For years, it has been my dream to produce something in a creative way. I dreamed of being able to paint the most beautiful illustrations and knitting the most amazing jumpers – only to realise that I don’t have a lot of talent for either. For years, I have been feeling bad about myself, not trying to change anything about my drawing or knitting skills. My own limiting thoughts were holding me back, There are so many who already do it. They are sooo good. No one would ever like what you do anyway – so don’t even bother. In the last months of 2018, I somehow felt that I really had to give it a try, that I don’t want to be old and realise that maybe I should have just worked a little bit harder (or at all) for my dream.
An idea is born
And that is what I have been doing since January. I thought of products I would like to create and eventually, hopefully, maybe, but mostly hopefully, sell this year. It is no secret that I love books and authors, so it was clear very early on that I wanted to combine my love for books/authors with my love for crafting, especially embroidery and cross-stitch. Eventually, I had an idea.
Anne’s Letterboard mit Literatur-Ikonen: Kafka, Woolf, Mann
My literature-portraits
I love embroidery portraits but most of the ones I see are very detailed. At this moment, I don’t know yet if I am able to create beautiful realistic portraits. My portraits are therefore very minimalist, but I really like the way they have turned out so far. Photographs of the authors inspired me and I wanted to add my own touch to it by adding a dash of red to almost every portrait.
Stickportrait Virginia Woolf – mit Anne’s charakteristischem roten Akzent
The first three portraits are showing some of my favourite authors: Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka.
Stickportrait Thomas Mann
Stickportrait Franz Kafka
All three authors have a very special place in my heart and life. My German teacher introduced me to Franz Kafka, my father is a huge fan of Thomas Mann and I did an internship at the Heinrich-and-Thomas-Mann-Museum in Lübeck years ago. Virginia Woolf has been one of the first person whose diary I ever read and she was such a delicate, yet strong person.
My goals for 2019 – business
In my post about my goals for 2019, I already mentioned that I want to craft on a regular basis. For this year, my goals for my crafting-business are:
Design 30 portraits of famous authors feminists and embroider them
Open my own etsy-shop (goal: Open the shop by the end of March)
Sell one handmade-item
Design my own enamel-pin
Produce my own enamel-pin
Design one linocut print that I am happy with
Make linocut cards
Design cross-stitch-pattern of my pin-design
Design a feminist calendar 2020
Design a literature calendar 2020
Design two tote bags
Participate in the Swan-Market in The Hague in September
A lot of ideas and I am very excited to continue working on the projects I have already started and to start with the other ones.
Steps taken so far
I have reduced my working hours from 32 to 24 hours per week to have two days off per week to focus on my creative adventures. In January, I have designed my very first enamel-pin and it is currently being produced. If all goes well, I will receive it in around three weeks. Every year, I visit the Swan Market in The Hague, a handmade-business market in the open air. This year, I am going to participate myself: I made a reservation for a stall in September.
I am very excited, also to mention it here in public and to people that know me in real life, but I think the more people know about it, the better.
Do you like to craft? If yes, what do you like to do most?
I love books. Books have been with me for as long as I can remember. They are my happy place and I turn to books when I am happy, sad, frustrated, stressed or relaxed. My parent’s house is full of books and I grew up being surrounded by many, many books. While others wished for money for their birthday, I always wished for books. I simply enjoyed reading from an early age. During school, one of my teachers sparked a deeper interest for books in me: I did not only want to read, but I also wanted to understand what goes on in a writer’s mind, how themes and motifs are connected and presented throughout the years. I then studied Comparative Literature, English Literature and German Literature and it was a dream come true. In my courses, we discussed the texts and preparing for a class was, most of the times, just so much fun. My love for books grew only stronger and deeper.
During my studies, I made new friends and with them, something happened which I was not used to: Competing about who has read the most books, the longest books and who owns the most books. Thinking back, it is kind of embarrassing how great we felt because we had read a certain book and how snobbish we were. Harry Potter – no, thank you. Anna Gavalda? Is that even “real” literature? It became a kind of obsession to own more books. Why? I don’t really know. I can only imagine that I thought it would make me appear more clever, well-read. I felt that I had to own a lot of books to qualify as a real literature student/person. How silly! Reading and books became a status symbol – one so silly and arrogant that it is difficult for me to accept that this was of thinking was part of my life for a couple of years.
I cannot deny it, I still love being surrounded by books but over the past years, I bought so many books that I felt like I had more unread books than actually read books. This is not the case, but the piles of unread books kept getting higher and higher. Books became yet another thing I would buy and you know, one can never have too many books.
The good of a book lies in its being read
Umberto Eco
This might be true, but I also want to know what the books are about. I want to explore the world that waits behind the cover of a book for me. I want to treasure the books, the work a writer has put into it and take the time to discover something new, learn something new, and maybe become a different person. I believe that books can change you (My thesis was actually about female initiation through reading). I wanted to be able to say what I liked about a book, what I didn’t and not stand in front of my bookshelves and repeat over and over again that I hadn’t read the book yet. So, when my friend Presilla and I started our book club, we both very quickly discovered that we have a lot of books which we haven’t read yet and we decided to not buy new books for a year.
We started in October 2018 and have 286 days to go. Our plan is to give money to a charity that helps people get access to books and teaches people how to read because our dream is that everyone can experience the joy a book can bring.
Why buying no books is difficult – a personal dilemma
The first months were not difficult. But I spent the first week in January in a bookshop in a booktown in Scotland. I talked to the owner of a secondhand bookshop, who told me how difficult the business became, especially since Amazon took over. He also mentioned how happy he is when people are coming into his shop, especially in the weeks after Christmas. And it dawned on me: We had already stopped buying books from Amazon or other chains and only bought books in owner-owned independent bookshops, but not buying any books also means not supporting these small businesses. And for me that is difficult: I want to support them, I want to be able to buy my books in a real bookshop for years to come, I want to be able to talk to booksellers and get their advice. But I also want to catch up on the books I already own and get better at cherishing for what they are: a source of knowledge, history, work and creativity. I will continue with our plan until November this year, but I am also making a compromise: I buy more books as presents and buying books as presents for someone else is allowed 🙂 I also want to talk more about books and share my thoughts on them because I already noticed that others in my close circle started to buy books that we talked about and that is a great feeling. I am optimistic that I will find a better and healthier relationship with books after the year. And who knows, maybe I continue a little longer. Or, and that is more likely, I will buy one or two books per month and only buy a new one once I have read the one just bought. Because one thing is for sure:
Books are a refuge and a reservoir of power. The mills of books grind slowly but they grind exceedingly small.
Arthur Bryant
Do you have many unread books? What is stopping you from reading them?
Do these goals sound familiar to you? I used to set myself goals like these for almost all my life. And almost never managed to achieve them. I doubted myself, felt useless and like I had no discipline and as if I am a loser. My attempts to eat healthy food lasted two months, if at all. It was difficult and feeling like a failure is never a good feeling. So, when the new year of 2018 arrived, I, like so many others, wanted to start new – a fresh start with new goals. Only this time it would be different – I would achieve my goals and feel good about myself at the end of the year.
What I changed this time
At the beginning of the year, I came across the book Stick with it. The Science of Lasting Behaviour by Sean Young and it changed the way I set goals now. He argues that a goal that takes “more than three months to accomplish”, is a dream. You have to keep the dream in your mind and then pick a goal that you can accomplish within one week to a month. So break down your goals into very small steps. You will see the results very easily. Imagine my goal would be to lose 20 kg. It will take such a long time before I can achieve this goal, that I am very likely to give up on the way there. But if my goal is to prepare a healthy lunch for work for one week, it is manageable. I can do this and be proud of my accomplishment – after one week already!
Another important factor to achieve your goals is to make it yourself as easy as possible. One of my goals was to work out more often, so we got a rowing machine and a stepper for at home. Super easy – all I have to do is put on my sports clothes and go to another room. No “But the rain/cold/sun” excuses, no “But the gym is already closed” talk. After a while, the home gym was not enough anymore, so I started looking for gyms in my area. And found one – 7 minutes walking and the opening times are awesome: Mo-Fr: open around the clock, Saturday and Sunday from 8.00 to 8.00. Wonderful! Another thing I have changed was to talk about my goals. I made sure that the people closest to me knew what I wanted to achieve. This way I felt some external accountability and knew I could reach out in case I needed help or support.
The last and final step was to visualise my goals and achievements.
When I read about setting goals, I often read advice like “Draw a picture to see what your life will be like once you achieved the goal”. For many, this might be ideal. For others, like me, this does not work. First, because I cannot draw and would only get frustrated and second, because it gives me the feeling that “everything will be better once you achieved the goal” and this is a mindset, I do not want to have. I do not believe that my life will change dramatically if I read more or craft regularly. But this might be because I have had this way of thinking for a very long time when I was younger (eating disorder) and I can tell you, my life was not better just because I lost weight and reached my goal.
For me, the focus is now on the process. I want to enjoy the way and not only the end/achieving of the goal. If I am not able to enjoy the process, I know that I will replace my goal with another one and another one and this way, I will NEVER achieve any final goal/dream.
Step-by-step-guide to achieve your goals
Step 1: Break down your goals into very small steps.
The goal ” I want to read more often” is too broad. Make it “I want to read 20 minutes before I go to work this week”. For example, my goal for 2018 was to read 40 books. This was my, as Young calls it, dream. So I broke it down into small goals which were very easy and fast achievable.: Goal 1: Read in the tram on my way to work for one month. Goal 2: Read 20 pages per day for one week. Goal 3: Read 50 pages per day for one week. Goal 4: Read 50 pages per day for two weeks. And so on. Imagine I only had the goal to read 40 books in a year, it would take me such a long time to achieve this goal and feel the rush of reaching a self-set goal.
Step 2: Make it easy for yourself.
Don’t think that you will join the gym 15 minutes away. Sign up for the gym that is on your way home from work, or that is just around the corner. I, for example, know that I am very unlikely to go to the gym after work, so I chose a gym that is open before work. Now I get up at 5 in the morning and can work out in my gym because it is open 24/7 during the week. This is ideal for me and I only skip a day in the gym when I am really not feeling like going or am sick or travelling.
Step 3: Communicate your goals and create a community.
I was always shy about my goals and realised this year that it was partially because they seemed so unrealistic, not reachable. With my very small goals now, I find it much easier to share them. It happens often that I tell my friends about my goals for weightlifting in the gym and then, a couple of weeks or even days later, I inform them proudly that the goal we talked about was reached. It makes me proud of myself. It helps a lot that my boyfriend is such great support and we often go to the gym together. His support is also very visible in step 4.
Step 4: Visualise your goals and achievements.
It might sound cheesy, but my boyfriend and I have created a vision board in our living room. It is a pinboard divided into three columns: One for the current month, one for the next month and one for in 4 months time.
At the end of each month, we sit down and write down our goals for the next month (column 1). One goal on one post-it. We write down until when we want to achieve it and hang it on our vision board. Once we have reached a goal, we write the date of achievement on the back and put the paper in our goals-glass. This way, we see 1. that our goals to achieve are getting less and 2. that our glass with achievements is getting fuller and fuller. At the end of the year, we sit together and look through everything we have achieved. My boyfriend told me that it helps him to just stand in front of the board every now and then and to look at his goals to work maybe a little harder in the gym.
The goals in the second column (next month) are goals that we think we can achieve within two months times. This can be, for example, an increase in repetitions in the gym for one exercise or 3 hikes of more than 15 kilometres (the latter is an actual goal we had this summer)
The goals in the last/third column (4 months time) are our dreams. In the time leading up to this month, we will write down small goals for our monthly overview that will, eventually, lead to the bigger goal.
My goals for 2019
I love making lists and setting myself some challenging goals. And I cannot deny that a new year always makes me extra-excited to set goals. So, without much further ado, here are my goals for 2019. I have divided them into categories and will show you how my small goals will lead, eventually, to a bigger goal.
Zero waste
Dream: To live almost plastic-free
Buy shower gel and hair shampoo without packaging the next time I have to buy these items
Find a recipe/instructions on how to make deodorant myself
Make deodorant myself once mine is used
Buy nuts and potatoes on the market for one month (mid-January – mid-February)
Tidy up the bathroom stuff and get rid of things I never use
Put cutlery into my locker at work
Make paper out of wrapping paper (used) and re-use it
Reading
Dream: To read 52 books in one year
I already read a lot and often so the goals for this category are more to challenge myself even more
Read 30 minutes before work for two weeks in a row
Read 30 minutes before going to bed for two weeks in a row
Participate in one reading challenge (for one month)
