James Danderfer

Along the way in my “planning struggle hell journey” I’ve faced this situation a few times: There’s me, sitting alone, in a coffee shop with my cliche moleskin notebook in front me, writing out my career options: What are my strengths? What are my opportunities? How can I make a living at this for Christ sake?!, etc etc. I’ll end up with a series of short lists under each heading and think: “Is that it? Please somebody tell me that’s not it! Please tell me my chosen career, my life contains more opportunities than playing shitty cocktail parties, producing CDs for closet storage, and ramming music lessons down some kids throat who is only there because his parents want him/her to spend less time playing World of Warcraft. Normally, after that, I’ll wish I had a considerably smaller head, so that I could shove it squarely into that freshly brewed pot of boiling hot coffee behind the annoyingly contented Starbucks employee. … And then I have my bad days.

My point is that more…

Welcome back to the battlegrounds my good readers. It’s been a slow and steady fight this week with little ground gained, yet we must persevere, and so here is part 2 of the dramatic journey into Artistic Planning. … What’s that? You weren’t with me last week? In that case, part 1 is right here, in the last news post. But if you don’t want to sift through all that nonsense about my intimate relationship with McGill University then here’s the short version:

Part 1:

Your plan must be flexible because it will change, sometimes drastically. It’s guaranteed. But just because it will change, doesn’t make today’s plan of action any less valid! more…

Well, it happened. I courted that McGill University, and courted her hard. I made small talk, I expressed my affections, and made my intentions clear. Then, with little more than a flirtatious email in return I flew back to her and laid bare my soul (via jazz clarinet audition) with the plea to Love Me!… er, … rather Accept Me!?

And like any noble University would do, she made me wait,… and wait. Delicately stringing me along with the odd hint of interest, slyly stoking the fires of my more…

This weeks Saturday Morning News Post is going to be a short one folks. It’s very late on a Friday night and I left this to the last minute, … what a surprise.

So I’m going to pose a question to all 8 of my readers out there: Why are we so good at avoiding making a personal plan for ourselves? Whether you have a steady job or not, but especially if you’re some kind of “free agent” artiste, there’s some part of your life that requires planning. If you work for a company then congratulations, most of your career planning is done for you, at least the day to day stuff is kind of mapped out with deadlines, projectives, etc, etc. But there’s still other parts of life that you’d like to see turn out a certain way, and that certain way would be a lot more likely to come to fruition if you planned for it in some way. No? more…