I‘d hoped this week to be able to share with you The Manifesto for New Work Pioneers as a PDF download. And I do have a document sitting here on my Mac with that title.
But, I ain’t going to be putting it up here today. First, I haven’t figured out the technology required to actually put it on my blog. Second, I haven’t had the time to tart the thing so that it looks as smart as I want.
However, these are just superficial symptoms masking the real issue:
I’m not happy with what I’ve written. The thing hasn’t flowed as I’ve been working on it and it’s felt more of a chore than a joy. Which is a bit of a red flag, if ever I saw one.
I sat at the weekend with these realities and with the inescapable consequence that I was going to fail on one of my own deliverables. My frustration was immense. To begin with, what kind of thought leader doesn’t honour her commitments? Also, I felt that I had something important to discuss, but that it wasn’t coming across in a way that did it or you justice.
I wanted to keep moving and to make progress, but I had to confront my own limitations. I considered spending the weekend sweating it out, pushing through myself. There’s no doubt that in previous lives I’d have done just that. But I value myself and other people and things in life too much now to sacrifice them to my inherent need for perfection. Also, I intuited that something other than force was needed to get beyond my stuckness. And so I took the opposite path, deciding to take the pressure off myself and to wait for the way ahead to show itself.
This morning I have more clarity. Reading back through what I’ve written I can see that I’ve put together what I imagined a manifesto to be. Structured as I imagined it should be structured. Saying what I thought it should say. I’d been looking at manifestos by people like Chris Guillebeau and attempting to be “me too”. In the process, I’d psyched myself into a “less than” place. I’d lost my own creativity, and my own voice.
Responding yesterday to the rich and engaging comments I’d had from last Friday’s post, I realised also how much I enjoy connection, conversation and challenge. And yet how doing a big piece of writing achieved the opposite for me, leading me to try to create something in a vacuum.
Instead of muddling through with what I have I decided to throw the thing in the air and let it reinvent itself. My current thought is to do it as a series of posts, each around a particular theme, each created in the moment and put out there for your immediate involvement and commentary. Not only could this be collaborative and fun, but it’d buy me the time to reach out more to figure out the practical stuff.
What do you think? Are you up for it? Assuming so, my plan is to begin on Friday 9th April. I’d love to have you along for the journey!




Believe it or not, another month has passed since I 
