Perhaps I Suffer From Overexpediency

I've been trying to give money away recently. I know that in this economy, that might sound strange, so I'll say that I've been trying to give money away in targeted areas. Apparently, it's not as easy as one would assume.

Let's pretend you are a small business owner and someone approaches you and says, "I would like to hire your business. Here is what I need. Please put together a contract and I will sign it and give you money." In my mind, a reasonable turnaround on that request is 24-48 hours - at the very least, there should be some form of communication within that timeframe. Similarly, let's pretend you want to BUY A CAR. Does it seem like a week should go by without the dealer getting back to you. And when he finally does, is it odd that he is responding to a voicemail you left from two weeks prior and that, in the interim, you met and spoke with him in person?

I feel so conditioned by my own past employment to assume that any request made is already 24 hours late and that everyone plays catch up meaning the sooner the request is fulfilled, the better, but I'm having to rethink this.

(As an aside, it is humorous to note that when the dealer finally did get back to me, albeit with the "woah, didn't anyone call you?" excuse on his lips, he then wanted me to make the decision within 2 hours so he could pad his monthly quota for July. Oh, sorry, didn't quite do that, did I?)

The problem, however, with wedding vendors, for example, is that I (and el padre) are interpreting this lackadaisical method of entering into contractual obligations with us, as unsound business practices which, according to the wedding books, is not something you want in a wedding vendor (of course the wedding books have also counseled me to start my facial and mani/pedi reginmen SIX MONTHS before the wedding, so perhaps not all of their advice is gospel). Don't these people want our money? And can I be assured that if we give it to them they will show up and do the job they were hired to do? Would I be better off hanging out at Home Depot on the morning of the affair and hiring day laborers?

Or maybe I'm just not spending ENOUGH money. Perhaps if I was inquiring at the Ferrari dealership, there would be more handholding, buttkissing, and returning of phone calls. Perhaps if Joel Robuchon was personally catering the party, I could expect things to happen tout de suite!

Or perhaps I'm just too high-strung and this time lapse business is normal and I'm the weird one (well me and my dad). I'm just having difficulty getting my mind around this.

After

So I'll start off by saying it was way less scary than I thought it would be. It was delightfully informal. The first hour was mostly meet and greet. I met two of the hostess's lovely sisters, some of the moms from preschool and mommy group, and friends of friends of friends. I engaged in small talk - something I don't think I'm good at - and tried to keep track of names. Then the speaker took the floor and spoke about her experiences on the road to becoming a life coach for about 15 minutes.

She was cute, and definitely spunky, and certainly very invested in her experiences. She did assume a little more background knowledge in her audience about the sphere of personal improvement, but perhaps that's bias - I didn't really know the names of the people she referenced though it's possible I've seen one of the books she mentioned advertised on a bus shelter. She did not use a lot of hocus pocus words, nor did she speak like a drone or a robot - all good things. And, as I had expected, what she said was elemental; and she admitted as much while asserting that it's precisely the elemental things we find it so easy to overlook.

Then she opened the floor up for questions. I asked one. I even made it honest and truthful and not designed to trick her into admitting she was a massive fraud, or a thetan, or a seller of snake oil. She responded as best she could without giving away strategies best learned through purchasing her book. And she's a businesswoman above all else, so I don't blame her for that. After question time we returned to speaking to one another, only this time, we spoke about what we had just heard. I was gratified to hear more skepticism from the other women than I would have expected. The refrain I kept hearing was to the tune of, "that's all well and good in the abstract, but how do I improve my life starting now?"

The crux of the speaker's thesis, and her name is Marie Forleo if you are interested in learning more, was that we all need to live in the moment more. Now that's one of those catchphrases that twitches me almost immediately, but I attempted to translate it into something more palatable for my snobbish ears. What I came up with is that we all need to learn to be fully invested in our activities if we want them to succeed. That makes a lot of sense and I don't need to dig too deep to discover how rarely I'm fully invested in anything. I'm more of a dabbler, really, and my bank account and self-esteem show that. The how was the ingredient we didn't get for free.

But she said one thing that really resonated with me (see admission of dabbling above): she said that we are programmed to think that success comes, for the most part, in a single arena; that we have to commit wholly to one thing and one thing only and be a success in that; that attempting to be successful more than once and in more than one area is to set one's self up for failure. She called bullshit on that. She said that as long as you are able to be in the moment fully invested in each of the activities that drives you, you don't have to pigeonhole yourself. I can buy that.

But here's the rub: my personal problem, for all of you who are interested, is I'm completely devoid of that initial all-encompassing inspiration. There are a lot of things I could be interested in and could devote my time to, I just am so incredibly wishywashy, indecisive, and self-critical that instead I do nothing. The real development that took place on account of last night's event was the conversation, poorly timed, that devoted partner and I had this morning. And shocker of shockers he said something that is going to stick with me. He said there's a difference between a career and an avocation.

Well, shit, that's true. I started making and selling chocolates while I was unemployed and decided that instead of going to get a stable job, I would hack away at chocolates until it became a stable job. Thing is, it never became a stable job. Why didn't I go back and get another technology job and make chocolates at night and on the weekends? I can answer that question: because that would have been difficult and time consuming and not fun. Sitting around in my underwear and responding to intermittent orders was fun (if non-lucrative). I never made the chocolates my job, I just made the chocolates.

So here's my takeaway: for eff's sake stop quitting your jobs. You have ideas. They constantly percolate. Start following through. Stop thinking that all it takes is an idea and start attempting to make the ideas work. No one will pay me just for having neat ideas (although I always thought that's what working at a think tank was). In the meantime, start thinking about things I could do as a career - perhaps my ideas and my career will intersect, perhaps not, but I shouldn't think of it as a binary system: either I have a career or I have a thing I really like to do.

Oh, and to the one person who won the 258 million dollar jackpot in Missouri... I totally hate you.

Absences

When I started this I wanted to write every weekday, and I've mostly kept to that schedule. Some of you may have noticed, though, that there have been a couple of missed days recently. Those are my chocolate days.

On a chocolate day, I get up around 7:00am and by 8:30am I am already covered in chocolate - and you can take it from devoted partner this is not a sexy-covered-in-chocolate thing at all. I work pretty much straight through, filling the time during which the chocolate has to reach temper by making ganache or caramel or a batch of pates de fruit. I do not stop and check email or even, generally, eat or use the bathroom. It just seems to be the way I work. At night - generally between 7:00pm and 9:00pm, I finish, search for a starch and a seat, and sometimes take a washcloth to my chocolate parts. This is a day in the life of my little chocolate niche.

I've been busy this December for the first time in a long while, and that has been nice. But, having been away from the process, I'm looking at it with new eyes, and these eyes do not like what they see. The meticulous way that I make my confections makes them take a really long time. Over the years, I have tried to be ever so slightly less exacting, but the fact is, every piece has my hands on it at some point in its lifecycle. As I think about the future, I realize this might be unsustainable. I can't imagine that the successful chocolate makers I see are physically interacting with each piece produced under their auspices.

This passes the time while I decorate, or stir, or clean.

This week should be the last production week - I have some outstanding orders and some personal ones, oh, and a whole bunch of people are coming to my house on Saturday and I expect they'll want to eat something. So I didn't write on Friday and I apologize - I hope this was a decent excuse.

Raining and Pouring

Pates de Fruit
Pates de fruit: pomegranate/pistachio, pb&j
Originally uploaded by reallyct

Apropos for the northeast today, no (she asks as she drips dry)? My confectionery ambitions have been tested by the economic downturn, but more by my seeming inability to concentrate on the job of selling what I make as opposed to simply making what I make.

I won't lie, the making is the easy part. For all my narcissism, I am horrid at self-promotion. Plugging my wares seems so, well, "look at me" which it's supposed to be. That's how you sell things. There's also a healthy dose of fear which says that if I try my hardest and fail, isn't that much worse than not trying and sort of failing? These are not personality traits I am proud of.

So I'd like to thank the friends and family who, in the past day, have tried to throw some business my way. Even if I get one of the jobs, it would be a huge deal after a year that has seen practically zero activity. I hope it might re-motivate me as well.

I have always like to think of myself as someone unafraid and resilient, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that there needs to be more experimental evidence to back that statement up. Sure, there have been examples of fearlessness and bounce back-ability, but I'm not sure there have been enough to make such a declarative, nor do I think those are two qualities that permit resting on one's laurels.

With so much else having changed for the better this year, I am going to renew my efforts to change my business for the better. I don't like the idea of failure, but I think the idea of coasting as a lifestyle choice is even more abhorrent to me.

End philosophical self-indulgence.