I’m starting to realize that a big reason I never feel satisfied with my ambitions is that I am not pacing myself. I’m doing too much at once. I can’t help it because there’s a since of immediacy to everything that spins in my head, and it seems irresponsible to not act on these ideas NOW.

(This, of course, stems from my 15 minute of fame with The Real World. When the clock is ticking on fame and influence, there’s no reason to postpone any goal. The time is now. It was if every minute of everyday I heard a ticking clock in my head. When the time ran out, the party was over. Extraordinary is over; it’s time to go back to an ordinary life.)

This new revelation about pacing myself popped into my head because I’ve been in 2007 planning meetings almost every day for the past 2 weeks. These meetings are bizarre because nobody has ever bothered joining me to plan for lifeteen.com. In the first 2 years of working on the site, it’s as if the organization didn’t even know it was there. And for the last 3 years, people have taken notice, but it’s been too abstract for them to understand. What I did worked, and that’s all that mattered. People left me alone. And to a degree this was cool because I had ultimate independence, but that also meant that I was isolated and had little support.

Now lifeteen.com is a critical cornerstone of our organization, and everyone wants it to continue to succeed. Our web staff is now increased to 3 people, which I thought would never happen. Different parts of the organization are contributing to the website, and it’s important that we communicate with one another on all projects. That means we have to plan. Hence the 2007 planning meetings.

I was excited about the new attention until it came time to sitting down with President Randy and picking dates when we’d finish projects. Keep in mind, these are projects that we’re working on right now, and could very easily be done next week:

  1. Making a TV show, airing it through our new video player
  2. Creating a podcast talkshow
  3. Creating a podcast for XLT
  4. Creating a podcast to teach types of prayer
  5. Designing several new T-shirts
  6. Design a new EDGE logo
  7. Design several EDGE Tshirts
  8. Maybe redesign the Life Teen logo
  9. Redesigning the store homepage to be updated through Flash and XML
  10. Do live event video coverage

President Randy patiently worked with us to assign dates to each of these projects so that it’s spread over the next 365 days. When he asked my opinion, I was too much in shock to say anything. I just couldn’t fathom why you’d take a whole year to do this. But I figured it was time for something new, and maybe taking our time would be good for us. I nodded my head in silence, and we each marked out calenders.

In the week since we had this planning meeting, I’m realizing that it really will take an entire year to accomplish these goals, whether planned for it or not. If we attacked these projects all at the same time, some would get done now, others would get done later, and the last projects would get done way later. And that works out to an entire year. So pacing ourselves and being realistic about our goals will help us feel better about what we do.

This is an entirely new idea for me: to pace myself for success. Maybe if I slow down a little and take it one thing at a time, I’ll get more done.