My Orphan Blog
Motivation vs. focus: one is easy to get but hard to hold, the other hard to achieve and damn near impossible to keep. My blog has become a victim of a war between the two. Is it a lack of motivation or an unwillingness to focus? Either way, it has become another orphan blog on the world wide web.
Like many budding Generalists, I work a full-time job, have a family, and sometimes I just can’t find the motivation or the focus.
I think I occasionally forget about playing the long game, even though it’s the long game that has got me where I am. I lose perspective and worry about the worth of what I have to say on here. I forget that much of what I write about are the things that have made me relatively successful in my career. It already has some proven value, and these are the very skills that I need to employ to build something of value on the side.
I, like many, work in sprints on my side gig yet I expect marathon results. I see what others have done but I’m blind to the long lead up. James Altucher didn’t write a couple of blog posts and start a media business, so why would I think after one year and a handful of posts that I’d have a massive email list?
There’s no rush as long as over time I keep moving forward, and remember that by doing nothing, I’m going backwards. A couple of sentences here, a paragraph there, a book read, a meeting had, it all mounts up over time. People, including myself, tend to overestimate what we can do in the short-term but underestimate what we can achieve in the long term.
Over time I went from being a farm hand to an Executive Producer at a television network, yet last week I went round in circles and got nothing done. In fact, I spent a chunk of the week worrying that someone would find out that I was a fraud and send me back to the farm. At times like this, I tend to lose my curiosity. I stop reading, stop meeting people, and creativity seems to seep away.
I start berating myself for not getting on with anything; my plans start to seem unrealistic, just too big or too hard. But if I just do little things every day, achieve little victories, over time I’ve proven to myself – when I take a moment to look back – that I can get quite big things done.
While this is a slightly random post, it qualifies as a little thing, a little victory, and if I keep on doing it, maybe something will come of it.
Cheers @generlaistalan
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