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You probably won’t remember this blog entry when it becomes most useful to you. And probably neither will I…

There’s something I’ve discovered about myself which gets more acute over time and that is, that I’m extremely impatient. That’s a benefit as well as a curse.

But because I get impatient, I get into a weird situation regarding work.

The cycle begins like this:

I get a lot of work, I’m in production, I’m not concerned in the least about generating new assignments, everything looks rosy… then of course at a certain point the work runs out and I find I now need to concentrate on promotion to generate more work.

I’m very familiar with that phase. That’s pretty easy. All part and parcel of being self-employed.

So, I get nice and busy and I PROMOTE, and soon bring myself to a point where that flow is reversed and I’m no longer worried or anxious about things, and it’s all going in the right direction, (OUT) and very soon something will respond and come IN.

Then…

THEN there comes a period when I have truly HAVE promoted enough and work SHOULD by rights be coming in… but as yet the lag of the physical universe is in effect and I find I am becalmed in that dreaded thing- a WAITING PERIOD.

I then have to ENDURE that waiting period. Which is hard.

So then, since I’m an impatient person, I get a little bit frustrated that all my promotion hasn’t had an impact INSTANTLY, resulting in jobs coming in. (My calendar is still bare.)

So then I get a little more anxious and do the only thing that makes sense to me: I promote MORE…

and THEN…

And THEN I go through a period, (which is really the period I wanted to draw your attention to) which is a kind of ennui, a kind of “it doesn’t matter anyway, I’ve tried everything I know and nothing has changed, therefore everything I know is wrong” (to quote the Firesign Theatre.)

But what I HAVEN’T recognized during that time where I was experiencing that ennui, was that the laws of the Physical universe were still in operation, but they were just not quite as impatient as I was.

And so, I don’t realize it, but it’s all about to hit me like a tidal wave, and the work that is about to come in, (now that I am in the depths of apathy about the whole thing) is going to present me with a LOT of problems, including that cliche: multiple jobs come in all wanting me to work the same DAY.

The day I was trying to fill maybe WEEKS ago. Back when I had nothing at all on the horizon.

And now the horizon is FULL of silhouettes of ships and vehicles and animals from strange lands…

All wanting ME. And no one else will do.

And so at that point I am faced with the emergency of having created a TIDAL WAVE of work that is really going to be challenging to pull off. And that becomes my problem.

But it’s a problem that I find much more delicious, and so it doesn’t really bother me nearly as much as NOT having anything to do and WAITING.

This cycle has happened to me so many times –just happened again, in fact– but I still get caught up in the sad, pathetic period before the deluge when I think my destiny is completely out of my hands and that I am a total loser.

Which turns out not necessarily to be true.

Maybe it’s happened to you.