I am in a rut.
That much is clear. The path out is less clear.
I put The Compound Effect on the other day and listened to some random spot in it It’s a similar book to The Slight Edge (the authors of each have a mentor/mentee connection if I’m remembering right). I enjoyed The Slight Edge more, but there’s no audiobook version of it.
Anyway, one similar story in the books is the diverging paths of separate people.
One makes a bunch of tiny positive choices over a long period of time.
The other makes a bunch of tiny negative choices over a long period of time.
The kicker of the story, of course, is that the person with the diverging paths is the same person, just at different points in life.
A couple years ago, I think I had an okay flywheel going. It wasn’t the most cohesive thing where it’s greater than the sum of its parts. But it was a bunch of different parts in motion—videos, blog posts, the podcast. It wasn’t all aligned and I’d often just blog about blogging and talk about being unaligned.
But, again, it was something in motion.
That seems to have ground to a halt this year.
For the record, in case you’re stumbling upon this post a few years from now, it’s 2020.
Tough year! But plenty of people in similar situations took the new situations that 2020 presented them and became even more productive.
I didn’t. That’s okay. But I can own it and start turning the ship back around. Slowly.
So here’s a quote from The Slight Edge:
What’s more, it’s one that the majority follow their whole lives. Someday, when my ship comes in … Someday, when I have the money … Someday, when I have the time … Someday, when I have the skill … Someday, when I have the confidence … How many of those statements have you said to yourself? Have I got some sobering news for you: “some day” doesn’t exist, never has, and never will.
One of my favorite phrases from Shawn Stevenson (author of Sleep Smarter and host of The Model Health Show) is: don’t live on Someday Isle.
One post at a time and all that. I’ll write, draw, talk, make videos, and work my way off of Someday Isle and out of this creative rut.