Up at 0930 and again tackled the proposal. In the past few days I have had a great deal of difficulty with this project and have accomplished little or nothing. Truly the only thing I have going for me is my incredibly stubborn persistence, the fact that I am unwilling to give up, unwilling to surrender to my injured state, unwilling to exclude the possibility of recovery.

Despite this persistence, I have been very down. This is due to a number of causes:

• Engaging in activity which results in the forced recognition of my incompetence. Every line, every phrase, every articulation, proves to be a blind, bullheaded effort which demands an extended review, edit, polish, cycle to arrive at a meaningful text.

• The recent realization that this forced effort does not lead to much in the way of substantive improvement. My “bulldozer” efforts give me a sense of accomplishment as I conflate effort and achievement. My hard work creates the impression that my activity will translate into accomplishment. In fact, I achieve little and there is no true substantive change in my abilities, or my condition. In the world of HR this sense of deflation is described by the Porter-Lawler Expectancy Theory model.

• Another negative factor derives from the recognition that in place of a positive change in my photographic abilities (which would indicate some degree of progressive improvement in my condition) what in fact has occurred is the relaxation of my process standards so as to facilitate performance at a lower standard than previously accepted. Acknowledgement of this is very painful.

• Coupled with these three events (forced recognition of my incompetence, conflation of effort and achievement, the inadvertent acceptance of lower standards) there has come the reluctant acceptance that, even should the proposal result in a functioning social enterprise, I lack the ability to manage the resulting organization. This too has been very hard to accept. I am able to perform but in a limited way and that limited performance remains very slow. Exceedingly slow. Glacially slow.

The proposal has taken over two years to arrive at its present incomplete state. Its origins lie in a document I sent to a Federal M.P. two years ago. This original document was a very poorly written. Atrocious is a better word for it. There was no response.

The second iteration of the proposal took place one year ago. It was presented to a local Ottawa non-profit in January 2013. That morphed into a third iteration which was distributed nine months ago. Forced recognition of my inabilities resulting from that distribution lead me to a personal crisis in March / April 2013.

The fourth iteration surfaced on this blog six months ago. I took another stab at redefining the project and ended up with a document package which I proposed to send out for review. Fortunately, I erred and sent out nothing.

The fifth iteration is the web version, which, when completed, will be available here:
TBI Proposal

I believe the reason I have found the proposal so difficult to write is due to the fact that it seeks to describe something in the future, an entity which has no place in the present. All of the other written materials consist of descriptive narrative. I am describing something that I experienced. When I move away from descriptive narrative, that is when I encounter great difficulty.