Have you ever played paper toss? That silly iPhone game where you take paper balls and try to get them in the can? Today, I am here to talk about my experience with missing those shots. For instance like what happens when you post a blog to try and get some traction, and it leads to some LinkedIn activity and you think over one blog, your life is going to change like a movie but then your brain returns back to earth.
Here we go
You feel like its back to reality, you look around your room and you see the same color paint that you have been staring at since the day you started this endeavor that we call life. You talk to your family about what you are feeling and what's going on. They are there to comfort you and they do a great job at it. Telling you "Hey, keep your head up, its a pandemic, something will break soon." So promptly you take a deep breath. Begrudgingly you calm down a bit, you take the night off to just let the mind relax. You ask yourself before your head hits the pillow, "what am I going to do differently to shake this thing off?" You jot down a couple of notes on some action steps. You exhale and hit the lights.
The next day the sunshine greets you along with your go-getter of a neighbor's lawnmower. You look at the note, and it stares back at you all the while you think I should have paid more attention in writing class in elementary school. Now that is Tuesday you have your commits to do on GitHub to make sure that you can still keyboard surf. Following that, you have to write a blog about something, who knows. It's a different day though. Still not in the right gear, we move into the stage of bargaining. Oddly sounding like the prosses of grief, you tell yourself that if you get your commits done, you will take a car ride just to get out of your own head for a moment. Getting through the commits feels like you are running through molasses that has been doused with quicksand. By the time you hit the ignition you remind yourself of a time when you weren't doing something that you loved. You chuckle and crank the tunes. The air conditioning blowing at your face, doing the worst covers of songs you have listened to more than one million times each. It makes you feel alive again. The wind is back in your sails. You decide to really think about what if you crushed it on American idol, then return to reality. Once you get home you sit down to write your blog. You still don't know what you are going to write about. After your bout of writer's block, you think what if I just write what I do for a week -- the ups and downs and what we can learn from it.
You smile and start writing, then you finish. You continue to smile, believe it or not, and think, wow I am getting some stuff done. You wrap up for the night and everything is peachy keen. You finally get back to working on the stuff that you wanted to work on like certification stuff, working on communication, working on reach-outs, every day practicing your skills and that goal that you have is at peak palpability. You can see yourself coming home after a long day of work with a smile on your face because you do what you love (and turning on Monday Night Football). This is all well and good and your riding high so you decide to post your blog.
What is there to learn!
A couple of nights ago I had heard a talk from the CEO of Patreon. His name is Jack Conte. Now, I have never met Mr.Conte a day in my life but over the course of the 35 (or so) minutes, I felt like his story sounded oddly familiar. Don't worry I won't spoil it and I will link it down below. The lesson he talks about is a lesson that I am warming up to like boiling a frog. Uncomfortable but slow. I will keep tossing those paper balls because there is a chance that if I keep at it and take a few more deep breaths, I might sink one.
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