Today I made no discernible progress towards achieving my 2014 goals. That is unless you count writing this blog post.
Now why is it that the blog post goal has stayed on track and the others haven’t?
The answer is simple.
If I miss one day of writing the goal is over for the year – I’ll come back to that later – but if I miss a run or some chin-ups there’s always the next day. That’s precisely what happened this past week. I didn’t run once and I didn’t do a single chin-up.
Still, I turned up at Frontline this morning and did my thing. It felt great to be hard at it again. And that will probably give me the motivation to get the running and the chin-ups started again.
The reality is, this week has been very busy. I presented to the Professionals marketing group on Monday. It was the first time I’d done that presentation so I had to prepare it from the ground up. Although I used a lot of stories I’ve used in other presentations the re-organising took most of last weekend. By the time I made it to the end of Monday I was already buggered.
I then had an early start Wednesday and I’ve had tomorrow’s keynote (embedded below) to prepare from scratch.
Then I’ve had the brutal feedback about my writing. I think that knocked me a bit. It’s not that the feedback wasn’t valuable – it was – but it took a lot of my mental bandwidth trying to think about what it is that I want to write in a book. I still don’t know the answer to that question but I know that writing a book WASN’T part of the plan for 2014 so I’m dropping it.
Instead, I’m writing – stuff. As Henry Day said this morning, “Your writing is a bit all over the place. But it’s interesting and it gives your readers an insight into your mind.” That’s good enough.
It was never my intention to write blog posts with any sort of narrative theme so I’m happy just to write something.
This post is a nod of the head to Marcus Aurelius who wrote a regular journal as a way to remind himself of the things he ought to be doing. If it’s good enough for an emperor, it’s good enough for me.
Now back to the statement above about the goal being over for the year. That’s bullshit. Yes, if I miss a day I’ll have missed a day but that doesn’t mean that I can’t get back on the writing horse and keep writing.
Thinking of a setback as a complete failure effaces all the good that I’ve done to the point of the setback. And that’s disempowering and it’s what’s happening with my chin-up challenge. I miss a a day or two and I start to think “Of fuck it, you’re not built for chin-ups anyway.”
So, I’m going to get back on the chin-up band wagon and I’ll be running again tomorrow, even if it is just a quick 5 ks.
And on a positive note to wrap things up, I’m excited to see my friend Belinda Dufall starting to blog. Belinda is a passionate advocate for people receiving a fair go and a fine agent. I’m looking forward to reading more of her work.
