The Life Half Full

If you’ve been anywhere near a technology blog or website in the last few days you’ve probably stumbled upon this article in Wired about the development of the iPhone.

Aside from being an interesting insight into the machinations of the mobile industry, it’s a great tale of perseverance against an indomitable adversary too.

Was his motivation to change the world of telecoms? Or was it to drop a few more coins into Apple’s piggy bank? Maybe he craved a repeat of the highs that the success of the iPod and iMac must have given him? Or maybe he just wanted to create something beautiful?

I really don’t know the answer to this and there are many biographies of Steve that may help to answer this question. I do know one thing though and that is he must have had a driving force of some sort that kept him going.

In my little world (unfortunately not quite in the same league as Steve in business terms, although I do have a higher salary… just! Scroll down the list to see the lowest paid CEO according to the Guinness Book of Records), I need to find motivation to keep me on track with projects.

There are many things that can provide motivation to keep going, but I think inevitably it boils down to one of two things:-

• Either I love what it is I’m doing,
• Or I really want to get where it is I’m going.

If neither of these apply, I won’t complete things unless someone else makes me do it - and in that case it’s really their project, not mine.

In the best cases, both factors apply and nothing can stop me! What I find important to remember is that the factors can thrive on each other.

Let me give an example. At the moment I’m really trying to keep up an exercise routine. For the first week or so my motivation was clearly goal oriented. It HURT to lift weights. It hurt even MORE the next day…. I would struggle to say I was enjoying the pain - I just kept going with a vision of my finely toned physique in my minds eye…. Can someone tell me the best way to indicate irony in a blog please?

Once I’d got through the pain barrier though and built a routine (and probably was high on the endorphins), I found that I was really enjoying the exercise too - the double whammy hit in and it felt like the easiest thing in the world to do - at least until I put the weights up to the next level…

Sometimes it’s the other way round though - as long as I’m enjoying what I’m doing I’ll quite happily keep on with it. That’s exactly how writing this blog feels, and why I’m only posting every few days - there are many articles about new posters burning out quickly, or losing desire through feeling obliged to post. I want to keep enjoying this and I’m sure if I do, where I’m going will become clearer too.

So it’s simple - either enjoy the journey or relish the destination and you won’t go far wrong. If you can get your kicks from both then nothing should stop you.

Filling life up, day by day….

Marley

Mary Poppins once told me a very good place to start was “At the very beginning…”  You can’t really argue with logic like that, and it’s not a bad maxim to keep in mind when thinking about getting started with something new.

But then again, shouldn’t I “Begin with the end in mind” as the Seven Habits have me believe?  That sounds like a much more planned approach. 

Or maybe I should be eating the Elephant Sandwich one chunk at a time while working off all those carbs by starting on a journey of a thousand miles with just one step?

It got me to thinking about what makes us get started on something new, and what can stop us too?

I’ve experienced the stresses and strains of starting something new quite recently with this blog.

It had been on my mind for a while as something I’d really like to do.  It was something I’d been thinking about for a good six months or so too, so what actually made it happen?

Well for me it was several things coming together in a perfect storm.  The main components were….

• Desire
• Inspiration 
• Time

To take each of these in turn:-

Desire - I’ve already said that this was already there.  I’ve always loved writing, and I like reading other blogs.  I’ve been wanting to do this for a while and just haven’t got round to it.  Having a base interest in something has to be key to getting on with it.

Inspiration - For me this has come in two forms - a good friend of mine had recently been encouraging me to write more and his enthusiasm for every bit of output from my pen or PC was a major kick for me.  Sadly he is no longer with us, so the impact of his words is magnified in my mind forever.  More practically, realising that the wonderful Zen Habits blog has gone from startup to huge sucess in just one year was a great source of hope that ’it can be done’ for me.

Time - both having that little extra time off work over the Christmas holidays , and the extra peaceful time I found in the mornings from my new early rising routines have given me the space to be creative.

Taking these thoughts and abstracting general principles from them I would say that to kick off any projects in general I would need:-

Want or need - that’s the “desire” above - fairly self-explanatory.

Resources - in my case that was “Time”.  For other people who might have the time, it could have been access to the internet, or the funds to set up a website.

It’s the final element of inspiration that eludes easy capture - the lighting of the blue touchpaper is so much harder to quantify.  What is it that takes a project from drawing board to action?  And why does it always seem so easy once you are started, and yet so hard up until that point?

Making the move to start this blog has been a big step for me.  Ordinarily I would have wanted to know what I was going to write before I started.  I would have wanted to know that it would be sucessful and I’d have take forever trying to plan out how and maybe never got past the drawing board.  As is probably painfully obvious I’m diving on in and seeing where it takes me.  But I’m started and I’m looking forward to a structure emerging and quality improving as time goes on. 

Darren at ProBlogger touched on this in his great post on Wednesday about thinking like a blogger.  One of the critical things he identified for me was his last point “There’s nothing like falling flat on your face, making a fool of yourself, or doing something stupid that can’t be reversed to teach you how something should be done.”

He’s right you know - I guess the final factor that needs to come in to play is to overcome the fear of failure.  Some people seem to find this quite easy.  I really, really, really don’t.

That said, I’m finding taking this approach quite liberating…..

Filling life up, day by day.

Marley

Photo courtesy of DarlingSnail’s Flickr Photostream

In recent weeks I’ve been doing my level best to apply the wondrous lessons from the Yoda of self-improvement  - Leo from Zen Habits - if you’ve not already surfed on by, be sure to check him out if you have any interest in bettering yourself.

I’m currently trying to apply his theory about creating a morning routine, and alongside it an evening routine too. 

It’s a part of a wider game plan to work on only one habit a month, allowing myself to make that habit second nature before moving on to the next one.  Hey - if it works, I’ll have changed 12 things about myself by 2009 which will be a marked improvement over any previous years!

Part of the extra challenge for me is that I’ve always been a self-proclaimed ‘night-owl’, claiming insomnia (although I’m sure any real sufferers of that affliction would tell me I was nowhere near it).  However I am now determined to become an early riser, and having a morning routine to stick to gives me many reasons to do so.  The productivity benefits of this will be huge - one good example is that it’s giving me time to write this blog - something that’s been on my ’someday/maybe’ list for quite a while now.  Even if I never wrote another post, I’ve got further with setting this up than most of my other projects in life!

 So far I’ve had mixed success.  You can see my progress as shown on Joes Goals in the graph below.  By the way, Joe’s Goals is a great little service for tracking goals simply and effectively if you like that kind of technological thing.

As you can see, so far I’ve had mixed success (including today) - as per the title of my post it either happens or it doesn’t.  I’ve been very careful to not slip into the habit of claiming a slightly earlier wake up time as ‘almost’ success.  I know that’s a slippery slope to go down.  I either do it, or I don’t.  This kind of thinking is critical if I’m going to make this stick.

Another reflection of forming this habit is that (duh) getting up earlier is easier if I go to bed and go to sleep earlier!  I know, I know - Marley Mastermind (specialised subject - stating the flaming obvious!)  However I truly always thought that my problem was getting up early.  It’s really not.  Here’s some things I think have helped

• Telling myself to stop doing things in the day.  They’ll wait until tomorrow and I’ll be rested
• Don’t drink caffeine after Noon.
• Switch the laptop off at least an hour before bed
• Drink something soothing like Ovaltine at bedtime (how old am I?!?)
• Write a journal before bed - gets the thoughts whizzing round my head out.
• Plan to be in bed very early.  Then you can do some of the things above and get to sleep early.
• Prepare as much as possible (lunch, iron a shirt, pack bags etc) for the morning.  then you wont worry about it.

I’m sure there’s many, many more and I may add to these as the month goes through.

Until then, wish me luck and let me know if you’ve got any tips, or even if you’ve set yourself a challenge for January.

Filling life up, day by day….

Marley