Always Have a Project

A container for reflection, experimentation, and momentum

Back in September, I was reading a Substack post from

Adam Ming

about building creative habits through his Morning Pages, a ritual for prompting ideas and creativity introduced by Julia Cameron in her book The Artist Way. Adam’s advice, ‘always have a project’, stuck with me because that’s a principle I seem to have applied throughout my life, without being particularly conscious of it.

Always having a project provides us with a container for our ideas, inspiration, and growth. It provides an outlet for when ordinary life stuff becomes overwhelming. The one question I’d love to be asked more often is ‘What are you working on at the moment?’ There’ll always be something, often too many things. On the backburner, I’ll always have something creative, something physical, and something of an intellectual nature bubbling away. At times I’ve often been simmering something entrepreneurial, and in recent years I’ve been drawn towards spiritual¹ or contemplative pursuits - but more as a contemplative dabbler than being on an intentional path of mastery with anything spiritual.

It seems to me, from a purely observational and non-scientific perspective, that people who don’t always have a project, are more prone to getting lost in life. Work and our everyday duties keep us busy, but unless you are lucky enough to have found a true vocation, your job is unlikely to be a fulfilling creative container for exploration and inspiration. I feel that we need something of our own, a path of mastery where our projects can emerge and take shape, giving us direction and providing a lifeboat to sail through the adversities of ordinary life. If we find ourselves in a job with heavy commitments and long commutes, where we return home exhausted, too washed out to spend any time on hobbies or interests, there is always a way to carve out time for yourself and your project. It is in this situation that a project is most needed.

Almost June, Ludovico Einaudi

This week my piano project has been to learn Ludovico Einaudi’s beautiful piece, Almost June, from his Underwater album. It has only taken a few days to learn, Einaudi’s songs are quite simple and playable by a mediocre pianist such as me, but what I lack is his mastery of touch. Where his fingers fall with just the right weight, mine fall a little clumsily, too heavily in some places, too light in others. but it’s a project, and one that keeps me continually challenged, inspired and sane.

It took several attempts, probably about 9 or 10, before recording a version where I had sufficiently minimised my mistakes. Recording a performance seems to add extra pressure because as Kenny Werner says, we try too hard. Instead, I tried to be careless and play from the ‘SPACE’, as he advises. Easier said than done. During every attempt, there was a point where an unwanted thought erupted into my head. Where do these thoughts come from? How can I get back into the ‘SPACE’?

Flexible Identities

I know that our sense of identity is a personal myth, a set of stories we weave to make sense of ourselves, but as a tool for functioning and relating in the world, our identities can be useful. Through our projects, we bring depth and breadth to our sense of identity. No longer are we ‘just’ our job title, or ‘just’ our family roles. We can become a guitarist, a runner, a meditator, a writer, or a triathlete. This might lead us to identify with a broader community - a group of Substackers, or a member of an Aikido club. Our sense of self, and our identity becomes more flexible, more fluid.

I would argue that relegating our piano or yoga practice to ‘hobby’ or ‘interest’ status is a mistake. It’s work. It’s working on our project. It’s hard work. It’s worthy work. It may not be economically productive work, but it is productive work for the soul. When our conventional work comes to an abrupt end through redundancy or any other unexpected event, our unconventional work on our cello practice or fascination with knitting techniques persists. If we pursue our practices seriously, with a sincere attitude of mastery, they become foundational to our well-being, and our identity, when our ordinary lives get serious. I want to encourage you to permit yourself to treat your practice as serious work, a project on the never-ending path of mastery.

Patricia Linville, the originator of Self Complexity Theory, asserts that people with high self-complexity, those who have a broader range of identities, have diverse self-aspects to rely on as a cognitive buffer if the self-aspect in one domain is threatened. If we lose our job or partner, for example, we can fall back on other aspects of ourselves. She argues that those with low self-complexity, less fragmented selves, might have more positive experiences when life is going well as their life is highly attuned to their identity, but they may be more prone to difficulties when that aspect of themselves no longer has an outlet.

Linville’s assertions around self-complexity theory have not gone unchallenged, but anecdotally from my perspective, having a range of interests that I’ve indulged as identities has been somewhat protective. When times have been hard I’ve fallen back on my projects, my practices, my interests, and the varied identities they’ve imbued me with.

Suicide, and Finding Salvation

Today, 15th December marks the 30th anniversary of the suicide of one of my closest school friends, Stephen M. We started playing the guitar at the same time when we were around 17. He was hooked on Queen and U2, while I was drawn to Prince and Jimi Hendrix. Neither of us had found our path in life, born and raised in the coastal town, of Lowestoft, where prospects were grim and a depressed outlook was not uncommon. ‘This place has gone to the dogs’, I recall him saying. We didn’t know what our paths could look like but did know we wanted to escape. Music offered escapism - a little direction, purpose and hope. Our desire to leave the town and find our paths was captured in the song ‘Stuck in a Rut’ by The Darkness, whose guitarists Justin and Dan Hawkins were at the same school as us, but a few years younger.

Gimme the keys
You ain’t gonna see me for dust
The Barnby Bends ain't gonna get the better of me
Oh, gimme the keys
To any old bucket of rust
Acle Straight’s gonna take me to where I wanna be

Stuck in a Rut, The Darkness

The Barnby Bends and the Acle Straight are two infamous roads that lead away from the town, which both had disproportionate levels of car accidents before stricter speed limits were imposed. We were indeed stuck in a rut, but music as a project, was something to find meaning in when ordinary life wasn’t offering much to inspire.

Before finding music, my outlet was gambling. I was desperately hoping for a big win as a ticket to something better, and I came close on one occasion which simply served to pull me further down the path of addiction. I didn’t see it as an addiction at the time, but, in hindsight, it was. It was the expression of a general feeling of hopelessness. Here I was on a loser’s path at 17, circa 1987, with Champion Jump Jockey, John Framcome, on Lowestoft’s Ladbrokes:

Meeting John Francome in the bookies, circa 1987

How I managed to pull myself out of my gambling nosedive I still don’t know. The shame and hopelessness I felt from wasting money that I’d saved up from paper rounds and other part-time jobs seemed overwhelming. I’d stopped going to school and 6 months before taking my A-Level exams I was predicted to fail miserably. But somehow I found the good sense and courage to vow that I would stop gambling and did so immediately and without remission once the decision was made. Something within me clicked, and gave me the resolve to relinquish the identity I’d created around my gambling, the brave chancer, the beater of systems, the cigar-smoking, wheeler-dealing gangster-like hard man I’d wanted to become - I’d been inspired by too many black and white gangster movies from the 50s, Humphrey Bogart’s characters were my introduction to masculinity.

I gave it all up and fell back on the new identities I was forming as a guitarist, and as an athlete, as I’d also taken up running the previous year and had begun to find solace in the meditative effect of pounding the pavements and Lowestoft’s sandy beaches on bleak winter days. This was also the beginning of forming an identity as an autodidact. I decided not to go back to school but instead prove the teachers wrong by teaching myself. Six months later I took my A-level exams and surprised everyone by receiving B grades, my rebellious ‘screw you’ to the teachers who had doubted me, and decided that my escape from my hometown would be University, instead of the big win on the horses.

These new identities were forming through my projects. Instead of the addicted hopelessness of the gambling identity I had bestowed upon myself, I was carving out an identity of resilience, practice and dedication. These new identities, though still fragile, were grounded in purpose and self-determination. The core idea that you can transform yourself and change your prospects through dedicated learning and practice has remained a core theme throughout my life.

Around this time, my aforementioned friend, Stephen, commented on hearing voices emanating from his bedroom radiator. His behaviour changed, and he started to become quite erratic. He was soon diagnosed with Schizophrenia and was institutionalised for a while. Some years later, in 1993, the institution in which he was being looked after was closed down in favour of a ‘Care in the Community’ approach. His mother had passed away a few years earlier and he had become estranged from his father, so his carers were his mates. Us lot. A few clueless school friends who had been given no information about his needs. It was a very difficult time. I had finished university but on returning to Lowestoft I was jobless, and again there seemed to be no prospects in the godforsaken town I once again longed to escape from.

I visited him in the flat he had been provided with one December evening. He had started to re-paint the walls but had stopped halfway, leaving the remnants of random swear words he’d painted across the unfinished walls. On the record player was Meat Loaf’s ‘I Would Do Anything For Love’ which was charting at the time. That song still haunts me. He seemed to have a fascination with the song and was attuned to something I couldn’t hear. He had it on auto-repeat and it must have played about 20 times that evening. That was the last evening I saw him. He wasn’t making much sense that evening and there were times he disappeared to the kitchen and I was a little worried for my safety, wondering if he would emerge with a knife or something. Of course, it wasn’t my safety I needed to worry about, it should have been his. It turned out that he had stopped taking his medication, saving it in order to take his own life. He died of an overdose a few days later on the 15th of December 1993. Those were very dark times.

This is the first time I’ve ever made a written account of those miserable events of 1993 but it has been on my mind quite a lot since it is now 30 years ago. Where has that time gone? I’m a completely different person now in terms of my experiences and identities. I would handle that whole situation differently, I would be a wiser friend, able to give better help and support. Yet, if I strip away my accumulated personal myths I am fundamentally the same, my essence is unchanged. Our ideas of ourselves, our identities, and our stories are fluid, but our essence stays the same.

It was a very tough thing to deal with, I felt quite conflicted with the events. On the one hand, I felt ashamed that I should have done more to help, but on the other hand, felt that his death had come as a relief to his suffering. The conflict I felt was nothing in comparison with the pain he must have been dealing with.

Containers for Reflection, Experimentation and Momentum

What helped me to get through this tough time, the tough times that followed, and the tough times that emerge from nowhere even now, are my projects, my systems and practices. My physical practices of cycling, running, swimming, callisthenics, fasting and kayaking all provide me with opportunities to create little training projects. Music has given me countless practice routines and musical projects. My academic interests create endless little learning projects. They are a container for experimentation and self-expression. They give life momentum when you are stuck in a rut as there is always something to move forward with. Projects provide space for reflection, an escapism for mediation and reflection. It is this immersion in constructive projects, on my own humble path of mastery, that has helped me immensely in enduring the ‘ordinary’ trials of life, and that is my primary motivation for this Ordinary Mastery project. In a bizarre twist, for the first time in 30 years, I have found myself in a jobless situation again, but this time through all the work I’ve done in my projects, I’m able to see my situation from an elevated view - I can see myself in transition, I have hope, I know that I will find the right path.

I think Stephen would have appreciated my rendition of the Ludovico Einaudi tune in the above video. We started out learning our guitars as naive teenagers. I was motivated more by the idea of becoming a rock star than the purist pursuit of mastery on the guitar. The rock star ambition faded with age as I began to see the guitar as more of a companion, a constant project to work on. I’m not sure what Stephen’s motivations were, he always seemed a little wiser than I was, with a rebellious streak that inspired me to begin questioning social norms. A passion for music and learning musical instruments didn’t save Stephen from his fate, but the sparks of inspiration that ignited my passion in those early days have stayed with me, and have certainly been a source of salvation during times of crisis.

To work is to live - and I love to live.

Charlie Chaplin

Always have something in life that is worth working on. Always have a project. This is a quintessentially human source of meaning and salvation, and the path of mastery which wends its way through our projects is available to anyone. To unfold towards its destined potential, a tiny seed must first endure the darkness of the soil, and the struggle towards the light. Our projects begin in darkness, imbued only with potential, and we must struggle with them, towards the light. A project compels us to keep going and do the work to feed its potential every day.

The Ordinary Mastery Project

This project, Ordinary Mastery, is proving to be an expansive container, a place of convergence for the many paths my life has followed, a means to include and transcend those paths for my own personal growth and hopefully for the transformation of others. I want this project to be ‘mastery for the masses’, so to speak, something that inspires people to pick up a guitar and set themselves up with a practice routine so that they can form their own bedrock through the ups and downs of ordinary life.

To that end, the Ordinary Masterclasses that are kicking off in early 2024 would be open to anyone who sincerely wishes to explore the principles and practices of mastery and apply them to their own lives and projects. I don’t want to attract experts, I’m seeking beginners. People who are taking their first shaky steps, not knowing if they have the dedication to stick to the path. I’m seeking people whose search for a purpose in life has thus far eluded them. I’m hoping to appeal to ‘ordinary’ people just like me. See the link below for details.

Lowestoft Through Matured Eyes

I see Lowestoft differently now. I’ve made my peace with the town. When I return with my family I appreciate the vast sandy beaches and cycling along the quiet country lanes around the Norfolk/Suffolk border. Like many coastal towns in the UK, it is still economically deprived but it has a quaint charm about it. I can relax there and have developed a nostalgia for the place. We grow up, we change, we see things differently.

Our dog, Alfie, especially loves the beach on a wild and windy day.

Alfie enjoying every moment in the sand

1. Spiritual is a word that’s open to interpretation. For me, it has been a bit of a dabbling. A foray into mediation, exploring the ideas of non-duality, near-death experiences, psychedelics, and adopting seasonal fasting rituals.