A personal project. It is that idea that keeps knocking on your door and is waiting for you to answer.
I answered the door and started exploring personal projects right out of college. It is what made my transition from college to adulthood one of my favorite times of my life.
My personal projects were starting a podcast, developing a daily journaling practice, starting a blog, and enrolling in yoga teaching training.
But a personal project can really be any project, hobby, or habit. It can be anything from taking a photography class, to organizing your basement, writing a book, or developing a steady workout plan.
A personal project is a project, hobby, or habit that you do for your own self-fulfillment.
A personal project is that "other" thing besides work or family. It is that thing you don't do for someone else or as your sole income, but for yourself and your freedom.
You find it by leaning into your curiosity and interests, and pursue it by laying out an action plan as to when and how you're going to make it happen.
More than anything, personal projects are a way to commit to your self-fulfillment and happiness, and not have it get lost in the craziness of life.
When you hear personal project, you may also think passion project.
I call it a personal project because I think the word passion scares people. When people are asked, "what is your passion," I see them get stressed, especially those who have no idea what to say.
I think this is because our society has put pressure on each person to find their "thing." We all need a niche or one thing we are good at, interested in, and maybe even extremely passionate about.
But what if we are good a lot of things? What if we are interested in a lot of things? What if we don't have a strong interest for anything? What if we want to spend time on one thing now and a different thing later?
Is any or all of this ok? Yes.
Our interests change, the world changes, and we change. We don't have to have one specific passion that we earnestly seek.
It is important to see that there is something distinctively unique inside of us, something personal, that we are meant to discover and explore.
That is what personal projects are for. We can have many small or big ones over many years. It's about pursuing whatever is inside of you in this season of life.
What is a personal project and what is it not?
It is your box, not someone else's box
We have all these different boxes in our life: work, family, friends, significant other, other responsibilities, etc. A lot of times we try to fit ourselves or spread our time amongst the boxes. But where is our box? Where is the box that we don't have to fit ourselves into? Where is the box that is dedicated to spending time on you?
That is what personal projects for. They give you your own box to spend time putting your smallest and biggest ideas.
A timeline for when something will be pursued, not something that gets put on the back-burner (again)
We say a lot how cool it would be to do "fill in the blank" someday. Well that someday can be today.
Personal projects allow us to make what I call a "growth, but graceful" timeline for completing something. We can create a deadline that is close enough that it motivates us to work on the project, but far enough out so it is realistic and attainable.
An action plan for how you're going to do something, not a forever winding road to the destination
A lot of times we say we want to do something, but we just aren't sure how to do it.
Personal projects allow us to think through and lay out the steps for what we want to do. It allows us to have a glimpse of where we are going, even if that requires a few U-turns along the way.
Time spent on something fulfilling and happy, not something unfulfilling or boring
Our lives are meant to be lived to the fullest, whatever that may look like for us.
Personal projects are a way we can check in on what is actually fulfilling to us. We can be more intentional on doing things that are going to bring us the most amount of happiness, and leave what isn't serving us behind.
Why you want a personal project?
Puts less pressure on receiving happiness from somewhere else
We've all heard, "don't put all your eggs in one basket." It is the same with our happiness. Sometimes we can put overwhelming pressure on 1 thing such as our work or romantic relationships to make us happy. That can be self-sabotaging at times and actually make our relationship with those things worse.
Having a personal project allows us to have another outlet for our happiness and one that we have a lot of power to be creative in. It is often that I notice that my relationships with the other things in my life have gotten better due to being able to pursue my personal projects.
Get to use your downtime how you actually want
When we finally get to have some downtime in our day, we sometimes don't know what to do with ourselves. Our go-to ends up being what the great marketers of the world have told us to do: social media scroll, binge Netflix, and online shop.
While there is nothing wrong with any of those things, personal projects give us the opportunity to consider what we actually want to do. Is it relax and watch Netflix, or make a recipe from the cookbook you've been wanting to open? Neither is right or wrong, but personal projects help us to make the choice of how we actually want to spend our downtime.
Allows you to explore a new version of success
Our forms of success could be what job we have, what house we live in, who we are dating, or how much money we make. What if we measured our success on how happy we were doing something? Not the destination or the result, but the actual journey to doing something?
Personal projects give us the opportunity to explore the activities, practices, and habits that make us the happiest, sometimes guiding us to a better destination than we could have even imagined.
So the question is, are you going to answer the door?
