Grindin' & Rollin'

Flow states can't maintain indefinitely. It feels effortless to maintain but it requires energies and no matter how balanced you are, the tank empties unless you stop to refill it.

I've had a great summer run doing the "SUMMER OF BUZZ." I learned a bunch about hair, about what kind of barber I want to be, about what kind of shop I want to be in, about what kinds of non-standard barber stuff I really love and what I want to avoid. With the school year starting, that means it's time to hustle and I was anxious to get a reality check on barber school progress while I'm on-schedule. Every month I have a certain number of practical exercises that I need signed-off by my instructor. I also need to have clocked 1,500 hours to qualify for my license (only 1,200 to take the test, though).

I've been going to school full-time, Monday-Friday, 9-3pm. 30 hours a week x 4 weeks a month; that's 120 hours a month. I'm on month 9 of 13 – should be 1,080 hours. I'm at 1,079. I'll take that :)

My practical exercises are things I've seen escape other barber students, putting in time beyond their scheduled graduation to catch up on the practical exercises. This last month and a half is the first I've been able to complete my monthly practical exercises, more or less. The seven prior months, however, had many exercises I didn't know how to do yet. Doesn't change the fact that they need to be done.

These signatures are actually signatures... meaning that these are paper records. Fortunately, I'm really good at data entry and in less than 20 minutes had my records accounted for in a google spreadsheet, shared with my instructor. When I got home and on a laptop, not an iPad app, I set to doing some conditional formatting to identify exercises and frequency necessary to meet all the requirements within 90 days. I still have more than 90 days, but this will make a month-to-month recalibration easier to iterate and give me a little buffer if/when things don't go to plan.

To meet my requirements gap in the next 90 days, I need to do the following every.single.day.

• 2x cuts minimum
• 1x Round Brush or Flat Brush
• 1x Roller Set or Flat Iron
• 1x Virgin Tint or Touch-Up Tint

And once a week, I need to do a facial and a razor shave.

From now until the end of November.

I can do it, but it's a grind and lately I've already been feeling it. I get this is how I become sharpened as a professional barber. Now it's about performance vs. time. My haircuts are consistent and reliably improving, while my ability to earn a living as a barber really depends on my discipline around being efficient. Time efficiency is important, but even moreso is skill/service efficiency. Erskine has been on top of me the last few weeks about this; I get it now. When there's a bench full of clients who are waiting for a haircut, every stroke matters, so doing two strokes to do the job that one could do – it adds up.

The discipline it takes to do those exercises and still take on all the unpredictable good stuff that's been building up – that's gonna take a bit to build. I've been booked 2-3x a week for the past three weeks, either directly from people who got my business card at the park or at Cary's Lounge, or through TLCforMe.net. My last booking through the site said they found TLC through Google, and then decided to book me based on the cuts I had on Facebook and Instagram. More evidence that, at least for provenance, my socials are working for me. I imagine bookings will increase over time. Today this feels like pressure; I know in a few weeks this will feel like progress.