The Great Reset - 2010 In Review

The year 2010 was eventful to say the least. It started in Times Square NYC and ended in a little one-room hideaway about 30 mins outside Santa Rosa, California. You can't get much more different than that, though my companion in both locations was the same- the amazing Sadie Jernigan Valeri, my life partner of now 7 years. I would be lying to you if I didn't tell you that 2010 was HER year.

In fact, over the course of this past year, Sadie has gone from a highly skilled painter with a tiny home studio, a fantastic artist blog and a respectable following to an award-winning still life painter who works out of a much larger studio and shows artwork in three major galleries across the US. She now teaches on the weekends at her studio, with a rapidly growing demand for her workshops and classes, while she paints full time during the week. In other words, her art career has totally blossomed.

For me it was just so much fun to ride in the passenger seat on this particular journey and bear witness to all of the incredible events that took place- to watch her go through each step and to help extinguish any number of the little happenstances that threatened to obstruct her veritable wave of success. I think the most fun part of the year was taking off time from work for a few last-minute jaunts to Florida, accompanying Sadie for her first major gallery showing and subsequent workshop, in February and March respectively. While I was there I got to hang out with some of the wonderful people of the classical-realist art world and drive around in the sunshine, listening to radio stations playing old 80s and 90s tunes all the way. It was fantastic. I also had the chance on one particular occasion to surprise the heck out of my parents who happened to be visiting Florida at the same time I was. Gotcha!

If you look back at the pure numbers of 2010 you could well conclude that I also did pretty darn well for myself, even outside of Sadie's great harvest. In one facet of my life I was busy revisiting my studies of the previous year- an activity that resulted in three heavily researched and meticulously executed philosophical/scientific essays for my epic blog series, Becoming. In another facet I was plugging along in my tenth year of work in the professional visual effects industry. It had gotten to the point where I could more or less do my job on automatic, filling the long work hours of almost effortless routine with podcasts and audiobooks. In other words, I was pretty much on Easy Street.


But there was something else that didn't show up in the stats that I was experiencing on a much deeper level, that I can only now describe as a slow, creative strangle. Day in and day out, weekend after weekend, in the aftermath of throwing in the towel on my long-sought career as a film director, I had no idea what to do with myself. I took down everything having to do with my abandoned feature film script Golden Gate from the walls and bulletin boards of my home office, packaging them up in boxes and putting them in the attic. I deleted files off of my computer en masse, took my personal website down and put the brakes on every other creative endeavor I had going. I had hit bottom in terms of my creative life. From here I would have to completely rebuild my creative self- if any of that part of me even existed anymore. It was a very dark and scary time for me.

As Spring sprung though, I enrolled in Sadie's Drawing for the Absolute Beginner class, which served as the first step to get me out of my rut. While I knew a single class wouldn't make me an amazing draftsperson overnight, I could see from the techniques that I learned that I DID have within me the capability to actually draw an object from life, in perspective and with some semblance of rendered lighting, on the surface of a piece of paper. This was an incredibly encouraging experience for me, and was a clear indicator that I COULD start over from ground zero creatively and make great things, with a little bit of effort and practice (and the right teacher, of course).

By Fall things had somewhat improved. I'd taken a few more intermediate drawing classes with Sadie and spent a full six months of work on my fourth Becoming essay before I finally posted it to my blog, Polyresonance. The essay turned out well and I was generally very pleased with it, but the pace of its execution had been absolutely excruciating. What was worse was that during the times when I didn't feel up for intense essay writing, I found myself squandering the time by cleaning/organizing the house, or whatever I could find to excuse myself from being creative.

I wasn't sketching anything from life as I now could given my new fledgling skillset, nor was I writing anything significant outside of Becoming. In fact I didn't try learning ANYTHING new as I had done habitually (by way of audio classes) over the past few years. And once my fourth Becoming essay had been completed and the formulation of the fifth was far off in the distance, I had nothing left to procrastinate about. I was forced to face the hard fact that beyond these huge nebulous projects like feature film scripts and 3500-word essays, I was deliberately undermining my own happiness by preventing myself from spending my free time on things I found creatively satisfying. I began to wonder exactly what the hell my problem was.

I even went as far as to hypothesize that it all might be a sham- that perhaps for all of these years since college I'd been faking being a truly creative person. Was the jig finally up- the curtain dropping to reveal that I'd fooled myself, my wife, my friends and family, and that I actually DON'T always have something interesting, important and cool in the works- that I'm really just another sap clicking computer keys, numbly motoring through my day to earn a paycheck that will be spent on expensive crap that I just ignore in my free time? And if so, what kind of a life is that?

These questions began to plague me on a daily basis, and as the last few months of the year began to melt away I slid into a bout of depression and anger that I carried with me everywhere I went, making me a generally miserable person to be around.

Then sometime in late November I was browsing Audible.com when I stumbled upon the audio version of the New York Times bestselling book, The 4-Hour Workweek. It sounded intriguing in an outrageous sort of way, and since I had finished Ayn Rand's The Virtue of Selfishness so many months earlier in the year, I felt it was about time I'd had a fresh dose of audacity.

After the first five minutes of the audiobook I was hooked. Here was a guy who managed to screw up pretty much every professional opportunity of his life and still somehow became successful enough selling sports supplements online to be able to travel the world while having only minimal involvement in the day-to-day operations of his business- in fact only about four hours a week.

Since author Tim Ferriss has figured out this little dance of setting up what he calls "muses" - self-sustaining niche businesses that operate with minimal human interaction and with as much as possible outsourced via online office assistants - he had won a gold medal in a martial arts competition in China, become a world champion in competitive tango dancing in Argentina, lived for several months in Japan and had seen more or less everything that the normal worker bee would have to diligently save for until a more traditional retirement age. Instead he recommends taking what he calls "mini retirements" in the frequency of about three PER YEAR. His motto is "don't save it all for the end."

While I'm not all that interested in traveling the world for large parts of the year, nor do I have aspirations to become a tango champion, this book made a huge impact on me because it created a clear distinction between living life with some false sense of obligation (i.e. slaving away for countless hours in front of a computer for one's entire young/middle adult life) and actually enjoying it along the way. Out of all the philosophy I'd read over the last several years, it was this book that finally pushed me to reevaluate things and to honestly ask myself what really mattered to me. Most importantly it set me on a path to make meaningful changes in my life that would in turn allow me to focus more on the things that I really cared about. In the first section of the book Ferriss asks- "How much is your time worth?" All I could think to myself was that it's simply amazing that we can never get up enough courage to ask ourselves these questions.

So in mid December of 2010 I gave notice to my job of four years that I would be leaving the company in January. It was sudden, yes, but it needed to be done, so when the opportunity arose, I took it. The truth is that I'd allowed myself to soak in the same destructive cycle for far too long, and in order to make any meaningful progression towards a better life I needed to start taking some drastic measures. And this is just the first step of many things that will be changing over the next several months. While it's certainly been a painstaking process to get to this point, it's mostly a relief to finally feel the momentum of moving on.

So far in 2011 I've begun to examine and slowly reconstitute each piece of the detritus that was my former creative self, while constantly referring to the wisdom of my past missteps in order to construct a new and better version of that self. I think the most valuable lesson I can draw from the more troublesome experiences of the past year is that mistakes are an important part of life. If we can't learn from them, than we can't possibly hope to progress as individuals or as a civilization.

Friedrich Nietzsche famously wrote "That which does not kill us makes us stronger." I'd like to append that statement to say that it also makes us smarter. The proper use of accumulated wisdom has the ability to turn potential misfortunes into a treasure trove of success. Thus my Great Reset of 2010, when viewed effectively, can only become the springboard for the Roaring Creative Renaissance that will be 2011. And I'm very much looking forward to that. ;-)

Have a great year everyone!  -Nowell