Life. It’s happening and going by.
Six months since my last post, nine months since my last real post. June 7th, 2013. Hmm. We were getting ready to launch Sprayable Energy in August, and I was getting ready to go back to school for a semester. I figured I’d just take a short one month break, and then get back into the habit of blogging twice a week.
Lessons learned: It’s really easy to fall off the bandwagon, even for really strong habits. Falling off the blogging bandwagon happened despite me having blogged for a fairly long time with pretty solid consistency. It took a significant event for me to justify falling off the bandwagon consciously, but once that happened, it was pretty much game over.
This happened again just this past January - I’d been keeping a daily progress journal online for the past 551 days with only one short weeklong break during a cruise prior, and then I had to fly to New York for a weekend to ship out 11,000 bottles of Sprayable and fulfill the vast majority of our crowdfunding campaign orders. Almost nothing could have broken my habit of posting daily in my progress journal, but this was a huge deal for the company and myself personally, and I decided to cut off everything so I could focus solely on shipping.
It took until this past Thursday before I was able to finally pick up the habit again, despite having done it for 551 days and only shipping for about a week. Work spiraled out of control, and the farther behind I fell, the more work I had to do to catch up, and so the more time I had to set aside to build the habit back up, and it took almost two months before that happened.
The interesting thing is despite these things being ostensibly unfortunate events, there’s something interesting about the second at least. I had gotten pretty complacent in my habit of posting in the daily progress journal, and had stopped taking it very seriously. Having a full break from it for almost two months let me take a fresh start, and allowed me to begin taking the ritual of posting daily and setting weekly goals seriously again, instead of just half-assing it and not really adhering to the goals I set anymore.
So what have I been up to in the interim 9 months? A couple things. I’ll try to write them out before I forget, but two things for now that I’ve learned:
Here’s a quote from the father of a new friend I met that’s stuck with me very strongly and may possibly be the best advice I’ve ever heard: “When starting out, never think of failure.”
It’s possible to change anything about anyone, so long as they’re willing to change it themselves.