Thursday, July 19, 2012

The Moment the Light Went On

As anyone who's been reading this blog since its inception will have noticed, I have been a very sporadic blogger at best.

Blogging is something I am meant to be doing. Frequently, that little lightbulb goes off in my head that says "this would make a great blog post topic!" and though I want to blog, and sometimes even intend to write that post when I get home, I nearly always have shoved the idea away, consciously, and have been avoiding this blog at all costs.

I haven't been sure why until just recently.

A little backstory here to catch you up on my life at the moment: I'm currently on a working vacation in Hawaii. Vacation, because it's been four years since I've taken a real holiday. Hawaii, because I have never been to a tropical beach location and have been dreaming about it for ages, and it fits the bill for the type of activities that jive nicely with a work retreat. And why am I working on vacation, most of all? Because I needed to work on my business rather than in it. To do that, I needed to get away from work and away from all my regular life distractions, so I can strategize... and if I'm going away physically, I'm killing two birds with one stone and taking a holiday!

I needed to do business strategizing because I've been unhappy with the process and results of two specific parts of my business, and I needed to find a way to make them work for me instead of feeling like I'm fighting against them all the time.

It's become clear to me while working on this strategy that:
  1. I had resigned myself to mediocrity in my career due to my lack of solutions to these business processes that weren't working.
  2. I'm not actually okay with mediocrity, however.
  3. There are still avenues I haven't exhausted for new processes in the areas of my business I've been unhappy about, so I have no business throwing in the towel and pretending they're unfixable. And, interestingly:
  4. While my primary focus with this strategic planning session on my day job, I've been hearing this clear voice that keeps telling me that blogging needs to be a regular part of my life. It doesn't need to be part of my job strategy, but it needs to be a part of my life strategy.
 And in seeing all four of these insights together, I realized that the avoidance of this blog has been due to my resignation to mediocrity. I may have settled in some aspects of my life, but I am really passionate about blogging (I know! I don't actually even participate in my passion. The irony is not lost on me) and I was not okay with having a mediocre blog. And I think I had started to believe that I could do no better than mediocre, so it was easier to just not blog at all than to do it poorly. There's also some fear that this blog will not measure up to the one I wrote previously, before starting my business. If you don't try, you can't fail, right?

WRONG. So, so, so wrong. Not participating in your passion = GIANT FUCKING FAIL.

Another thing I do that is pretty dumb, when I have the presence of mind to actually think about it? Believing that past results determine future results. It's a sign that I'm a bit jaded and have been bashed about by life a little bit, but that doesn't make it true. It doesn't matter how many times I have failed or will continue to fail at things in the future, or how many times I don't live up to my own hopes. That doesn't mean I should lower the bar, and it doesn't mean I can't ever succeed at anything, though I'd say it's pretty likely that I won't if I stop trying.

In the words of Thomas Edison,

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."