Camp Creek Press

Interviewing Maira Kalman for the Inspiration Boards Blog was a thrill.

The blog is one of my many side projects. It helps me stay focused to have a lot of little fires to maintain.

If I just had one project — albeit my main project — in front of me, I would go clean a closet or organize a drawer. At the end of a month I'd be very organized but my project would languish.

Side projects give me something to fiddle with that keep me in front of the laptop and exert a gentle pressure back to my main project. They are like secondary moons whose collective gravitational pull keeps me in orbit around my main project.

Because it's a side project, I don't have much fear about failing with it. Failed side projects get swept under the rug or out the door and forgotten, replaced with shiny, new side projects.

Because it's a side project, I don't worry too much about preplanning it to death before I get the job done. The point of a side project is to always have something ready to slap a coat of paint on or drive around the block. If you've ever known someone who restores vintage cars, they typically have a gorgeous — if nonfunctional — sports car in the garage and they drive around in a beat-up Chevy. My sports car is my main project; I drive around the Interwebs in my side projects.

There's no downside to the side project. If you succeed, it's very encouraging and invigorates your "real" work. If you fail, it's always a learning experience — you can't fail without learning something — and you can apply that to your "real" work.

Too many times, we artificially hold ourselves back from our true capabilities. We set "realistic" goals. We hedge things a bit so we can avoid the sting of failure.

Side projects allow me to simultaneously extend my grasp and get used to failing and rebounding. It makes me more confident, because I learn that failure really isn't so bad. It makes me ambitious, because success is so fun.

When I asked Maira Kalman for an interview, the worst thing that could have happened was, she could have said no. A good reminder that most people are nice, and you can't achieve anything if you don't try.

For many people (most people?), side projects would probably simply function as a distraction keeping them from working on their most important goal. They dilute your attention. However, they also dilute your fear, and they gang up to help attract you back to your desk and get you in work mode. It's easy to procrastinate with one big project; it's a lot harder with a handful of mini-projects. There's always something bite-size to work on, and then you're in work mode and you might as well look at your main project.

Bite-size successes whet your appetite for the main course. And .. that's about it for metaphors for me this morning. Have a great day!

The world stands aside to let any man pass who knows where he is going. — Spencer's Mountain