Nothing Twice: I have a Dream
Posted On: Aug 12, 2019
Categories: Blog
You are all familiar with the mind of a procrastinator? Well, here’s my confession: I think I’m a procrastinator...
Aaron Sorkin once said: ‘You call it procrastinating. I call it thinking.’
It took me about 4 years to get the courage to set up Nothing Twice. There’s always been a deadline at work, another project to develop, travels to do, family and friends to see, but it’s always been on my mind. I’ve had a quick read on ‘procrastination’ and realised that a lot of great personalities in history were procrastinators. And yes, it makes me feel better!
- Leonardo da Vinci took 16 years to finish Mona Lisa, but the time he took to investigate optics transformed the way he pained light and made him a better painter.
- Mozart wrote the overture for Don Giovanni the night before it premiered, and it’s been reported he may have been a tad hungover.
- Martin Luther King, Jr was rewriting his speech only hours before he saw his audience on that memorable day when he uttered: ‘I have a dream’. That famous sentence wasn’t originally included in his draft and leaving the speech to the last minute he left himself open to a wider range of possibilities.
- Frank Lloyd Wright left himself only a couple of hours to draw up the plans for the Fallingwater retreat, his most recognised architectural piece, just because he’d spent months avoiding decision-making. Yes, procrastinating kills productivity, but it can be a springboard for creativity.
Aaron Sorkin once said: ‘You call it procrastinating. I call it thinking.’ At some point thinking becomes doing.
Fallingwater, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1935 and completed in 1937; near Mill Run, southwestern Pennsylvania.
One day the final ‘push’ arrived in the person of my partner and a couple of cool French cyclists – travellers met in Phu Quoc, who encouraged me to really give it a go. Sometimes you just need to make the final leap and decide to stop procrastinating! Having a dream needs to turn into MAKING a dream.
First business cards were made in a little print shop somewhere in South Vietnam, where the lady owner and I had fun trying to communicate across our languages and cultures. I still have some of these cards and I can still feel the Vietnamese sun on my face and the smell of Pho Bo, the way I felt it as I opened the box and saw my first Nothing Twice logo.
At the moment the MAKING is happening, on many levels. I’m aware the journey has only started, I will probably make mistakes in the running of my small business, but equally I will have my successes and joys when things are done. With determination and the help and patience of family and friends who love me my small workshop is now open, the website is now working and I am ready to commit time and creativity to do what I love to do: I am ready to MAKE. I’M MAKING!!! And I will not procrastinate any more, I will just ‘think’ to design some extraordinary silver pieces, I promise!
Examples of procrastinators-thinkers in Australia and Vietnam. Photos by Ewa Ullman.