Many years ago, Stephanie suggested to me that I needed a hobby. I never really understood why she insisted that was the case. I mean, I liked running my silly Web sites and coaching volleyball and such. Those were my hobbies. At the time, she was trying all kinds of new things, like soap making, knitting and such. In retrospect, I have to give her a lot of credit for trying a great many things.
But I felt like I was pretty balanced out. Coaching in particular was such an intense thing, and I had to balance that out or I'd go nuts. These days, I don't have coaching, and I miss it like crazy. Even at my most tweaked out, I had the joy of it all.
So I get it in my head that I'm going to stick to my programming hobby more, which is hard because it's my day job too. And then I disappoint myself when I don't spend more time on it, because the entrepreneur in me isn't achieving. But then lately I've been thinking about the balance thing, and when I go back to ancient blog posts about coaching, working and doing other stuff, it always came back to balance.
My desire last weekend to build model rockets, that came out of the need for balance. And this weekend, I built those rockets. When seeing the TV reports about the auto show, I thought, I've never been to one, why don't we go? So hopefully we'll do that next weekend. There are all of these things I talk about and never act on, so like the movie Yes Man, I find myself more willing to do stuff I haven't really done.
And you know what the interesting side effect of that is? When I do get back to things like programming and coding for *Buzz, I really enjoy it and get into it. I don't get burned out or set expectations for myself to do more. I'm just able to be.
So Steph's advice was actually pretty good, even if I didn't feel like it applied to me at the time. When I line it up in the context of trying to balance myself out, it totally makes sense.