photo credit: MinimalistPhotography101.com

Lately I’ve been reading Chris Brogan again.  I tend to stay on blogs for a week or two, move on to something else, then sometimes return.  The ones I return to are the ones I find most beneficial and worth reading, so I’ve been floating in and out of Chris Brogan’s stuff for a few years, depending on his content.

His most recent posts focus on the ‘doing’ of things, what stops us, and what we need to do to overcome it.  The crux of it all “DO THE WORK”. Of course this is where a lot of us fall over, we want it to be easier than us actually having to do anything – it is 2011 afterall, life is supposed to be much, much easier.  But it isn’t.  My favourite buddist/esoteric/spiritual quote is “what do you do before enlightenment, you carry water and prepare meals, what do you do after enlightenment, you carry water and prepare meals” or something to that effect – you get my drift.  Just knowing something doesn’t really make much difference unless you apply it.

So every time my inner voice is screaming at me to get off the treadmill at gym because it’s too hard, I answer back, “I am doing the work – suck it up” and I do. Writing this post is me ‘doing the work’.  My son spends at least four hours a day practicing his juggling – I know he’s only 11 – but he’s doing the work.  He wants something and he’s doing the work to get it.  Yeah I’m pretty proud momma.

Anyway, I still can’t bring myself to finish my two novels, that are left unfinished.  One was actually totally trashed, and deleted after a terrible session on twitter and blog comments which caused me to question whether I was up to facing all the criticism of a mean public, and at the time I wasn’t, (words can mortally wound the fragile heart – Me if you ever want to quote it),  so hitting delete was pretty easy.  But it’s still in my head.  The other is a fiction, much more fun, but still sitting, stewing around.  I let myself get distracted a lot, with things that I do care about, and others that I choose to care about, because I can contribute something.  But really on strong self reflection, it’s just one more of those excuses that Chris Brogan talks about.

So the aims for this month are to write a fantastic last assessment piece for my masters and get a high distinction so that I can change to an MPhil and then articulate to my PhD, and once the assessment piece is out of the way, write the shit out of both novels so I can lodge them early next year, March at the latest.  And to achieve this, I have to do the work, and to do that, I might have to let the daily blog posts go, and instead make quality weekly ones, but I’ll see how I go.  Blog posts actually get my brain thinking, and my fingers writing which are both great things for me.

So do yourselves the old favour, and check out Chris’ blog and think about what it is you’re not doing and why you’re not doing it.

Carry on.

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