navigating your life through values

Digital Craft Time…

On my schedule, it says “Writing”, and has for the last hour and a half. However, I’ve been doing something else, something that was inspired yet again from Chris Brogan’s The Freaks Shall Inherit the Earth.

In this case, it’s in the section called “Make Your Own Compass”. “Write down maybe five to seven reminders you need to focus on daily.” Then he gets bossy:

And I don’t mean that you should think, “Hey, I’ll do this later.” I mean stop what you’re doing and make a compass right now.

As you might guess, I think you should do that as well. So don’t click until you’ve done it. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

Ok, so here’s what I came up with. First I drew a picture of the compass rose, and then started throwing words at it. Then I realized that the words were pretty easily mapped to the four elements, which I’m actually a little embarrassed by (that’s a bit more woo than I am comfortable with). After a while I realized that this seemed less like a compass and more like the viewfinder on a…well, let’s pretend I didn’t just finish binge-watching “The Unit” and call it a camera lens. The question then became: what would I be looking at through that viewfinder? I’m not a big one for destinations, but paths, yes, those I understand.

My compass became the viewfinder through which I view my path through life. Not exactly what Chris was suggesting, but I like to think it was pretty close:

This is a way to keep you tied to your goals and help you remember to dig out of the areas where you might get a bit stuck.

He gives an example of one of the parts of his own compass: Work the plan. If there’s no plan, make the plan. Simple. Direct. I found another fun little reminder online that really could be considered the root of any success ever:

But me, I’m kind of a fancy pants, so I went out and fired up the old graphics program, searched flickr for a bit, and came up with the fancy version of my own compass:

So. I showed you mine. Wanna show me yours?