Havi at fluentself.com has been making me think about a range of issues, but the one that I want to chase down right here is the idea that the thing you need to get unstuck, the balm for the hurt, the holy grail, is probably something that you’ve been tripping over. As in, direct from The Department of the Bleeding Obvious.

What have I been tripping over? While I muse on that privately, what have YOU been tripping over? It could very well be the thing that will help you “do the thing.”

We all need an even better (or just outside-ourselves) example to learn from—a person who does what we do, who can cast an eye on our efforts and give some perspective. Wha? I mean, as one of my beloved clients sez ‘even an editor needs an editor’ or, put another way, even mentors need mentors. Masters of almost any craft or vocation will say that they have a master they in turn apprentice from.

Just finished the first session of this course (”Self-Promotion for Wimps”), which as anyone reading along here at Wild Keys knows, is welcome triage for my Achilles heel. Havi, Naomi, your sane, helpful voices are coming in loud and clear, and at the perfect time.

Merlin Mann, the voice behind the uber-productivity blog 43 Folders, is melting down. I mean this in the best possible way, no snark intended.

As Merlin notes in this post, he began 43 Folders almost exactly four years ago (which seems hard to believe, in hindsight, given its meteoric success — only four years?). Like many blogs, in its earliest form the blog was a means of self-discovery — a self-improvement experiment, if you will:

I also realized from the beginning that the real life hacks were about making your way from a place that’s chaotic and depressing toward someplace where you feel more competent, stable, and alive. A place where you eventually may not need the life hack any more. I wanted to figure out why this stuff did and didn’t work by living inside of it, and by filing real-time reports about what I learned — effectively operating on myself in public with a keyboard, a handful of index cards, and an infinite IV of French Roast coffee.

People, including high-profile bloggers, liked his (earnest, quirky, occasionally profane) voice and linked to it. What started out, I’m guessing, as a hobby, grew into an avocation, and then, a living.

And then comes the rub. The living-by-blog model is harder than it looks, and I’m not surprised to learn that it comes at a price and may even be damaging to the soul. The timing isn’t surprising either; Merlin wouldn’t be the first high-profile blogger to hit a wall a few years in, nor the first to do so after becoming a parent. (Yes, I believe this changes things, for fathers as well as mothers.)

Mostly, I think there’s a paradox for the people who value making worthwhile things. On the one hand, its damned difficult to do on top of life’s other responsibilities. It seems to make the most sense, be most practical, to combine making worthwhile things with making a living. And yet, it is so easy to get sucked into the vortex of being a producer, where one gets whirled so fast there’s no time to think, to deepen, or to reflect. What happens to one’s ability to create when creation is 9-to-5?

What makes Merlin’s announcement that he’s come to a crossroads inspiring rather than depressing, however, is that he’s proposing to go on, to do things differently, and to do them better. I am truly hanging on, eager to know what comes next, and wishing him all the best.