Do This One Thing with No Regrets
Kondo your ghost projects
In the run-up to The Great Wave, we’ve asked speakers, hub hosts, and friends to don their advice-giving hat and tell us: What’s one thing you would recommend someone do to live a more beautiful life, to have a better and more beautiful business?
Where do you put art you never made? If you’re like me, you’ve dedicated space for unmade art in your apartment. Obviously these unfinished projects are not hung on the walls, because strictly and materially speaking, they don’t exist. But I’ve shelves’ worth of research for future books, all still unwritten. My Dropbox folders contain dozens of abandoned drafts. For years I have instructed myself to keep this stuff because, I tell myself, I will get around to finishing these ghost projects eventually. Perhaps on an extended holiday, or once I sufficiently self-improve and am waking up at 4 a.m. daily to write. Then I’ll actually finish them. And they will stop haunting me.
I’m here to tell you — as I came to tell myself — that this is pure nonsense, and chances are you won’t finish, and meanwhile, you don’t do yourself or your ghost projects any good by pretending that you will. You imagine it’s a sign of hope, keeping the evidence of these ghost projects around, and for a few months after your original inspiration, seeing those ghost project artifacts on the shelf, on your Drive, does lend a flush of excitement, the fuzzy feeling that stems from the urge to create, and to make a contribution. You may even feel great affection for the you that would create a thing like the thing you imagined.
But over time, walking by that bookshelf every day on the way to the bathroom, you have to ask yourself:
Does this spark joy?
For me, the answer was “No.” Every glance at the spaces, real and digital, only served to remind me of things I’d failed to accomplish.
There’s no point in keeping inanimate objects that make you feel guilty around.
So please kondo your ghost projects and all artifacts associated with them: Give them away, throw them away, just let them go.
Getting rid of the objects is relatively easy. You find the trash bin, the recycling bin, a Little Free Library down your block, a friend willing to take some items off your hands. Remind yourself, if needed, that the thing won’t cease to exist once it’s no longer in your possession. In some cases it will simply move on to new owners. You are returning it to the universe in hopes the universe can guide it toward someone who may need it more now.
Letting go of the inspiration to make the art you never made is harder, but still doable. Try this oddness on and see if it fits: Think of your ghost project not as something that originated with you, but as something which has an existence completely independent of you and your mind. Then to take it further, think of your ghost project as a lover (in an adult relationship, not an anxious, insecure infatuation).
Tell yourself that true love isn’t manipulative or controlling, does not need to possess, won’t demand that someone stay by their side, but only desires the beloved’s freedom in its broadest, most spiritual sense. And if you can’t give your ghost project what it most wants — i.e. to become real — then it’s only kindness to let it go. Say to yourself what grandmothers say after a break-up: It just wasn’t meant to be.
Then tell yourself that if it is meant to be — and you don’t need to have a clear notion of what “meant to be” really means — then the inspiration as well as the resources to make the project will come back to you. Who knows if this is true? But hoarding in the meantime isn’t a way forward.
The Journal of Beautiful Business is the online magazine of the House of Beautiful Business, a global think tank and community for making humans more human and business more beautiful.
This year, the House of Beautiful Business will run The Great Wave, a global-local, virtual-physical festival from Friday through Monday, October 16–19, 2020, the first-of-its-kind practical-fantastical global festival to reinvent business — and yourself.
The Great Wave is a creation of the House of Beautiful Business, in partnership with Forward31 by Porsche Digital, BCG Henderson Institute, Grupo Ageas, pur’ple, SAP, IEEE, INDEED Innovation, SYPartners, Stadiumred Group, and Waltz Binaire. For more information, please contact us at [email protected].
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