if i had a hat, consider it thrown
I have been talking about making my own products again for years. Cards, notepads, journals - your basic collection of paper goods a la an etsy store starter pack. The problem is that I am my own boss. And I am very, very lenient with deadlines. There is always something more pressing than a personal project: a Minted challenge, or client work, or family life, or reading about solar powered bird baths or, or, or... it is easy to push the dream down the road a little. Let it stay a floating, cloud shaped thing. You can look at it in the distance and admire it, escape to it when you need a little break. But a dream made solid in reality loses its ethereal edges and becomes apprehensive, uneasy. It can be inspected, appraised, judged. It can crumble. It can fail.
As I flipped through my planner in December and saw my 2025 goals, and then 2024, and then 2023, they were almost copy + paste, the same lines over and over and over again. I remembered a course I took a few years ago. It was live, and most of the people who joined were older than I am, in their 50s and 60s. As they introduced themselves the common thread was that they had been chasing their dreams for decades, and maybe, just maybe, this course was the thing that would finally help them catch that dream. That haunted me. Here I was, stuck in the same loop for years and thinking of those faces felt like looking twenty years down the road, still circling. I decided I wasn’t going to be a dream chaser anymore. I would build my dream and stand inside it, see how it looks and feels.
I needed a deadline. A real, concrete, stationary deadline (there’s a stationery/stationary joke there somewhere - thinking about it). And even better if there was something on the line, like money. I read that in How to Change - money is a great accountability partner. So in January I applied to be a vendor at Swiss Days, a giant outdoor craft market that brings tens of thousands of people to Midway, Utah. This is also known as Mike’s worst nightmare, which explains why all the color drained from his face when I told him I applied.
Just applying created a little bit of momentum because there was a clear focus. It was easy to work on my products and get a detailed plan in place when I thought about my dream of standing in a booth surrounded by products I made. Even if I didn’t get in, it gave me the boundaries I needed to see the next steps and move forward. A few weeks later, I read this story and it resonated with exactly how I’d been feeling after hitting that submit button:
“A group of boys are walking home from school in Ireland when they come across a tall stone wall. One of them wants to climb it but keeps hesitating, circling, unsure if he can make it. So he throws his hat over the wall. The hat is part of his school uniform; he can’t go home without it. Now he has no choice but to climb.” - Amanda E. White, “Stop Waiting to Feel Ready”
The truth is, I do not own a hat. My head is large, square, and my hair is more horse than human. Hat companies don’t tend to take this particular niche into consideration when making hats. But if I had a hat, consider it thrown. I got the email this morning that I’m going to be at Swiss Days in September. Time to climb the wall.
