There’s this weight in me sometimes, a sensation in my gut that says I’m not saying what I really need to be saying. I want to try and get at that leaden sensation, dig out the message I haven’t heard yet out and onto the page.
I think it could help us all slay some dragons.
This blog has been itching at me for a while. I listen to a fair few marketing and life change podcasts (heck, I interviewed Tim Reid of Small Business Big Marketing for my own podcast) and I keep reading that the ideal goal for your main web site, the one you own and have control over, is to be the place where people can really connect with you, decide whether you’re someone worth reading, following, buying from, joining on your journey through life.
I keep feeling as though this blog so far has involved a lot of front. Making Fun. Living Curiously. Neither of these have really been about who I am and what I’m really doing.
What I’m really doing. I’ve been thinking about since I last re-wrote my about page and posted that article on branding. That concept of what I do when no one else is watching.
There’s a book I ought to track down some time, called The War of Art by a gent called Steven Pressfield. It’s often cited by creative types, especially a sentence where Steven states that any creator must fight a daily battle with the dragon called Resistance in order to get work done.
That’s me.
That’s what I do when no one else is watching: Fight that battle and – a lot of the time – lose. You’ve all seen the various projects I’ve undertaken on this web log that I’ve stopped halfway through. I often struggle to schedule, then edit, interviews for The Paid to Play Podcast.
Making Fun and Living Curiously are the goals, and they’re great ones, but I can’t write a blog about them because they’re not what I’m actually doing; they’re my destination, not the trek over monster-infested mountains to get there.
My ideal is to write posts about the struggle; what I want, what I’ve done, what I actually feel when “resistance” occurs, how I overcome it (or fail to).
And I’d like to filter it through the metaphor of something else I do, that I’ve done since I was a wee tacker: Loved giant robots.
So true. And he’s a wily dragon, that’s for sure. I’m learning to treat him like Saruman (don’t let him speak). Just get in there and write before he has chance to talk you out of it.
Don’t worry, Louise, I have no intention of swiping the AntiWrite from you! 🙂 My particular monster – well, monsters, I think – are probably going to wind up with code-names like the Kaiju from a certain blockbuster movie that launched just over a week ago.
Hence the point at the end about giant robots… 😀
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Definitely get The War of Art! It will make you feel relieved and understood and motivated all at the same time.
I’ll have to hunt it down! My local library network doesn’t have a copy, so I’d say it’s time to start hitting the bookstores.