One of my 2011 goals is to further develop my writing and communication skills. So how am I doing? Any feedback you can give would be much appreciated.
PS. I believe I'm in the 1-2 year old age range in this photo. I guess it was never to early to start a goal!
How many of you faced this dilemma: You have this amazing idea for a blog post, article, book, etc, but you currently don’t have enough traffic or a large enough following to get any mileage out of it. Do you punt it until the unknown future? Or do you publish it now and suffer the emotional heartbreak of no one caring enough to stop on by and see your work?
Congratulations, you’re facing facet of writer’s block.
Good constraints are helpful because they can:
The allure of making money online is a powerful one. I’ll admit that I got caught in the entire eBay marketing hype a few years back because I wanted to get rich quick. And so naturally I lost some money in the process. I was beckoned by the simple dream, the simple meme: if you build it, they will come.
And so many build, and few show up, much to the dismay of the would-be internet millionaires.
Discovering I had no fingerprints startled me. I actually felt my head jerk in the same way my body shakes awake when I fall in a dream. I was washing my hands (like usual) and I noticed that my hands and fingers were slipping past each other with zero friction between them. Was it a different type of soap? No, because even when I dried them, I could rub the pads of my fingers together with almost no resistance. All the ridges that you normally can see with your eyes had been smoothed away.
I was confused. How did this happen? Would-be crooks, pay attention! Rick’s secret to fingerprint-free fingers is about to be revealed.
I face this fear almost every time I write. What if it’s all junk? What if nobody likes it? The list goes on.
But why do we not ask the opposite? What if it’s great? What if it really connects with a reader in a big way? What if it permanently shifts their perspective on life forever? And all from a single post, how amazing!
I threw a huge pity party for myself last week. It was awesome awful. I let these debilitating thoughts play in my head over and over again until I made myself sick and puked. It was like a college party without the fun of the buzz.
Then I changed my attitude and (surprise) everything got better. Instead of worrying about all the todo’s on my plate, I simply sat down and knocked them out (and ahead of schedule). Problem solved.
It’s simple math. Would you rather:
When put in these terms, the answer seems obvious. Yet some of us are so fearful to part with our hard earned dollars that we’d rather do all the work ourselves even if it ultimately hurts are bottom line.
No, this post is not about boogers. It’s about all the little irritations of life that we let slide until the frustration crescendos until we do something impulsive: yell, eat, smoke, drink, yell some more, throw out, curse, bitch, moan, cry, and possibly pick one’s nose.
I screamed “DO A GOOGLE SEARCH!” in a german accent while pounding my fist on the table. My wife and our friends Emily and Ben roared with laughter (of course you had to be there). We were playing Mad Gab, but not with any care of who won the game. Our goal was to have a great time with some friends. And by the my wife blurted out “Dead man walking!” in a british accent, we were all in tears from laughing so hard.
Fun was had; Mission accomplished.