Idlemind - nickcoster.com

It is the New Year again, and I still feel the need to write but have a crappy resolve to get the keyboard moving at my fingertips. I have been doing a bit more free writing where I just open up my ‘brainvalve’ and try and allow the fingers to keep up. I haven’t done a lot of follow up to see what the results of that undirected blather have been.
It is looking like a very busy year where my commitment to output is going to be tested. There is too much thinking and not enough output and with out put the thinking may as well not have happened.
So Happy 2010!

Jack is just over 8 months old now and it is amazing to watch his development. He now has his third tooth appearing pm his top gum to compliment the pair on the bottom.
He is able to pull himself to a standing position, provided he can find something stable enough to drag himself up on. This has often been the leg of anyone standing still long enough to be used as support.

The last 5 months have been amazing and exhausting, rewarding and frustrating. For the last five months I have been a dad to my beautiful little man – Jack.

Tonight Jack is having a hard time getting some sleep. We have been pretty lucky lately with his sleep. He has learned to relax himself and sleep on his own in his own bed – most of the time anyway. Tonight however he is sick with a cold. This is making sleeping flat a difficult proposition since his throat seems to fill with goop, causing him to cough and wake himself up.

Right now he is draped across my lap, asleep with the tele filling the empty silence of the dark night. I am going to have to try and get him to sleep before I doze off myself.

Walking down Martin Place in Sydney every day it is easy to feel like a scrooge as I turn away a host of charity workers asking for money, or a credit card number to help them support their chosen cause.

In the mean time Seth Godin raved about a micro loan project where instead of donating money to a cause that is (at least to me) quite faceless, i loan money to an individual investor to help them achieve a particular goal.

And then they pay it back, which gives me the opportunity to give again later with the same money. So I am going to pledge here that I will invest USD$50 a month to this process.

While it doesn’t payback any interest there is a different kind of return. A human return. I will get to hear how the loan has effected the lives and the family who has less than me but is doing something about it. Now that I am a father, thinking about the future of the world and setting an example in it feels rather important.

I think that this is a great idea and the longer I contribute the more value I will be able to add over time.

Imagine what $700Billion might have done for these sort of people…

It may be obvious but when it is hard to write, then writing can be very hard to do. Writing has it’s own momentum that can take a while to get rolling effectively.

The question that I need to aswer is not how to write more effectively, but how to start faster and then keep the focus on the target.

Start faster… I’ll ponder that as i finally sleep tonight.