You need to find the puppy part of your dream

On By Tinu

We covered that you should start. And that your mistakes are what teach you.

But there’s knowing a thing and doing a thing. Words on a page aren’t enough to inch you forward.

They weren’t for me. What was?

Focusing on keeping my dream alive instead of giving birth to it.

Once I saw that and truly understood it? Knowing that everything else I was doing, every day that passes without at least a tiny but of progress? not doing it, it’s not alive.

Meant it was not alive.

And if it’s not alive it’s dead.

I’ll make that make sense momentarily.

I don’t meant alive as a metaphor

To suddenly go from having a set of capabilities that quickly puts money in my pocket to losing all those resources was — is! — terrifying.

That fear paralyzed me in place for years.

I would think – “I need money today“.

Before I got sick I hadn’t had that problem for more than a day. Want money? Sure.

But NEED it? Not for 16 years.

Even the day I got home from almost dying of severe bacterial pneumonia? I had two contracts and about $5k by the end of that week.

So having to sell my money maker site to survive, and losing my 10,000 email subscribers… to me it was like I was being torn apart from the inside.

I kept trying to crawl my way back.

At least, I thought I was trying. I would think “okay today I’m going to write a book/ do a video/ make an audio class.”

Because I used to be able to do that.

Just create a project in the morning, write a sales page, do a little publicity and leave the rest to my search-magnet blog and social media.

By night my problems wouldn’t be ALL solved. But I’d see enough of a trickle of funds to know that I was going to make enough soon.

I knew exactly what to do. But since the way I used to do it was impossible? Every day I’d get frozen in place.

What do I rebuild first? My list? Do I write for the publications that used to love me three years ago?

Do they still exist?

All of those fears locked me in place. I repeated that cycle of fear for almost two years.

Then I started to understand that there was another way. And that instead of trying to resurrect this dead thing?

Maybe I should try not killing it.

I’m sure that seems a bit off.

But the difference between the crying desperate struggle to get a dead thing to be alive again?

And trying to keep your dream baby alive?

Is Everything.

The Excitement of Creation is more electric

In my mind, in my heart, I thought of my career, my product line, my service ability as a thing. Something not alive. Something that maybe COULD be alive, if I tried hard enough.

If I WAS enough.

Then one day, a motivational thread I read on Twitter, at a time I wasn’t expecting, gave me that twinge of excitement again.

Couldn’t figure out what was different at first.

Then I realized. I cared again. And I cared because now my dream wasn’t a building, a trip it could pay for or even an amount of money.

It was a puppy.

And what kind of monster kills a puppy?

I chose a picture of a puppy that most reminded me of my dream’s personality. I love helping businesses. I love writing.

So a scrappy puppy. One I could imagine at a typewriter sipping bourbon.

And I got on WordSwag and wrote a message to myself as a caption “Are you a Puppy Feeder? Or a Puppy Killer?”

And made it my wallpaper.

Thinking of my dream and a cute living pet- it makes me love it again. I can SEE it again. It may not work the way it once did.

And that’s fine. It’s still my favorite. We don’t stop loving puppies when they become dogs. If anything we love them through it.

My first big step wasn’t scary anymore. Nor were the next ten.

They are exhilarating.

Start Right Now

On By Tinu

Literally start now.

You’ll never be “ready”.

You’ll never have enough research.

You’ll never find the exact right moment.

You’ll never get the pricing exactly right.

Not all of that may be technically true but you should act as if it is. Otherwise you’ll always be waiting to see if you can fix just one more thing.

Start right now.

Now has an advantage over any other time at least until we figure out how to travel back in time.

Every moment you delay, you’re losing the one resource you can never regain.

Each day that passes is another day someone else might have the same idea as you.

Every day that goes by where you didn’t take action is another day that you didn’t

  • make any money
  • take a new step
  • sell any books
  • have any newsletter sign-ups
  • get a new customer
  • sign a new client
  • create new artwork
  • launch your new podcast
  • add a new episode
  • write a new paragraph
  • complete a new chapter
  • create a new article

My biggest problem with this is getting caught up in my perfectionist nature. It has cost me tens of thousands of dollars – a post for another day.

It has also cost my independence.

After recovering from cancer treatment, I spent a good year trying to figure out how to create a whole book in a day.

It often took me less than a day to complete some of my shorter books before. And for whatever reason, I expected the same thing of myself after the initial recovery phase of the sickest I’ve ever been in my life.

It took half that time to realize that I could also work at the pace of the rest of the mortals around me – a chapter a day, a hundred words at a time.

Then I got entangled in finding something original to write about, because that’s how I initially launched my career 21 years ago.

And old habits had me believing that I just wasn’t good enough to survive if I didn’t have something new to say.

Finally I realized – no one I looked up to was writing about totally unique, new things and concepts every time.

And there weren’t exactly a bunch of new areas to explore like there were when I was getting started.

But almost all of the 40+ ebooks and guides I had written still applied to right now. So why didn’t I just update my existing library?

A little at a time?

And what about the couple of dozen things I’d started and never finished?

What about my notebook of “back burner ideas?”

So I couldn’t wake up in the morning and write a 60 page ebook in a 20 hour stretch.

That doesn’t mean I can’t stretch the creation of that book into an hour per day for twenty days if that’s all I could manage.

By the time I realized that I could still be successful at a slower, measured pace, I was almost frozen again by the amount of time I had lost.

But this time, I dodged that thought with the following truth: conditions change.

They always do.

The stumbling blocks that change will produce may seem like obvious solutions to other people but feel insurmountable to you.

My big block was how to make money quickly if I couldn’t produce quickly. I thought not solving that before I moved forward would make me broke.

And I was right. What I missed? Was that there was no solution – at least not in the way that I thought.

Which also left me broke.

What I needed was to solve the new problem, not solve the old one – because there was no real solution.

There was no way for me to live in my former state. It no longer existed. I could not replicate it.

There was no way for me, by myself, to write, create, market and run my business the way I used to do it.

When I finally decided to do a little at a time and let the chips fall where they may, I began to see the solutions.

Which is another advantage of starting where ever you are, right now, and move forward a little at a time.

You don’t always know what you need to solve a problem …

Until you start to work on the solution.

It’s one of life’s big paradoxes.

Once I started to write a little at a time – laying down and typing on my phone when I couldn’t sit in a chair for example – I started to see what my real problem was.

I was trying to figure out how to do what I used to, the way that I used to do it, and get the same results.

The simple answer was – I couldn’t.

What I needed was help.

Some of it I got in the form of apps. There are better apps for things like:

  • creating graphics,
  • short videos,
  • screencasts
  • invoicing

And a lot of the other stuff an app could do, I could ask of the people around me. I used to think “I don’t know what to ask for help with.”

But again, the problem was the solution – I didn’t know what I’d need help with because I hadn’t started working on things.

As I work things out I see tasks I could outsource- do I really have to be the one who creates all my slideshows?

Couldn’t someone else turn my summaries into videos?

I could have someone else I trusted answer my phone or run the first level of my customer support.

Start in whatever small way you can, in some consistent way, and do just a little more than you did the day before.

You’ll either find out that

  • what you want to do can’t be done,
  • that it can be done but not just the way you envisioned, or
  • it’s not really what you wanted to do, and as a result you’ll find a new, better, solvable problem.

Forget about the problems and obstacles. They will get solved along the way.

You can do it.