Ah, Toluca Colorado. Man, that brings back some memories, and not all of them are good, to be honest.
So, this “Toluca Colorado” thing, it wasn’t a place I visited, not really. It was this project, or maybe more like a half-baked idea someone important dreamed up. Sounded fancy, right? Toluca Colorado. Nobody could really tell me what it was supposed to be, not in concrete terms anyway. It was all very… aspirational, let’s say.
Naturally, it landed on my plate. “Make it happen,” they said. Okay, sure. First thing I did, I tried to pin down the details. What were we actually aiming for? I asked around, sat in a bunch of meetings. Got a lot of vague hand-waving. “Think vibrant,” they’d say. “Think passion!” Useful, huh?
So, I started just trying things. I grabbed a bunch of reference stuff, anything that screamed “Toluca” or “Colorado” – which, by the way, are two pretty different vibes if you ask me. I sketched, I mocked up, I threw ideas at the wall. Spent days, maybe weeks, just trying to make something tangible out of the fog. It was like wrestling smoke. One day the feedback was “more red,” the next it was “too much red, needs more… earth tones from Toluca.” Make up your minds, people!
Here’s what I actually did, my process, if you can call it that:
- Wasted time in meetings: Sat there, nodded, tried to extract a single clear instruction. Mostly failed.
- Tried to research: Looked up images, articles, anything to give me a clue. Found lots of cool stuff about Toluca, the city, and Colorado, the state. None of it seemed to connect to what they wanted.
- Made a ton of drafts: Seriously, so many versions. Each one shot down for some new, random reason. It was like they didn’t know what they wanted, but they were experts at knowing what they didn’t want.
- Got frustrated: Yeah, a lot of that. Felt like I was just spinning my wheels.
The Big Realization
And you know what? That whole “Toluca Colorado” fiasco, it was a real eye-opener. It wasn’t just about that one project. It was about how things were being done, or rather, not being done. It made me think, what am I actually achieving here? Am I building anything, or am I just shuffling papers and trying to read minds?
I remember one afternoon, staring at another rejected draft – this one was apparently “not Colorado enough,” despite being full of mountains – and I just thought, “Nope. Enough of this.” It wasn’t about the work itself being hard. I don’t mind hard work. But this? This was just… pointless.
So, I started focusing my energy elsewhere. Little side projects, things I actually enjoyed and felt had some purpose. I learned more doing that in a few weeks than I did in months of “Toluca Colorado.” Eventually, I just moved on from that whole environment. Found a place where “clear direction” wasn’t a mythical creature. Best thing I ever did for myself. That “Toluca Colorado” mess, in a weird way, pushed me to find something much better. So, thanks for that, I guess.
