paradigm concept

Spending the whole day at the beach is the most amazing thing.   I went with my wife and Family, and it was great.  It just makes me think about everything with a different perspective.  Nature and all that.  so the fireworks were nice but the waves were much better.

I had to visit the doctor two weeks ago and I found out that my health was really crappy.  I had already cut the crap out of my daily intake and started to exersise.  To little, to late. Now, I have to do that along with cutting out the alcohol. It was good that i went to get checked out cause that makes me conscious of what harm i caused my body with all the fast food and drinking.

so i hope all of you learn from me and cut out the crap before you realize … to little. to late.

Right now I just want to write, so from now on these posts are not going to be in any way restricted by the parameters set and things that will make me put a hold on writing. I want to write more and hence forget any rules I set forth for my “blog.”

I have been thinking about a lot of shttt. Relationships, Design, work ethic, there is all kinds of stuff that I think about while I draft at work. Also, I listen to some good podcast, all the twit.tv stuff and I found a new one about skeptics. I can’t listen to any rev3 stuff because our IT guy didn’t like me looking at that so he blocked it.

Now, moving on to something that I have been thinking about:

Now I’ve drawn a blank… screw it I am sick and tired of the lack of imagination and the waste of my artistic abilities. I find myself sketching through notebooks a bunch of doodles that don’t make any sense and have a lot of creating fonts that i will never use to create a cool design with.

I fill my head with all these distractions and still manage to finish what is required of me at work. It makes Tim Harris’ book The Four Hour Work Week seem to make more and more sense.

The thing I am pissed about is that nothing comes out of all that the podcast that are informative. I write notes sometimes in my note pad, only to be forgotten, along with the crazy babble that I doodle. The notes are mainly surrounded by my mindless cursive of my surname STEVE!!! I always scratch that and write ESTEBAN around it to make me feel better.

I am self diagnosing my self as a crazy person that writes his name over and over to cover up any potential that he might have to actually accomplish great things.

Now what do I do? How do I start working towards something that I could be proud of? As apposed to the piles of doodles in notebooks supplied for note taking in meetings before the meetings?

This is an endeavor that I think could get me in trouble. I should be more focused on the job and less focused on anything else. Sometimes the job is very demanding and requires me to remove the headphones and really focus, but most of the time this is not the case. How do I avoid negative reaction to my attempt at creating something great without causing anyone around me to be alarmed? Maybe they will react by overloading me with things to do.

Who knows? It’s a catch 22. I think I am going to start buying audio books about structures and other stuff so that when I go back to school I will be ready for structures. Maybe some History and conceptual design stuff. I think even some stuff about getting my architecture license. That might be it for now, but what about my doodles?

My last post was not well thought out. First of all, I didn’t even answer the question. I just stated that i would like to have the decision making ability that I feel I lack… and TOTAL POWER!!! HAHaHA

A dream job is a job that besides pay and job security, it meets other needs. It fulfills the need to be proud of what you accomplish. It stops you from having those bad days when you don’t want to get out of bed. For a person in pursuit of a goal, it gives them the freedom to accomplish their goals - in an out of the work place.

In my case, my dream job is a job that realistically wants to create great design and stand out amidst all of the obstacles we face.

Obsticles which include:

1. Budget

2. Time

3. Clients

4. status quo

The list goes on and on, but I digress, these obstacles are what make our job what it is. We must live with them and figure out ways to push good design through their crutches!

My dream job is not too far away. I need only to finish my personal goals and continue my professional ones. The one thing about this that really excites me, is that my comfort level has been raised. I never thought about having a dream job before; I only thought of getting one and keeping one. Even if I hated getting up every morning. and of course power is nice too…

A whole bunch has happened since I last posted. The biggest being, our new apartment. This is huge for me because i am closer to work and school. I have more time to do things and my wife is happier.

With that said, I have been far too distracted to think about new things, new thoughts and new ideas to share here. As you may have figured, I am all about trying to overcome obstacles and figuring out what makes us do the things we do. I am trying to self-analyze my lack of motivation and in turn accomplishment.

I feel that I have gotten to the root of it and am on a mission to change my mental wiring. This, as everyone knows, is a daunting task. So here I am thinking that I am well on my way and some one completely knocks me off my rocker.

What would you do to make your job a dream job?

To me, a job is far from dreaming. When it comes to work, dreaming is the farthest thing from my mind. If you know me at all, you understand that if I start thinking of dreaming and working together, you will find me on a couch like the “IDC Grizzly,” (in school i used to sleep on a couch and my snoring earned me that nick name).

I am still trying to figure this one out. I really want to write a good answer to this for myself. Good design, Great design, Design period.

creating something exiting within budget and other constraints. It goes back to my idea of survival through design. I need to become more secure with the idea that I can create good design regardless of the constraints. I need to approach this subject head on and come up with an answer.

I am sorry if this doesnt make sense. But the answer is:

to create my dream job is to be great enough at what I do, to the extent that no one questions my decisions anymore starting with myself.

thoughts (2)

planning is never perfect. there are always outside occurrences that stop you from accomplishing your task on time; for instance, family and friends, their  plans, or their problems. One is put in a position where one has to make a choice. Finish our task at hand or push it of for a later date. this is where priorities come in. what are your priorities?  if our priorities are well defined then these choices are not hard to make and we never regret not finishing our task at hand.

insert: to complete this thought, I was thinking that if our priorities are well defined to ourselves then others will have no problem excusing us when we cannot come to there aid. they will do their best not to disturb us on our mission.

thoughts Feb. 5, 2008

i need to finish di work tonight! i really think i could do a whole lot.

last night when i was starting i felt a flashback to when I was in school. that lack of focus and discipline.

The same feelings of oh well maybe tomorrow ill work on it.

i keep telling my mom to change her enabling and have more strength to push her kids to do the right thing.

i really think i should practice what I preach (not enabling, but having the strength to push myself) . in a way that talk was for me.

It is Tuesday now and i turned in half of that project. i was feeling like shit for not finishing or for not starting on time, but this time i kept it going, i said i better show that i did do something or else i am in the same boat that i was in. It is still a bad situation to be in but now i see that i do have to change my evil ways i have let down so many friends. i didn’t want Englebert going down in flames like ed green, Ozzy, Hildy, and last, but not least, Edgar. all in chronological order. i think the biggest person i have let down is myself. i need to change that. i cannot continue along that path any longer.

Engelbert is the man. he took it upon himself to help me finish. he did not have to do that. i think that because i actually put forth the effort into almost finishing then that is why he was able to help me. i actually was able to let him help me without guilt or shame and that is something that i needed in school to put forth the effort so that i could allow myself to be helped by the teachers and my peers. my heart was in the right place but my actions screwed everything up.

i am dead tired.

Okay. I have not posted in a while. There has been a lot going on in my life that I need to share.  I got a T-mobile Dash. A smart phone. finally! I have been wanting a smart phone with a mini keyboard for some time now. They are so cheap now that Maira and me could finally afford it. Plus she lost her phone which was already busted. 

I don’t know why I feel like I have to justify my purchase.  Its probably the debt that keeps me from making purchases without guilt.

So back to the point. I have been using it to the fullest with the Calender and Outlook tasks.  I made a discovery of the program One Note.  One note Mobile.  This program just makes it easy to write notes on your computer and now your smart phone its by Microsoft - part of Office. 

I started to use it to write my thoughts.  They are very personal, so I am always afraid to post them up here for everyone to see. After much thought, I am going to do it.  I will try to get to it tonight. i have to transfer the text to the computer.

I think that most of my future post will come from my phone so stay tuned. 

vacations are nice aren’t they?  Man! one week and a day; it was bliss. I even had to go back to work on new years eve and I am happy. I wasn’t happy on the first day back and even on the second, but you know you take a well deserved break from the norm with an old friend and you are refreshed and ready for the grind again.  Get your head right.

…so, I  Know that I have been away for a while and stopped working on my portfolio for a while…

I just started reading -I mean hearing-  the 4 hour work week by Timothy Ferris.  I heard about the book through a blog called the Freelace Blog.

It is a life changing book. I suggest if you are interested in the stuff I am talking about in this blog you read it. I will probably post more about it later.

O.K. the job thing is solved. A quick portfolio in pdf format and good friends helped me attain the job, but this definitely pushed me along to continue to work on my priority. Now, I am spending at least one hour a day on my portfolio. It’s crazy! I pushed myself into creating a 3-D Generated model. Something that I had all the tools to use, but never actually did. Sometimes you just have to forget the ifs, ands, or buts and move forward. It is tedious and it reminds me of Architectural studio. The all nighters. Too much work for what is a seemingly impossible time frame.

The grunt work is what I hate. I think it is one of the biggest obstacles that paralyzed me for all those years in school and even to this day. I really just came to terms with the fact that there is no substitute for hard work. I know that it sounds cliché. During my (writers block) I would feel that using all that time on what seemed as such menial tasks was some how fundamentally wrong. Looking back, because of this thinking, now I have nothing to show for the last years of my schooling. I am now making up for it at my own pace.

It is now years later and I am doing the work that I should of done then. Now, I cant get a grade on it, or any type of feedback from the professors. It is not just having great ideas, it is also being able to explicitly present them with different perspectives (this is the grunt work).

Sometimes, I wish that education was freer for things like this. That once you take a class you could continue to work on the initial projects untill you perfect them. Living in a dream world: the factor of time in a class is flexible depending on the individual.

In summary, you need to get shit done in a timely manner because if you die tomorrow and your portfolio is never done, no one will know how cool your shit really was!!!

One of the biggest problems that I find in my life is lack of focus. Last night, I went to diner to celebrate my brother-in-law’s birthday. I told him and another friend about wanting to do something. These two guys are people that I look up to when it comes to doing things that they feel are right. Dedicating their lives, through direct and indirect action, to make a difference in this world. I told them that I have been wanting to start a project and accomplish something, anything. I said, “I have all this talent that I don’t know what to do with. I need to have something to do. Let’s get a project started.”

I realize now that my focus is so off. This is not to say that I am not going to create something in this partnership. I have been wanting to create something in the field of making a difference in the world for quite sometime now. It is just that, I lack the focus to realize that I do have things to do with my talent. I just chose not to employ my talent for these things.

I leave you with this question: What stops us from focusing on the stuff that really matters?