Join My Scheme Team

Last year, my daughter gave me a fun blank notebook with SCHEMES on the cover. I vowed to her that I would fill it with schemes. I now have close to fifty.

Every week, I explore a new scheme on two sides of a single page. Things like:

  • Spend a month a year living somewhere else
  • Make a sci-fi radio play about a masculinity detox centre on the moon
  • Create an elder ritual for myself
  • Attach a tiny scroll of protection to random bikes

It takes about 20 minutes, and it’s silly and fun. I look forward to having a coffee and writing some crazy shit down. When I talk about the ideas with friends, some schemes are naturally more contagious… I can see people’s eyes light up.

And often afterwards, people will say: Man, I need a Book of Schemes!

So as we approach the beginning of the new year, I’m building a SCHEME TEAM to run through 2025.

Members of the team will write a scheme each week. At the end of each month, we’ll have a Scheme Team meeting. The exact format of the meetings might evolve, but they hopefully will provide an accountability structure and an opportunity to speak our outlandish ideas aloud.

What qualifies as a scheme? They can be: life schemes, creative schemes, preposterous schemes, political schemes, romantic schemes, so-crazy-it-just-might-work schemes…!

They are not: plans to execute. They are not projects. You NEVER have to do them. You probably SHOULDN’T ever do them. They are untethered, tantalizing flights of imagination.

Put down your task list and pick up your Book of Schemes!

For me, it has become a much needed creative practice in my life for turning seeds into seedlings. Some will be the basis for a project I take on. Some have already become reality. Most will be the fertilizer for other ideas.

If you are a doer, the temptation will be to immediately start to try to realize your schemes. But my invitation is that you push yourself to stay longer in this ideation phase. The whole year if you can manage it! Then you will have close to 50 schemes to choose from!

And I have a scheme for what might happen after that…


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *