Category Archives: life lessons

accomplishment, goals, life lessons, nanowrimo

Writing A Novel Is Impossible, Then Easy, Then Challenging

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As any of my faithful readers may have noticed, my blogging dropped off the face of the Earth toward the end of November. My apologies. I was participating in National Novel Writing Month, an endeavor I highly recommend to anybody.

NaNoWriMo
National Novel Writing Month (affectionately called NaNoWriMo) is a contest of sorts — its participants are challenged to write 50,000 word’s worth of a novel between November 1 and November 30. That’s a pace of about 5 pages a day!

The novels don’t need to be finished products, or even be good. They only need to exist at the end of the month. There are no prizes for winning. In fact, there isn’t even technically a winner.

I’ve done NaNoWriMo for three years now, and finished two of them. One of the many things I have learned in the process is that NaNoWriMo is a wonderful metaphor for any of life’s challenges. NaNoWriMo, like life, is a challenge against yourself. For when you set out to do big things, you are often your biggest obstacle.

In NaNoWriMo, as with any major task, you move through three distinct stages on your way toward your goal: Impossibility, simplicity and challenge.

An impossible challenge
At first glance, a major goal can seem almost impossible. In fact, the subtle fear that its accomplishment may not even be possible is often a good indicator that you are embarking on something significant.

This feeling of impossibility is an important measuring stick, for the value of an action is often relative. Going to the grocery store to pick up some shampoo, for instance, is not normally a significant action. But, if you have spent the past fifteen years struggling with intense agoraphobia, it may well be a life-changing experience.

Remember also that the key here is for a project to seem ALMOST impossible. That can be a fine line, but you will know when you’ve struck that balance. A balanced goal is characterized by a calm, confident sense from the heart that the project can be done, even though it may seem too big for you on the surface.

An easy challenge
Next, you become surprised by just how easy the project turns out to be. This is the most empowering part of the whole journey, and practically guarantees your eventual success. Sadly, this is the stage that quitters never get to. This is unfortunate, because it is so easy to reach.

We are all familiar with the old maxim that a journey of one thousand miles begins with a single step. In NaNoWriMo, the truth of this leaps into view. If you focused solely on the immense workload that stands ahead of you, you would never dare to begin. But a funny thing happens when you instead focus on a single day’s workload. Writing 5 pages, though challenging, is easily done. And when you’ve written those 5 easy pages, you don’t feel like you’ve done a mere day’s worth of work, but actually feel that the entire project’s success is within your grasp.

And the real fun happens when you’ve made it about 25% of the way toward your goal. Those first days of work, in addition to being surprisingly easy, also help to set the tracks for the remainder of the work. You don’t realize it at the time, but your early work actually simplifies the work that lies ahead.

In NaNoWriMo, this is clearly evident. In the beginning, you aren’t necessarily sure who your characters are, much less what they are or will be doing. But eventually, things in the novel being to take place as a natural result of the things that have transpired in its earlier pages. Soon, it becomes incredibly easy to write a novel — it practically writes itself! But you will never experience the thrill of being carried off by your goal if you do not take those first steps.

A worthy challenge
Eventually, even the thrill of the surprising ease of your work dies away. And finally, the project becomes a worthy challenge. Though the work may be relatively easy, there is still a lot of it to be done. The question is no longer one of whether or not the goal can be accomplished but whether you are committed to doing the work that needs to be done to get there. You are now locked into a battle of self-discipline.

In NaNoWriMo, there are many reasons to write a novel in such a short period of time. But not all of those reasons will lead to success. If you merely wanted to “try something new”, for instance, writing the first 20 pages might be new enough. After that point, it can be very difficult to finish. But if your interest is to train yourself in self-discipline, completing the novel becomes absolutely necessary. What self-discipline have you learned if you quit before the task is done?

The novel gets done only when you diligently sit down at the keyboard (or take pen in hand) day after day, for as long as it takes, until the job is done. That is the ultimate challenge of NaNoWriMo.

Discipline is the key discipline
In every major undertaking, there is a time when the fun disappears. There is a time when the task is no longer easy. There is a time when the reasons no longer seem reasonable. It is at those critical moments when the only thing that stands between you and your goal is the ability to put one more day’s work into it despite all of your feelings to the contrary.

Discipline is the one skill that carries you through to the accomplishment of your goal. Discipline is what gives you the courage to keep going, even when you don’t feel like it. And you know that your work is not in vain, for nothing compares to the euphoria of accomplishing a major goal.

So, what major goals do you want to accomplish? Do you have the discipline that it takes to accomplish it? The only way to know is to get started — and to keep going.

introspection, life lessons, mentor, self improvement, subconscious

A Mentor For The Hopelessly Introverted

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You are only moments away from discovering the most intuitive teacher you will ever have access to…

A mentor can be a valuable resource for when you need to adjust your attitude, view your life from a different perspective or reflect on surprising new insights. Turning to a person that you respect and that has the wisdom to help you grow is a vital component to your continued success. If you are an introvert like me, however, you may have found that it’s quite difficult to find valuable mentors in your life, if only because you don’t meet many people.

Fortunately, your most effective mentor may not even be a person!

A number of years ago, I picked up an intriguing technique from Peter McWilliams’s book, “Life 101.” The only prerequisite is that you need to be comfortable with meditation. Once you have reached a state of relaxed concentration, then the fun begins!

Every student needs a school, so your first task is to visualize a place where you can go to relax and to learn. One of the best techniques is to imagine you are walking down a long hallway, and you come to a door. As you put your hand to the doorknob, you realize that you will soon open the door to your perfect place for mental relaxation and refreshment — a personal sanctuary. Then, open the door and let your mental sanctuary appear.

This is a matter of discovery rather than construction, so it shouldn’t feel forced. What you find should come as no surprise, for it is such a natural and obvious reflection of yourself. It is not an “aha” moment so much as it is an “oh…of course” moment.

Your classroom/sanctuary need not be indoors. While some people might imagine a cozy study in an old Victorian home, others might imagine an isolated spot on the beach. Some people might imagine a combination of interior and exterior locations. My perfect place is a clearing in a birch forest with a babbling brook trickling through it. There is a simple wooden bridge over the brook that leads to a modest cabin. The cabin itself is a single room, barren of all furniture and decoration. It is bright, clean, and quiet. Ah, I feel relaxed just thinking about it.

Now that you’ve found your classroom, you need a teacher. That is an easy process, for you find your teacher the same way you found your classroom. When you are ready to meet your new mentor, imagine a doorway across the room from you. If your classroom is an exterior location, you can still imagine a door a few feet in front of you…after all, we’re working in the realm of imagination. You see the doorknob turn, and are struck by the realization that your perfect mentor is about to come into the room. Then, watch the door open and allow your mentor to appear.

As with your classroom, this is a discovery instead of a creation. It will again be anti-climatic because it suits you so perfectly and obviously. But, even though you may not be surprised by your mentor, your mentor may very well be surprising. Your mentor may be somebody you know, or your mentor might not even be a person at all! It’s quite possible for an owl to fly through the door, if that’s what represents your perfect mentor.

And now, with your mentor at hand, you can begin your learning. What should you ask your mentor? He (or she, or it) is open to any question you have, but is such an amazing resource that you’ll find you don’t want to waste petty questions on him. You will find that, in a state of relaxed awareness, the right questions come easily. As always, it is best not to “sweat the small stuff.” How you work with your mentor will grow and adjust just as you will.

Your greatest challenge may be adjusting to your mentor’s style of responses. Mine rarely gives me direct answers, but instead asks thought-provoking questions that get to the heart of the matter. Or, in especially obscure moments, my mentor directs me somewhere else for answers. In response to the question how can I become more successful, my mentor replied, consider the leaves of the trees, or the water in the stream. Upon considering the water, I realized that if a river stops moving, it becomes stagnant and putrefied. I was getting lazy when a healthy, vibrant life is one of action. Considering the leaves reminded me that actions alone are insignificant. A leaf by itself withers and blows away, but it is full of life when connected to the tree. Any action is more effective when it is part of something larger. Having active goals, then, helps maximize the value of all of your actions.

Earth-shaking? Hardly. These insights are not special. Obviously, success is the result of action. Of course goals help you to achieve more. But the value of this exercise is that it reminds you of the exact things you need to be reminded of right when you need to be reminded of them.

In retrospect, my mentor has always provided the best possible responses to all of my questions. After all, great mentors don’t teach you new things. Great mentors challenge you to apply what you already know.

business, life lessons, Marketing, mistakes, start-ups

Lessons From A Dot-Bomb CEO

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The best “mistake” of my life taught me a lot about how not to run a business. You see, I have a confession to make: I’m a Dot-Bomb CEO. Here’s the story of Midwestern Cybertising, and the lessons I’ve learned:

Prior to 1994, the Internet existed as pages and pages of text, with hyperlink shortcuts that brought you to other pages of text or to new sections on the same page of text. Text, text, text. Not bad if you like to read, but people today would hardly recognize it as “the Internet”. Then, a little program called “Netscape” changed everything by making the Internet a visual, multimedia experience. That moved it from the world of computer nerds and placed it firmly into the hands of businesses and consumers alike.

Enter Midwestern Cybertising. Some friends and I realized that this could be the new media for customer service and advertising, and jumped right into creating our own web development company. It was the classic garage biz — all of our HTML and graphic design was completed in my bedroom at my parent’s house! Our monthly server fee of about $15 comprised our entire operating budget.

One thing that I am proud of to this day is that my friends and I were YEARS ahead of the curve. If you can believe it, our biggest obstacle was trying to convince businesses that it would be valuable to have a web page! Our entire company consisted of three people — two of us planned to return to college at the end of summer break — unless, of course, our company made us phenomenally rich.

Unfortunately, our company did not make us phenomenally rich. By the end of summer, we had sold only one account (for $500, which we were never able to collect), and had one additional prospect that we were unable to close on. Eventually, we lost interest in our company and moved on to pursue other interests.

Here is what I learned from our adventure:

You are not in business to make money. You are in business to help other people or businesses — just don’t do it for free. Being clear about what your business does and how it benefits your clients makes it a lot easier for you to sell your services and products. My friends and I constantly had trouble explaining why it was necessary for businesses to have web pages as a matter of customer service. We saw only a money river and jumped in. It never occurred to us that we’d have to explain to people how badly they needed our services. We figured they knew.

Marketing is a start-up business’s most important activity. When we started our business, the first thing we did was incorporate. That used up almost all of our start-up money, and in hindsight did nothing for us. We were three college kids who had nothing; if we were to lose everything we had in our business, we wouldn’t have lost anything. In the end, our business imploded because nobody knew who we were or what we did.

Plan to fail or plan to succeed, but have a plan. Planning is a critical step in starting a business. By the time you’ve invested your first dollar in your business, you should already have a clear idea of what your business’s primary product or service is, how much you plan to charge for those products and services, who your ideal clients are, where you expect to find those ideal clients, how you plan to contact those clients, how much goods or services you must sell this month (and next month and the month after), and how many prospects you need to contact to make that happen. Time is critical for a start-up business. By doing detailed planning before you begin, you can hit the ground running. My friends and I did our planning all summer long — as much as 90 days after investing in our business. By the time we had worked out the details, we had to return to school…which brings us to the next item:

Give it your all, or don’t give it anything. Don’t have something to fall back on. If a business is worth starting, it’s worth giving it all you’ve got. My friends and I approached our business as a hobby for the most part, thinking it would be neat if we made a lot of money at it. We never seriously considered dropping out of school to build our business. But, if our business had actually grown as well as we thought it would, quitting school would have been necessary. So before we’d even begun, the business lost out to our education.

Ability isn’t enough. I don’t want to brag, but my friends and I were truly cutting-edge. We utilized all the latest technology, had beautifully designed pages, and were utilizing search-engine optimization (SEO) before it was even being talked about. If ability was what makes a successful business, you would have read about us in Time magazine. However, it is sales and marketing that bring in the clients. After all, what good is it to be the best if nobody knows about it? Ability brings satisfied customers back, but sales and marketing brings them in the first time.

One final lesson I would offer is this: If you learn from everything you do, nothing you do is in vain. I have never started another business, and may never again. But I’ve never regretted my experience with Midwestern Cybertising. I learned a lot from the experience, and not only what not to do. I have also learned a lot about the right things to do, too — in business as well as in life.