Troy Round Three: Recovering & Creating

Had a couple of guests fall through this week, but fortunately, my good friend Troy was available for dinner to save the weekly goal. I've done an It's My Treat meal with Troy before, but this one was especially satisfying because it came after Troy had spent three weeks recovering from a nasty bout of COVID. For those of you who say COVID is done and gone, you are mistaken. It is still rough out there. But since we, as a country, have moved on from worrying about that, just ignore any of the precautions that we were previously using and all will be fine.

Proud of Troy because he got adventurous tonight and tried something beyond just a burger. He agreed to go to Dos Reales and try some Mexican food. One of Troy's goals after getting a new chance at life after last year’s kidney transplant was to be open to new things. It was a good step to get him to try something new. Chips and cheese were delicious. The Chicken Quesadilla was good. The fried ice-cream was not his cup of tea, but overall, a good meal.

Troy is one of the most creative and hardworking people that I know. He spent years writing and producing Innocent Words Magazine, which lead to Innocent Words Records, which lead to writing a book and many other creative things in the music business. He talked about how he started slowly with just a few issues a year and built it up until he was doing issues all the time. It was a hell of an accomplishment but writing every day for twenty years lead to a bit of burnout. Since he had his transplant last year, he has moved from writing to painting. You can see his work here: www.instagram.com/throwingacrylics

One good thing about Troy is that he finds an idea and gets focused on it and can lock in and do it every day. One of my big problems is that I have so many ideas that it becomes overwhelming to decide on what I want to do. Sometimes this leads to me not doing any of them, or to starting something and switching gears soon after to something new before really exploring the possibilities of the projects.

This week I have taken a step back from doing creative projects to bring some order to my ideas. I am working on a rubric to help evaluate which ideas I should choose and which I should pass on. Some of the criteria that I am going to use are: creativity, does it bring me joy, does it align with my ideal of helping others, does it make an impact on others or the community or the world, maybe even include whether it has potential to make any money. Troy questioned whether I should include that one in my calculation. Probably going to include it but just make it of lower importance than the rest.

I'll also include an estimate of the amount of time it will take both weekly and in length of project. With working full time, I only have a limited number of hours I can do for other projects. And I still want to include some down time where I can just have fun. Once I have that rubric, I will be able to get some solid numbers to help make my decisions. Although this is not a hard and fast rule, so I will probably stray if I just have an inner pull that draws me to a certain project. If any of you readers have ideas of suggestions on what I should use as criteria for making the decisions, please comment below or message me. Always open to new perspectives.

Going to close it up here tonight. Thank you, Troy, for going to dinner with me and trying something new.