The Red Queen's Race

By | Saturday, December 17, 2011 3 comments
We're at the tail end of 2011 and I am utterly astounded at how fast that went. I was just scanning through my timeline on Facebook, and I kept seeing notes about things that happened AGES ago! They seemed like ages, at any rate.

It used to be, even as late as a couple years ago, I would get to Friday and think, "Hey, cool. I can start the weekend now." It was certainly good break from the daily grind, but it didn't seem like that huge of a deal. These days, I feel like I'm running full speed all week and when I get home at the end of Thursday is when I collapse. But then I still have to drag myself through Friday, and I don't have all that much time to relax on the weekends.
"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else -- if you ran very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."

"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"
That's from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass. I suspect a number of people feel kind of like that these days.

But one thing we do here at Castle Kleefeld is keep our eyes forward! "Face front" as Stan Lee used to say! So I'm looking ahead to 2012 as much as possible. I've got some things I'm trying to get in motion to keep me pretty busy throughout the year. Several months back, I talked about how we should try to follow a webcomic-type model of generating long-tail incomes. I'll be trying to more of that as time moves on.

Not to mention just working more, in general. Jack Kirby was often credited with being a fast artist, but a lot of it was that he would regularly sit down at the drawing board for insanely long stretches at a time. He was quick, sure, but he would also put in 10, 12 and 14 hour days with a pencil in his hand. I'll be using a keyboard and mouse instead of a pencil, but there's a similar gist there.

So, as you start planning for 2012, might I suggest a new pair of really good, high quality running shoes? Because if you want to make it anywhere, you're going to have to run twice as fast as you have been!
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3 comments:

Matt K said...

Buurrrrrrn-ouuuuuut...

:-)

That's the weird thing; I've gotten burnt out before, and this ain't it. I'm doing enough different types of things that it's keeping me pretty actively engaged on everything. This is more like a physical exhaustion. I go to bed around midnight most nights thinking, "Damn! I didn't have enough time to work on X." I'd stay up later to do that, but I have to get up at 6:30 as it is.

Matt K said...

Oh, well, I don't necessarily draw a distinction between the two. :-)

I see the point you're making, though, even if it's possibly an academic one when if you end up wearing yourself out either way.

Try to avoid that. :-)