Excuses are dead

The good news is that you don’t have any excuses left. You need to do great work.
The bad news is that you don’t have any excuses left. You need to do great work.

The picture above is my computer. I had 20 minutes open yesterday so I opened up Scrivener, grabbed a cup of coffee and started writing. What I came up with won’t win me any awards but I know it’ll help someone. It took 20 minutes to create something that has never been created. It was a birth. It was beautiful. The internet allows ideas to spread from the streets of oppressed countries to our living rooms. That same tool allows you to find kindred spirits, fans, friends and customers. It’s just a tool though. You have to use it. You are the missing link.

You don’t need to have fancy tools to create great things

You don’t have to own a Mac (but it helps).
You don’t have to own Scrivener (but it helps).
You don’t have to have a lot of free time, I don’t.
You have to stop making excuses for not doing the work.

Tools for inspiration and instruction to create great stuff

If you don’t feel inspired then read this book by Julien Smith (it’s free).
Then read this book by Steven Pressfield (it’s $6.29).
Then write something. Start something. Perfect it later. Create it now.

You don’t have excuses anymore. Sorry, and you’re welcome.

 

 

 

 

Below you will find an unedited excerpt from a book that I’m writing about permission.

 

This book is going to be 38 pages long. Studies have show that the number 38 is…ok, that’s a lie and it’s not even a complete sentence. I chose the number 38. I want to finish this book so I wanted to make the number small enough that I could finish it. Most of us start many more things than we finish. Most people start reading more articles than we finish. Our intentions and attempts outnumber our actual effort by a country mile (for those of you not in the midwest “a country mile” is bigger than a normal mile).

The best way to never finish anything is to never start anything. Never starting anything does protect you from those feelings of failure and discouragement from unfinished tasks but it is no power against a worse feeling, regret. To write something of significance one must start with a word, then a sentence, a paragraph and then a chapter. The simple letters, asdf and jkl; on which my hands rest, their neighbors qwert and yuiop make up these words. Below my resting hands are zxcvb and nm,./. Thanks to Mr. Dilley (freshman typing teacher)I can put these characters in a semblance of order and they become words, paragraphs…you get it. I’m writing. No one told me I could write and no one ever will. If you wait for permission to do anything then you’ll only pee when the class goes on “bathroom breaks”. Remember those? Apparently it was easier to train kids to all pee at the same time in my Catholic school than to have the chaos of children going to the bathroom alone. We’d all march to the bathroom and we’d experience three minutes of freedom as our female teachers, unable to enter our sanctuary, were forced to wait outside. It was like we had a “no girls allowed” sign but this one actually worked. The only alternative to the class trips to the bathrooms were the brave souls who would raise their hands and request permission to pee. Of course you never asked permission by stating, “Sister Bernadine, can I go pee?”  You asked, “May I use the restroom?” If she was in a good mood then she’d say yes. If she wasn’t you were at risk of peeing your pants, which I’m quite sure I did several times in my years on the first floor (1^st-4^th grade) of Christ The King Grade School.   It’s not unreasonable to force kids to ask permission to use the bathroom. It is unreasonable for adults to continue to ask permission though.
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