Whether you see it as the golden rule, or being the change you wish to see in the world, sometimes you have to do the thing you’d most like to see others doing.
If you wish more people would ask your advice and seek your help, maybe it’s time to give that gift to others and ask for their help instead.
It’s easy to become discouraged when thinking about all the new habits you’d like to form. Knowing that it can take many weeks to solidify even a single new habit, you quickly realize how long it will take to form several at once.
I’ve found that a great alternative is to focus on forming, mastering, and maintaining just one habit. By finding your own way to implement the Getting Things Done methods, you can, by default, accomplish all of the rest without having to focus on forming many habits at once.
UPDATE: It’s even crazier than I thought. The last time I looked at the book Getting Things Done on Amazon, it was selling for about nine dollars. Right now it’s only $6.49! If you don’t own this book, it’s crazy not to buy a copy at that price!
In any project you’re committed to following through with, there are are moments of inspiration and great action, there are challenges to overcome, and then mostly there are a lot of everyday moments when you just have to keep putting one foot in front of the other.
So today I took one more step. I hope you’ll do the same in your endeavors.
I’ve been working on a project for the last eleven months. In reality this is only the most recent phase of a project I’ve been working on for ten years. The project is to figure out how I’m going to make an acceptable living. (I’m currently making a living, but it is not acceptable, for many reasons other than money.)
For the last eleven months I’ve been learning how to make a living online. I’ve spent hundreds of hours, and thousands of dollars, and you know what? So far I’m not making shit. I’ve made sixty five dollars, but it cost me a hundred dollars worth of free advertising. So if I’d had to pay for it… it would’ve been a loss.
Beyond all the failure (or rather, temporary lack of success) it turns out there is one great quality I’ve come to appreciate:
I haven’t quit.
I will go long periods without any productive activity, but I haven’t quit. I’ll piss away a mentorship that I paid a lot of money for, giving me direct access to an amazing source of experience, advice, and resources, but I haven’t quit. The one thing that gives me hope is it’s been eleven months, and I keep on starting, over and over again.
I can’t give up. This is too important. It’s the rest of my life. So as frustrating as it is to look back on my time log and realize I haven’t done any productive work since July 24th (two weeks ago), I will start again. I’ll probably start many, many more times before I find lasting success. I’m an expert at starting. And I have to believe if I start enough times, eventually I’ll figure out how to finish.
