Revebla Manifesto

“Manifesto”
To make public.

The list

0 : Produce a plan / Produce data about data
1 : Fix problems now, don’t develop problems
2 : Speak to people where they are
3 : Review yourself and others
4 : Institutions are spooky
5 : Documenting is part of making
6 : Reuse techniques as much as appropriate
7 :
8 : Eat things well at all points in the practise
9 : Have a place for mistakes X : Grow practises
E : Keep it simple, stupid

The text

Like in life, there are several ways to create. Much like the seven basic plots there are a few basic paths. We either decide to wing it and allow conditions we fall into to create the work spontaniously or we plan out our path, or perhaps someone comes to us with the path we need to persue. Creation should be something we do critically, knowingly deciding the method that we decide our path.

Revebla, is a word that is bad Esperanto, the international language. It is an adjective form of the word for dream, revi- (to dream) -ebla (able, shows possibility). If something is revebla it is dreamable.

Over the past few years I’ve been contemplating a list that I could perfect and share that could help me in creation. Using a bullet-journal or a set of rules to create a way to track and shape what I do and what I want to achieve. Over that time (and even before that) the form of this project has changed a lot and in the past year I realised that the project has a very large scope and can only ever really be driven by example.

Some projects are started and never finished. Some are never brought to light. A lot of the time these projects are bad ideas, but some of those projects are just not given the time they need and deserve.

Doing things one thing at a time, after breaking down a task into smaller tasks tend to be good ways to do things but this isn’t applicable to every path we choose for whatever work we are doing. In programming, most problems you come across are solved, so if you don’t know a solution you just look it up online or in a project you have the source code for already. This is nice but some problems aren’t solved or are not shared in this way. This is where having rules to navigate a situation when other things fail is a very useful thing.

The list was originally for a movie I was writing about this project for me creating a better life for myself, the rules included meta-rules that dictated how the list was to be managed. The list was 12 rules long, the first being that the first 7 could not change. These core rules are the most important the rest can be changed as habits are solved or if it becomes too much at once. It takes around 3 weeks to form a habit or compulsion. This is important for anyone wanting to change, hold that thing for 21 days straight and it’s much more likely you will keep it going. So keep doing it everyday until the 22nd day, then just keep going. You control the zero mark which could happen any day but you control it.