of the thing is that over a period of time, you'll get better at it and, you know, you'll start putting all these rituals together and it'll all start to, you know, be cohesive. No, I got three sentences done. I got three sentences and I was done. I was done.
I cannot do that. I cannot sit down without thinking about what I'm going to write about and writing. I can sit down and write. I can sit down right now and I could go into a computer and I could type a bunch of stuff.
I could do that very, very well. But I just can't sit there in the morning without thinking of anything and just start writing three pages. That's the discipline, three pages, longhand, write it all out. What am I going to say?
I got three sentences done. They were totally nonsensical. And I just said, okay, I'm old and life is short. Do I want to spend how long it's going to take me to do this when I am totally not enjoying it?
And the answer to that was, oh, heck no. Heck, the answer to that was... No! Yeah, exactly.
No. I wanted to do what makes my heart sing. That's what I want. I want joy.
I want to create beautiful things. I don't want to, you know, that was an exercise that made no sense to me. And, you know, this is a thick book. I'm sitting here looking at it right now.
And, you know, they even have questions and answers in the back of the book. And I don't know. It didn't do it for me. I'm sorry, Julia Cameron.
If you want to come on the podcast with me sometime, we can discuss it. But you're not going to want to. And I don't really want you to. But here's what I like to do.
I like to plan out my day. And when I plan out my day, I will write something down as I'm planning out my day. And for years, I had, well, you know, I used to write out 12 things a day. That's what I remember for years, 12 things a day.
Then I knocked it down to six. Then I knocked it down to three. And lately, I've been doing one. Although today, after I, you know, finished this and just put it away, just, you know, ripped the page off, crumbled it up, threw it in the trash.
I didn't, you know, I wrote two things that I wanted to accomplish today. I accomplished both of them early, early. Got them both done. And I was happy about that.
And then I, you know, came back and rested a little bit and I started thinking about what kind of creative things I could do. And I came up with a really cool idea about a website that I want to do. One single page website. I'm not going to tell you what it is now, but I'm going to do this.
I want to do a single page website. It might be a long page. It might not. It might be very short, but I want to do a single page website that I think will help people, that people can participate in, and it could be beautiful.
Single page website. That's what I want to do. And I'm just, I've been looking at this and I'm going to do that. I bought some equipment also.
I have all, I'm in a studio right now that has, that is set up for video. It is absolutely set up for video. It's not set up. All the equipment's here.
It's not set up. I've got to rearrange some things and move some things. And I just haven't been able to get that done for whatever damn reason. But I also wanted to just take my iPhone out during the day and start creating some content that I can post one or two days a week on YouTube.
But I tried doing that and I wasn't happy with the audio. So I bought a lavalier mic that goes into my iPhone. And I'm, tomorrow, I'm going to start playing with it and I'm going to have fun. Because you get to a point in life where you're beyond the, I want this goal because I want this house.
I want this. I want this car. And I want, you know, uh, and we just went through a hell of a storm here. Okay.
We just had a hurricane that where I live, things look pretty good. You know, I can drive down the street. As a matter of fact, everywhere I went today was very nice, except if you go to my friend Jennifer's street, every house there flooded out. Jennifer's house is destroyed.
Her car is destroyed. Everything is destroyed. And the same with everybody that lives there. My first wife, Michelle, has a house out on the beach that is now, now they don't live there.
It's cottages, you know, like a cottage. It's a beach house. And uh it is unusable. It is totally unusable.
But there was a lot of people who live near the water, not far from here. I can just go right out my neighborhood. I can turn left. I can drive not even a mile, mile and a half, not even a mile.
And there's houses that have just been terribly, terribly damaged. So I'm, you know, I'm at the point now, I want to create beautiful things. I want to work for joy. I want to work for happiness.
That's what I want to do. I don't want, you know, that's, that's where I'm at. So, sorry, Julia Cameron. Nice book.
Maybe it's great for, obviously, it's great because it's sold like a gazillion copies and I've got the 30th anniversary edition. And people, you know, say wonderful things, but it just didn't work for me. So what works for me are one thing to do a day, two things to do a day. Tomorrow, I've got two things on the list and I haven't even made my list yet.
That's just in the back of my brain. And after I'm done with this podcast, which I'm just about done with, we're in the last one minute of it. I have a newsletter that I wrote that goes out tomorrow. I gotta format it and upload it.
I'll do that in my bedroom on the other computer. So, you know, that's my Tuesday commitment that I have to do. And this podcast comes out on Wednesday. Well, we'll see you on Thursday when we're going to talk about podcasting.
Yeah, I know that. I always say that, but I don't always do it. Oh, well, we do have fun. See you tomorrow.