Project Studio and the Pain
Joining the latest branch of Dave Gray's School of the Possible
A creative person must create.
And although talking about your work is enjoyable, to be truly productive you first have to make something.
After attending the weekly Campfire calls with The School of the Possible for 4 months, Dave Gray and I had a call and he helped me with something I was working on and we also discussed something he was working on.
Dave had identified a need in the community to move beyond connection and towards creation.
We talked a few times and had a blast tossing around a few ideas and he eventually refined a concept to try out with the community.
He wanted to give people a little more structure to help create something new.
And so he launched Project Studio.
Project Studio
As soon as Dave told me about Project Studio I knew I wanted to be a part of it and I even had a project in mind.
Open to anyone in the SotP community, Project Studio participants would gather together for six weekly sessions to advance a personal project with the support and feedback of the group.
What makes Project Studio different from other cohort courses or classes is that you get to decide on the type of project and the scope. The structure is loose enough that you can make it what you want but there is enough support to help you move forward.
For someone with a busy life of work and family, this is critical.
As Dave talked more about Project Studio with the community, I realized that I wanted to use Project Studio to discover a FORM and a PROCESS for my project that worked for my life as it is now.
I wanted something sustainable and sustaining.
The Pain Project
The concept I chose to develop with Project Studio was something I have been calling The Pain Project for almost 1o years.
I developed severe low back pain in my final year of college. It became progressively worse and eventually went on to utterly consume a decade of my life with drugs, treatments, therapies, injections, more drugs and lots of anger, frustration and despair.
Being a naturally introspective person this experience led me to journaling and writing my thoughts and observations about the nature of chronic pain.
Over the years, I would start writing but always stopped short of every really finishing anything.
So, I decided to take it to the Project Studio and have the group's help to finally make something.
Going into Project Studio I thought I was going to write a book outline or possibly have a goal for number of posts to this blog.
After the incredible feedback from the first troika session I decided to create a YouTube channel and just film myself talking on the ideas I've been working on for the last 15 years.
I am very thankful for the format of Project Studio because I think if I had joined a "Write a book" course I would have become incredibly frustrated with the time commitment and getting it right instead of just making something.
If I had joined a "Start a YouTube Channel" course I would have gone too deep into thumbnails, titles, keywords, audience, niches, cameras, lighting, audio etc.
Project Studio allowed me explore with other creative people and to discover the real reason I wanted to do any of this in the first place.
I wanted to talk to that person who was living with pain and tell them what I had learned so they wouldn't have to go through it all.
I wanted to go back in time and help my younger self have a better life.
And I didn't need to have things perfect to get started.
I just needed to make something.
So, at the end of a very long day, amidst the chaos of normal life I sat down at my desk and recorded myself talking about two things I know well: books and pain.
A week later I hit 'publish'.
What I learned
- I have talked about chronic pain with more people in the last six weeks than I have in the last 15 years
- Having a group of enthusiastic and open minded people to create with is its own reward
- Wanting some new skill or tool is just a form of procrastination - everything I needed was within reach
- Creating from the soul is far more enjoyable than talking about creating
If you are the kind of person that always has some kind of project or idea you're working on, and you want to explore it with other people like you - check out Project Studio.
