25/01/19

RE: A Message from the Desk of Thomas Crown

The last week at work, and surely the week ahead, was tough. With two colleagues absent I’m left to manage a typically lazy Italian, nurture a team in another location, and deal with all the extra crap coming my way in my boss’ absence. Most of that extra crap is stuff I haven’t seen before, so I’m learning on the fly, taking each question one at a time and pushing my frame out to get the answers. But what all of this has given me is an excellent segue to jump into my Daygame experience in January and for the first quarter of this year.

The main approach I’ve taken is to let the pieces fall as they will: I have my priorities in order and deal with them as such. I’m quite convinced that the winter is no excuse not to be out there, but just operating at a different level: humming at a low frequency and seeing what walks past. I’ve made arbitrary goals to hit five sets in a session, but then taken no offence when I’ve only done three. The aim is to preserve vibe, that’s the highest priority, and I’m not sacrificing that to hit a target of sets, just as I’m not going to give the Italian difficult things to do just so that things are split evenly because it’s not worth the hassle. My best approach is to act in order with my priorities, and see how the pieces fall.

Back in the summer I wrote an excellent post, if I say so myself, on the differences between high energy and low energy Daygame. Low energy Daygame is exactly what I’m doing right now. It should all be taken as a kind static test of your SMV: you present yourself as you are, without any kind of momentum, and see how you fare. And in itself that’s good for your vibe because if you get blown out: what are you going to do about it anyway? I know that other girls in London will like me, in fact I know without a shadow of a doubt…

At the end of 2017 I made a foolish prediction regarding how many sets I would do in 2018 and I didn’t count on my beginner’s enthusiasm dropping off to the extent that it did. There’s a lesson there, so let me commit to just this quarter with some experience behind me:

• Continue in January as I’m doing now. That means one session a week on a Saturday doing somewhere between three and five sets.
• February: move to two sessions a week, aim to hit five sets on one session, and just wander for two hours during the second to see what wanders the other way. The key with this second session isn’t actually to do a bunch of sets, but just to get me into a habit of doing two sessions a week.
• March: ramp up both sessions to six to eight sets.

Really the aim is to build up to my aim of doing 15 sets a week, but I can alter this target even further to make it optimised for maintaining vibe: turn it into a time commitment rather than a set commitment. Five well-chosen, well executed sets will probably take me a couple of hours to achieve, so here’s a better aim: do six hours of Daygame a week. It doesn’t sound like much when I write it down, but once you start aiming for a certain number of sets, and feeling guilty until you do them, you’ll suddenly be doing sets which are poorly chosen and poorly executed.

Let’s reframe that plan then:

• January: continue doing my one winged session each week. Allow the session to be as long or short as it feels right to do so.
• February: complement my one winged session (no time limit) with a two hour solo session.
• March: ensure that the combined time of the winged and solo session reaches six hours.

Now there’s an aim which is entirely within my control! Vibe is the real reason for doing all of this meticulous planning, as odd as that sounds. I know that I have the skill-set down and so I’m going to allow it to be fully expressed, smoothing the edges and letting everything flow into each other, rather than cranking out janky sets and sometimes not wanting to do sessions. I think there’s a weird inversion at play here: the common phrase for young go-getters like myself is to “aim for the moon… fall amongst the stars… etc, etc….” What’s better for me in this moment is to give myself quite reasonable goals which I can achieve, and then feel good about myself for doing them.

Yours unfaithfully,

Thomas Crown