Pruning Weak Links and Other Best Practices [Days 26-29]

I’m cheating a bit by posting multiple days on the same day, I know. But it was kind of an intense weekend because I decided to cut one of my favorite projects currently on the docket. It was just taking too much energy and had limited interest in its market. So, on Day 26, I cut it.

This resulted in a change of my color palette — one I’m fairly certain most will consider an upgrade. I know I do. I’m trading out the smoky black for a great green.

It’s a strong change and I’m excited to see what will become of it.

For now, however, here are the posts for each day, in descending order:

Sheralyn Pratt 29/365
Mint leaves

Here’s the new green and me toying with how I might use it on a future product.

Sheralyn Pratt. 28/365.
Color palette

Here’s the new color palette. I picked the colors out of paint sample colors since I’m pretty sure I might be doing some painting in the future.

Sheralyn Pratt 27/365.
The think about killing darlings before they see the light of day is that no one gets to mourn them but their creator... and some darlings really deserve more than a funeral for one.

This is me being melodramatic about shelving my idea after 2 weeks of putting gas in the tank and not getting much movement.

Timing isn’t everything but it can definitely make or break how well something is received. And, sometimes, you’ve just got to read the tea leaves on how things are being received and pluck things when they’re ripe.

So that’s what I’m doing.

Sheralyn Pratt 26/365
The funny thing about stories is they're all impossible whether they're true or not.

This was just looping in my head on this day. So I share it with you. Feel free to share an exception to me, but the more I think on it the more it seems accurate.

Growing Pains [Day 17/365]

The first time I say things, it can take an hour. Sometimes, longer.

To make for this, I like to find ways to say things simply the next time around and that’s where thoughts like this come from.

Day 17/365: Sheralyn Pratt
To grow is to leave an old form behind to embrace the shape of something new.

Whether you’re growing as a person or decluttering your home, or trying a new hobby, or doing anything that requires growth, I think it’s good to remember that you need to shed habits, thoughts, and even physical things on the path to getting where you’re going. And there’s nothing sad about that.

It’s all just part of the process of revealing the authentic you.

Merry-Go-Round in Time [Day 16/365]

A critique I get from editors is that I can be a bit too economical when dishing out words. Today’s meme is an example of where I feel I might be guilty of that.

So let me explain.

Based on my life’s experience so far, I’ve always felt that there was a merry-go-round aspect to accepting different challenges in life. If you really need to learn something, you don’t get to dodge it like a bullet and be done with it forever.

No. The universe doesn’t work that way.

If you need to learn something and dodge the lesson like a ninja, that lesson is going to start orbiting until you figure out how to stop attracting it. So, like a merry-go-round, lessons start circling around and keep giving us more riding opportunities.

Sometimes, we learn things quickly. Other times, it takes a couple of tries — or maybe our whole lives — before wisdom kicks in. And, once it does, it’s easy to bemoan that things didn’t happen sooner in retrospect. But the truth is that it took exactly how long it needed for you to accept something new, and nobody knows that better than you … even if you’d wish to alter your learning curve in retrospect.

After all, it’s easy to critique a race when you’re standing on the finish line; it’s quite another to tell someone who’s mid-race to just be done already.

We all like to hurry progress, but it takes the time that it takes to get on and back off the merry-go-round. It just does. Because it takes the time that it takes because everything is learned in time.