One week ago tragedy struck.
The day started off on a high note… I was part of an awesome brainstorm session with Ben Arment for Story 2010 and then hung out with Gabe Lyons and some awesome leaders from around Chicago to talk about the upcoming Q Conference.
I was with my friend Corbyn Tyson [if you don't know him, you need to...he's an amazing filmmaker and visual storyteller... he's also part of Monvee] having dinner when the unthinkable happened… someone broke into Corbyn’s truck and stole my laptop.
Living in the city you sort of grow accustomed to the fact that you can’t leave anything in plain sight [or even your trunk], but for some reason I guess I assumed the area/neighborhood was safe but in the end, I was wrong.
It was absolutely devastating.
Beyond losing the laptop I had also lost…
- all of my music.
- all of my work documents for Park from the last year.
- remember how I’d mentioned I was writing a book? Yeah, that too.
- a ton of personal documents, half-written blog posts and idea files.
- presentations I had created for a few upcoming speaking engagements.
- and a whole lot more…
I had just thought about getting an external hard drive to back things up about two weeks ago, but procrastinated and pretty much cursed the fact I hadn’t.
So, the next day I had to make a trek to the Apple Store and get a new MacBook and had to start the long process of piecing my life back together.
FORTUNATELY… the good people at iTunes let me re-download all of my purchases [bonus you get for downloading music LEGALLY], I had backed up a few things in GoogleDocs, and many of my work files were buried in different emails, so I was able to recover some, but not all.
So, today, as I type, I’m on a new MacBook that has an external hard drive attached to it, I’m using my Time Machine, have MobileMe, and am going to make this a new way of life for how I work, create, and organize.
This past week has been completely focused on getting my life back together, recovering lost files, re-downloading, re-installing… it’s been overwhelming to say the least.
In all of this though, there is a silver lining [I sometimes have the curse of being too positive] but the cool thing this is doing is giving me a clean slate… I don’t have the old files to depend on, old ideas to pull from… I have to start all over again.
I honestly think, in the long run, this will be one of the best things that’s happened to help reawaken some creativity and will be the catalyst for some new thoughts and ideas.
I think sometimes we just need to hit reset… or in my instance, start all over again. Sometimes starting with a clean slate is one of the best things that can happen to all of us.
But lesson learned: back everything up… take advantage of tools like MobileMe, GoogleDocs, DropBox, etc… and for the love, if you are in the city, don’t leave things out in the open.
