While traveling recently I enjoyed taking pictures of my “dessert of the day”. While this was fun, amused my friends and was usually pretty tasty, it was a fleeting fancy and decidedly tough on the waistline – it was a fun goal for a vacation. It might make a fun blog post but not without the actual blog site to post it on! Now that I am back home and life has returned to normal I am excited to put pen to paper – or fingers to keys – and get my blog up and running. So, that is the goal, I just needed to solidify a plan.
You can now see how the above quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupery (French writer 1900-1944) has inspired me. He also said “Your task is not to foresee the future but to enable it” and “Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them” – two more of my favorite quotes. All three of these quotes can apply to my need to put together a plan toward my goal. Watching my children when they were younger, I was constantly amazed that they got an idea into their heads, made a plan to execute and then just did it! They did not worry wether it would work out or not, they just went for it. Somehow along the road to adulthood we start to worry about the “doing” of things. We worry what people will think, will it be good enough, we get bogged down in how to do things.
I have a goal and I need a plan. The plan is not difficult and it can change as needed. The most important thing is to create the roadmap and if a detour is required then I will reassess. When I start a new design project, I automatically make the roadmap for the job – from years of practice. The goal is generally to accomplish a makeover or build a room or a house from scratch – the plan is drawn literally and figuratively. Then we follow the plan with the objective in mind – completion of the project with style and function that the client desires.
My new blog should be the same, no? This endeavor is fraught with uncertainty. I have never written anything that will be published for all of the world to see – that is if anyone reads it at all! The goal: To publish a blog with recipes, design information and life lessons (my own). The plan: Publish the blog by December 19, write and publish two blog posts per week, learn how to market the blog and try one marketing idea per week.
Keeping it simple in the beginning has made it more manageable. When I am in doubt or get bogged down in the details, I remind myself of the wise words of one of my best friends, “Hammer that nail” – another version of the ever popular Nike phrase, “Just Do It”. I also remind myself of something my mom used to say to me when I was feeling stressed about an interview or starting a new project, “Ninety percent of the the job is just showing up” – I used to take that very literally but now I realize that “showing up” happens in lots of different ways. So, I am going to follow all of this advice – Have a goal, make a plan, show up and hammer that nail!
Oh, and PS – her is my favorite dessert of the day!