Six Weeks and the fruits of focus

Six Weeks.

That’ll be the time between my last weekly review and the next one. That didn’t just happen by incident. Almost six weeks ago, I decided to focus on two things, and two things alone:

• The renovation project
• Writing an e-book

The renovation project

The renovation project is an ongoing activity for such a long time now. It’s hardly a project anymore, it’s a part-time job (or that’s how it feels at times). So I decided to focus a lot of time and attention to it to get it to the point of being done. And while I’m still not completely there, I made tremendous progress over the past few weeks.

The confidence that I’m going to finish it soon is back, and I ordered the carpeting last weekend. They’ll be laying the carpet August 22nd and I know I’ll be done by then. After that the renovation project is DONE! Sure there’s a ton of other chores to do in and around the house, but the major project is done.

Writing an e-book

I never expected it to take six weeks, but that’s the time I needed to write an e-book, make the graphics, have a cover designed, and get it proofread by native speakers. And to redesign the graphics, rewrite parts of the book, and redesign the graphics some more. It was an interesting process, I can tell you that.

But the good news is that I finished it. From start to finish, it took me six weeks, give or take a couple of days. The book will launch tomorrow (Tuesday July 29).

Confidence booster

Some of you may have read it between the lines, but as things progressed in the past few months I wasn’t quite satisfied with myself and with the progress I was making. That’s when I decided to focus my attention on a very limited set of things: my regular things (family and my day-job) and two projects. Nothing else. And that meant no blogging, no twittering, no running, no nothing.

It felt like an extreme measure, but it paid off. It was a real confidence booster for me, experiencing the progress when you focus on a very limited number of things. And to experience the fun coming back to them. Instead of grinding my thoughts over the lack of progress, I got empowered by focusing on making progress on the projects AND working on them at the same time. It was great.

I think I might even do better when I just focus on one project, beside the regular things. There have been times where the projects where biting each other, in time and mind-space.

Naming my own company

For a while now I have been walking around with the idea of starting my own company and transferring my online activities to it. It’s easier to make the income fiscally comprehensible, and it’s a platform on which I can launch other activities. I hadn’t gotten around to it yet though. And one of the things that was holding me back, was that I wanted to have a good name for it.

Almost at the end of the six weeks, in a spare moment when I was the only one awake in the house (I’m back to my night owl rhythm currently) I watched the movie Fight Club. To relax a bit, but also inspired by Brett Legree of 6weeks.ca. There is a particular scene, where six weeks is a crucial period for someone. He (a random dude called Raymond K. Hessel, who looks nothing like his Germanic sounding name) gets six weeks to change his life in such a way that he’s in pursuit of his dreams again. Or else…

Six Weeks again. 42 days. 42.

Wasn’t that THE answer? The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything? Yep, it is.

That was enough for me to decide that it should be the name of my company. Now the company name will not be very visible as I want to launch activities on their own names and brands, but nevertheless I want it to have a meaning. You never know what it might grow into (ambitious as I can be).

So Six Weeks is the name of my company. I did run it by Brett to make sure he was okay with it. After all it’s the name of his blog, but he quickly replied that I should go for it. Thanks Brett (you know I’ll be crediting you for a long time to come…).

So you may find Six Weeks as a name associated with How to be an Original, in the footer of the blog, but also in my Paypal account for instance. Don’t worry about that, it’s still me!

I loved the power of focus in the past six weeks. I will revisit that feeling often. But it’s also damn good to be blogging again!