You can lose yourself in awesome. Awesome itself is overload ... boredom is seldom awesome.
For the last 10 years, I've been traveling the world, working with all kinds of companies, eating great food, staying in (sometimes) posh hotels, speaking at conferences and it's been awesome. But it has also been all consuming.
Two years ago, Toni and I decided to be more picky about clients - work to ensure success, find companies that are willing to do the hard work of building a culture - not ones that simply want to by a box of Agile or someone else's canned Lean journey. By and large, that's worked pretty well. ... Which is awesome.
But I remembered this morning that I had this blog, called Evolving Web, which at one point was one of the most highly read blogs on the internet. I wrote this blog because I was a writer. Blogging led to books. Books and blogging led to travel and new work. And ... strangely to be alienated from writing.
So, what did I write in Evolving Web?
Whatever I wanted.
Read back through the archives and you'll find explorations of collaboration, governance, design, food, relationships, movies, art, music, and so forth. I simply can't do those things on the Modus Cooperandi or Personal Kanban blogs. Because of that, I've kind of lost who I am. I find I read less, I'm doing less extra-curricular things, because my writing outlets have been over-focused.
That originally meant that I wasn't writing about the things I saw while traveling. However, recent trips have made me question how a lack of a blog and the preponderance of Facebook means that all my observations are fleeting and succinct. "This is a pretty flower" "It's snowing" or "Look at my hair cut." That means I, too, am falling prey to becoming less observant, less present, less the person I consider myself or want to be.
Strangely enough, social media has made it easier to ignore the world by being inundated by the world. We are becoming desensitized to everything good and react to everything bad. We are less thoughtful, I am less thoughtful.
This morning, my Adron Hall, whom I rarely see because I travel too much, posted this post on Medium. In it he is talking about Medium, where I have my Agile Heretic project, but he's really talking about communication, being a writer, and about being Adron - a human being. (And even if he didn't write that, it's what I read into it.)
When I was running Gray Hill and at the start of Modus, I blogged every morning. No matter where I was, I would wake up and blog. Because of that, I was always both present in what I was doing (learning) and present in what was happening around me (not .. on .. line). I want to get back into that, and this is the place for it.
So I welcome you back to the resurgence of Evolving Web ... and maybe a more whole Jim Benson.
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