Coronavirus Part 2, Day 44- On Finishing Projects

I’m sitting out on my balcony this morning, listening to the birds and the beeping of the waste removal truck and a downy woodpecker doing his work in the distance. We were supposed to be out of town on a trip this week, but this hasn’t panned out. So it’s staycation I guess. It very humid today.

This weekend I had virtual drill which was a lot of fun, almost as much fun as in person drill. I don’t care what anyone says, being in the military is fun. There was a time when I thought it was miserable, but I look back and marvel at how naive I was. Because in the military you instantly belong someplace. It’s a place where you make friends quickly, and you do unusual things with your new friends. I read somewhere that it takes 200 hours to become best friends with someone. It’s very hard to hit 200 hours in normal life.

I had the idea last drill to do an online class on Civil Information Management writing and reporting. It was the perfect situation because the content was fresh in my mind and easy for me to present whatever new ideas I had. But drill weekends are tricky, because you are only getting paid for the time you spend during the weekend, so if there is something that involves planning, the planning needs to take place a month beforehand so people are not working in between drills, for free.

For this reason, drill sometimes feels like everyone is going around in circles trying to catch up on tasks and never getting ahead of them. I’m glad to say that we did manage to get ahead of things enough to create a class and present it to the group. I would say the end result was at about 60%, because the content was a bit all over the place and not nearly as focused as I would have liked, but the situation at drill being what it is, I’m glad we got this far.

There’s this great saying in writing, which is that written projects are never finished, they are simply abandoned. The same can be said for any creative project, because there is always something to improve upon and more to do and at some point the author of the thing must arrive to good enough, whatever that is. The important thing is to do the thing. To present it, publish it, post it, send it, book it, log it, whatever. “Ship it or it doesn’t count”, like Seth Godin says. Because none of it is a dead end. Once the thing is out there, it’s a data point from which to learn, and a jumping off point to next, better thing.