Focus on Done

Personal blogs are fertile ground for posts about what a person is going to do. This bores the reader and provides the blogger with the self licensing to not do what they said they were going to do.

If you announce it before you do it, your brain thinks you've accomplished something. This explains why changing your social media icon for a cause is a thing, when action for a cause tends not to be a thing.

I have a challenging year ahead of me. I'd like to take you on that journey from cubicle monkey to independent creator. But, I don't want to promise myself or you anything I "will be doing." I hold myself accountable by what I've done.

Two and a half weeks into the year, I've done the following:

• Decided to take this journey (this is a bigger step when you've tried and failed as often as I have).
• Compiled the last 400 posts to my blog for at least one new book. Editing will take while, but this has been my primary focus for January. I find releasing or completing a new project every month to be an intoxicating notion I can't get out of my head.
• Had dinner with Shawn Blanc. I want to see more of my "target readers" in person. These are the people I envision reading the post I'm about to publish. I don't want to necessarily "pick their brains" for new ideas. That's a waste of their time and they have their own blogs for that. I want to get an impression of what I do that works for them. To me, their views are more important than anything analytics or surveys can tell me. In fact, Shawn disagreed with what many of you expressed in the last survey and that's the best thing I took away from meeting with him. That, and, he's a nice guy (unlike many I've met in this business). I can buy and recommend his products with complete trust.
• Signed up for two gatherings later in the year among like-minded people.
• Woke up every morning an hour early to write more and meditate.
• Met with my doctor and discussed the latest advances in anxiety and IBS research. These afflictions have held me back personally and in business for 30 years. There are no cures for IBS and the emerging treatments have been ineffective for me. Anxiety, on the other hand, is something I've learned to live with. I may write more about this if I have the time, but, for now, I consider any progress in this area a milestone towards living a better, more useful life. I came away with two new leads for treatment.
• Gave the Twitter app on my phone a back seat. I've given up on consuming most forms of social media, but Twitter remains a place where the smartest people I know say the smartest things (with proper use of filtering and lists). However, those same people usually have blogs/newsletters/podcasts I can subscribe to. I don't need Twitter to be front and center anymore. It goes in a folder for now, and in the trash in due time. Baby steps.
• Decided on what will be the first physical product offered on this site. I'd go into more detail, but this is all that is done with this project.

Please let me know you've done. Keep the "what I'm doing" to a minimum and see what forces its way out through action.