Giddy-up

Out of dreaming and into doing. Mostly.

I’ve been absolutely geeking out on organization for a while now.

I’m religious about my Full Focus Planner. Recently, inspired by someone in a coaching circle I’m in, I started matching my three calendars (each color-coded) with highlighters to match, so my planner mirrors the digital. I can glance down at a week or a day and immediately see how heavy or light I am in each lane. I love this for me. Because I’m claiming momentum this year. Giddy up. Out of dreaming and into doing.

This quarter is specifically about not over-perfecting, not over-architecting. Not so easy, but a good challenge. I track my time like a warden. I gamify the shit out of it so I feel like I’m doing all the right things. The phrase for Q2 is next right step.

But fuck me if it isn’t relentless.

And I have other people to manage in this too — my business partner, brilliant and wonderful and full of shiny object syndrome; a 23-year-old founder who is fascinating and impressive and who I genuinely look forward to helping succeed, and learning from in return. As a person who needs to understand how everything works, I looked forward to my Q1 coaching call with Cecily.

My teacher, my coach, the person who gave me language for things I was living but couldn’t name through the hardest stretch of my career. I’m getting up and down the whole call because I’m dog-sitting my dad’s elderly dog and he has to go outside every thirty seconds. Cecily is patient with a sense of humor as always.

We’re three months into the year and I’ve been doing that thing where I look back at my own notes and wonder how time moves this fast. How a quarter just *goes.* And I’m telling her about this framework I’ve been building and we’ve discussed. Three lanes = Excellence, Primacy, and Optionality.

Here’s what I mean.

Excellence is what I give to whoever is paying me. It has limits. It is not everything I have. I am not pouring my whole self into it the way I poured my whole self into things for fourteen years and ended up watching them burn down anyway. Excellence is good. Excellence is real. What the limits look like and feel like are still in development. This is not an easy thing to figure. Note that excellence is not primacy.

Primacy is what I give to myself. To SMRK. To the thing I’m building that is mine. I will work on a Saturday. I will wake up at four in the morning and not be annoyed about it. I will be absorbed and energized and lit up in a way that doesn’t happen when I’m doing work for someone else, even work I’m proud of. Primacy means: this gets the best of me. Not the most hours, necessarily. The most me.

Optionality is everything I’m keeping warm. The conversations I’m not closing. The doors I’m holding open not because I’m afraid of commitment but because I came out of a very long, very hard transition and my nervous system still hasn’t fully let go of scarcity. Still hears the voice that says: if you don’t take this opportunity, there might never be another one. I know it’s not true. It’s still loud. I also like the idea of keeping the muscle warm and optionality gives me opportunities outside of the other 2 containers. And I hope this grants me opportunities to collaborate with some of my favorite people along the way.

Cecily lets me finish and then she says: “You’re observing yourself. Which is helpful, up until the point where you double down on the observing and it becomes analysis.”

She’s right. This is my pattern. I can live in the what-if forever. I love the what-if. The hazy part of creative and possibility and what if we did this. It is warm and generative and extremely comfortable and also a way of never actually shipping the thing.

This is the job of the mind. Harassing me all day long. I practice getting good at watching it, taking it seriously but I’m working on not treating every loop of anxiety like a verdict.

Just get up. Just go. Giddy up.

The other thing and this one’s harder to wrangle — is that building a framework doesn’t make the work easier. It does make it nameable and I’m finding that helpful at this stage.

I was crabby one afternoon last week. Deep in tactical stuff, doing tasks I didn’t want to be doing, irritated that I was exchanging time for money for someone else instead of building something of my own. And I had to keep reminding myself: this is part of the structure. This is how the structure works. The excellence lane stabilizes things so the primacy lane can exist.

Cecily quoted Jack Kornfield — the title of his book: After the Ecstasy, the Laundry. Every day. Every day. Every day.

I think about how many years I spent believing I was close to earning the exemption. The point at which I would have worked hard enough, done enough things right, made enough things beautiful, that life would finally let me off the hook. That the hard parts would stop. That I’d arrive somewhere that was just... easy.

There is no such place. There never was. And knowing that, really knowing it, in your body, not just as a concept you nod at in conversations is both devastating and, strangely, a relief. Because you can stop waiting for it. You can stop using the absence of it as evidence that something has gone wrong.

So here’s where I am.

I am three months into a year I call Giddy Up. I have a job to do that gives me stability and a lane I call excellence. I have a brand I’m building that gets primacy; my best energy, my real self. I have a list of open conversations I’m keeping warm because scarcity still has a voice and I’m not pretending it doesn’t.

I am figuring out what good enough means in each lane, which turns out to be its own full-time project because I have spent my entire career giving everything to everything and that is not a sustainable way to operate.

I am trying to move from dreamer to experimenter to leader. Still dreaming, still experimenting, but leading the dream more directly now. Claiming the role of project manager, accountability partner, the one who sets the container even when the container is just me and my dog-sitting obligations on a Tuesday.

I am not trying to do it right. I’m trying to do the next thing.

The laundry will always be there. The dishes will always need to be done again. The lane called primacy will always cost something to protect.

Giddy up, girl.

RND2 is a Substack about the second act: what it looks like to rebuild deliberately, to commercialize creativity, and to figure out what you’re actually for after the thing you built burns down.