Getting Ready for a Big Tomorrow
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I wonder how many folks tonight are getting ready for a big tomorrow. New starts, milestones, clean starts. Big projects.
I like cleaning my entire desk, room, and digital work-spaces to prepare for any single big thing I need to do. It’s the night before syndrome in reverse, the opposite of procrastination.
Whether I do commit my time (after everything is clean) who’s to say. Apex Legends just released Arenas and I love it.
The sunset is way too beautiful on the night I wrote this (one second) here we go:
Every now and then I’ve had a feeling to Batten Down the Hatches to prepare for either doing something great or weathering a storm.
Thinking out loud here, for the first time in nearly a decade I don’t own the full responsibility for the success of what I’m doing. Not only that, I also feel a new first time ever sense of personal debt to someone, my partner, to walk-the-line & deliver.
Working on a special project of any significant scale or impact is rare. I haven’t found it at any single startup project in a decade of work in Toronto. My fingerprints are present on many.
And while community work is impactful, it’s very political, and personally challenging— my life work right now is reliving too much of what we’ve been through and it feels like churning butter.
The scale of CanadaInnovates.org as a project to change the landscape of innovation & economy is something that’s never felt realer to me, the rarest of windows of opportunity and that confidence gives me the extra motivation I honestly need.
Arenas
Starting up has a competitive nature that’s the closest thing my body will get to real competitive sports, aside from Rollerblading, or playing Apex, that gets my heart rate to 109, wired to win.
I don't sleep, I'm tired, I feel wired like Codeine, these days
A brother gotta admire me from four fiends away
My pain wish it was quick to see, from selling 'Caine
'Til brains was fried to a fricassee, can't lie
At the time it never bothered me, at the bar
Getting my thug on properly, my squad and me
Lack of respect for authority, laughing hard
Happy to be escaping poverty, however brief
I know this game got valleys and peaks, expectation for dips,
for precipitation we stack chips, hardly
True this, the streets school us to spend our money foolish
Bond with jewelers and, watch for intruders
I stepped it up another level, meditated like a Buddhist
Recruited lieutenants with ludicrous, dreams of
Getting cream let's do this, it gets tedious
So I keep one eye open like, C-B-S, ya see me
Stressed right? Can I live?
I came to Canada when I was 5, after traversing a few continents and 4 or 5 countries, Moscow > Morocco > Dubai > Toronto, thinking Russian, speaking Arabic, and learning English. We’ve survived wars, martyrdom, imprisonment and loss of realities and we see the news today in Palestine same as the old news of shock & awe.
Some of us made it this far.
I’ve met some of them, people also from the outside, that tell me “what do you mean? what are you talking about? I’m just Canadian”. I don’t feel they factor in the 5% of life-experience that builds a different us, or they do and IDK… but I embrace this.
We’re both from out of town, what you trying to get into?
Coming full circle, I do sense a powerful feeling like my lungs are full all the time and to batten down the hatches + crush through the oncoming waves and storms.