Yes, Another Article About How to Get Out of Your Own Way…NOW.

I always make excuses. No like… it’s become a professional skill.

I didn’t realize how good I was at it until I was fooling myself and I called my own bluff (which is quite funny when someone is around to witness it). I kept purchasing all these books, all these seminars, “one-on-one”s, and yet I still keep/kept feeling like a failure. I looked at my to-do lists, my Trello boards, my notebooks, my wall of post-its, and my reminders and realized one pivotal thing:

I hadn’t created shit.

I mean sure, yes, I am somewhat successful. I have a great job, I speak at awesome conferences, met some great people (*cough* Oprah and Russel Simmons to name a little bit), and people come to me all the time wondering how I do it all, but I always ask them… “Do all of what?” The only thing I could see was that I was good at delivering other people’s passion projects, but when it came to me, it immediately went to the backburner. And there is something very psychological about doing that all the time, you start to feel like you are meant to always be a catalyst but never made to shine.

I heard it since I was kid, through grade school, middle school, high school, college, some grad schools, past jobs, my current job, and now I was actually seeing it in the flesh. I only get to 75% and I stop. Why was that?

I have read so many books, listened to so many podcasts, talked to so many people, attended so many conferences giving me advice on aiming once and shooting twice, focusing on one thing, how to execute, using this app to focus on productivity (#GTD #FTW!), but I still looked around and saw a bag of beef jerky that still had to be sent out that took me forever to make cause it wasn’t good enough.

The funny/sad/despicable/crazy part is, we know who is in the way…

So what do we do? No matter what, and I hate typing this as my fingers hit the keys, we have to go through the fear, focus on ONE thing and see it to the end. Try it with something small, make something and try to sell it to someone. Write a blog post for 20 minutes and publish it, worry about editing it later, your commenters will edit it for you. Then and only then can we get the feedback we need to become better and to learn the lessons we need to get to the next steps and to laugh at ourselves for taking 10 years for something really could have been done in a week.

We are all human and this is our first time at life. We all are doing it for the first time, so why not jump in the pool (I don’t know how to swim so this reference scares me as I type it) and just know that you will float. You will float, and if you don’t, just stand still, because your body naturally floats (ahhh look at that.. it’s about letting go… MESSAGE).

Go do awesome and take this with you when you go: