Perfectionism. Something that’s really held a lot of people back, and I’m one of them. It’s something that just seems to put this kind of chokehold on any kind of creativity, because it’s overly analyzing and editing everything, because it’s not quite right, it can always be better, and always being compared to some kind of great version, some kind of transcendent masterpiece, and then I create something and then it cannot compare, so it’s garbage. And this kind of approach, so many people are being are being limited in what they do, because they’re just constantly considering it to be not good enough. And in my case, I don’t feel like I really need to produce any kind of work of art or anything. And so that’s OK. but it also made me think that this same idea that is often applied to art, the same principles apply to everything that we do in our lives. So when I started to think about this concept of the rough draft, like being completely comfortable with producing and releasing and publishing something that is a very low quality, you can say. You don’t even… of course you try to make everything you do good, but to just not be concerned about judging it against some kind of standard, because you see it as a rough draft. The rough draft. The first draft. The trial run. These things don’t have the same standard that we would apply to some kind of ultra-refined, edited 10 times, final work. So applying that same idea, we can apply that to the things that we do in life. So I started to connect this idea with the idea of heaven or paradise, this kind of vision we have, this utopia, this idea of the way the world should be or could be, where everything is good, the good version of everything, the best version of everything. And it seems so far away. It seems like some kind of magical other world. And in some belief systems, it is a place you can only get to after death maybe, and maybe only some people can get there, and maybe it doesn’t have any clear definition. Maybe it’s not even a physical world or whatever. And it really does seem so far away, I think to the point that it gets dismissed. Just like when somebody attempts to make some kind of artistic masterpiece, and then takes a look at their first draft, and compares it to this imagined masterpiece. It’s like oh, this is nothing. This is total failure. But maybe it’s the same way with our view of paradise and heaven. Maybe we don’t have to wait for some kind of perfect complete version of heaven or of paradise. We don’t need to wait until everything is in place, for everything to be perfectly polished and refined and edited, and “This is our Heaven.” Instead we can make a draft. Imagine… here’s the question for you. What would make your world better? What would you want to change, in some small way, not in some kind of grand world system, but just what’s something that you would change, in yourself or in your own immediate environment, or something about the way you do things, or the way that your immediate environment makes you feel? What’s something that would bring that closer to paradise? Or if you have this kind of half-baked, partial notion of “well, these certain types of things, you know, they would be good; I’m not quite sure exactly how to make it work, but these things would be good”: well, why not experiment with that? Throw out some rough drafts? Just toss them out. Just try them out. And edit later. See what happens. That’s the idea of the rough draft of paradise. Just anything that seems like it would be in that direction of this sort of imagined world where things are better, this kind of otherworldly state: what would take things one step in that direction, possibly? And imagine if people started to take these steps. I think it takes a little bit of courage and creativity and daring to be willing to try to do anything differently. But it seems to open some possibilities. Some of these things won’t work. Some of them might be silly. And yet some of them might lead to a very good change, even in small ways. So that is my idea to kick off the new year. And I hope you have an excellent new year, and make it that way.