Maybe you're wondering what #chophour is all about. Maybe you're not. DOESN'T MATTER, CAUSE I'M GONNA TELL YOU EITHER WAY.
The best part of my day - of any day - is talking to kids who are killin' it. Intent on forging their own path. Of running head first into the belly of their dreams. The call and vision of The Courageous Life (thuuuug life), of figuring your own way in and finding your own way out. And there's this thing that happens when you decide, seek, to live your life this way...it's like a silent signal to the other one, like you, standing across the room. We don't live by scripts. We, to put it bluntly, cannot.
And it's stimulation: Even when I'm feeling downtrodden and close to giving up - why I don't just go find a real job? - it takes about 5 seconds, maybe even just a hello, to get psyched back up again and yell "We're DOIN' THIS!" inside my head.
My favorite is Patrick, a most excellent Groucho Blogger and one of the two rad kids behind 30 Days of Biking. Every time I hear that familiar ping of Gchat and look to see that it's Patrick, I automatically get a little psyched. Patrick and I have the same sense of vision for our lives, for our goals. And sometimes, it's nice to talk to someone who just gets how hard it can be sometimes. To focus. To slide all the distractions off the table. To be in that place where you're so jazzed about doing something, but it feels like it's taking forever to get there.
So the other day we were IM'ing about this, and I told Patrick about a success analogy I heard once that stuck with me. And it's this: Even if you took the biggest tree in the world and made one chop at it a day, eventually, that tree has to come down. It's the consistency. The push. The dedicated effort. Which, sportsfans, is something that your girl is not that great at. I am easily excitable, but also easily distracted. I'm great with ideas, but poor at follow through. I'm awesome with intentions, but trying to get better with the action piece.
So Patrick and I had an idea. What if we put the analogy to work and dedicated one intensive hour a day toward our goals? One goal always, until we got there. One hour, every day, until we got there. And we decided to call it #chophour.
For me, I initially struggled because I have 3-4 really really big goals. Completing the books I'm working on and promoting the books I've already completed. Taking Groucho to the phenom level of start-ups. Building out Cyber Dating Sidekick. Which makes for a very busy - albeit exciting - life. Sometimes I feel like I'm firing on all cylinders...sometimes I feel like I'm failing. Sometimes I think I should scale back and just pick one that I focus on with intensity, and let all the others fall away until I'm done with that one and pick the others back up. But that's not how my life works, and these goals are like children - giving one of them up would be giving up a piece of what makes my life work, sing. Sophie's Choice this is not, folks. But. Instead of feeling like I was doing different things each day for #chophour, I switched my focus. The thing that all of these goals have in common? Their inherent purpose is to get me closer to the kind of life that I want to lead, which, for me, is a very specific vision (I'm not sharing it on here. But let's say that it's easily written on a goal card) and milestone. So I don't have to feel bad about working on the book for #chophour one day and Cyber Dating Sidekick the next. As long as what I'm doing for each goal is going to lead me closer to that all-encompassing one, it still works. So that's it. That's #chophour. Now get outta here and make some stuff happen for yourself.
And it's stimulation: Even when I'm feeling downtrodden and close to giving up - why I don't just go find a real job? - it takes about 5 seconds, maybe even just a hello, to get psyched back up again and yell "We're DOIN' THIS!" inside my head.
My favorite is Patrick, a most excellent Groucho Blogger and one of the two rad kids behind 30 Days of Biking. Every time I hear that familiar ping of Gchat and look to see that it's Patrick, I automatically get a little psyched. Patrick and I have the same sense of vision for our lives, for our goals. And sometimes, it's nice to talk to someone who just gets how hard it can be sometimes. To focus. To slide all the distractions off the table. To be in that place where you're so jazzed about doing something, but it feels like it's taking forever to get there.
So the other day we were IM'ing about this, and I told Patrick about a success analogy I heard once that stuck with me. And it's this: Even if you took the biggest tree in the world and made one chop at it a day, eventually, that tree has to come down. It's the consistency. The push. The dedicated effort. Which, sportsfans, is something that your girl is not that great at. I am easily excitable, but also easily distracted. I'm great with ideas, but poor at follow through. I'm awesome with intentions, but trying to get better with the action piece.
So Patrick and I had an idea. What if we put the analogy to work and dedicated one intensive hour a day toward our goals? One goal always, until we got there. One hour, every day, until we got there. And we decided to call it #chophour.
For me, I initially struggled because I have 3-4 really really big goals. Completing the books I'm working on and promoting the books I've already completed. Taking Groucho to the phenom level of start-ups. Building out Cyber Dating Sidekick. Which makes for a very busy - albeit exciting - life. Sometimes I feel like I'm firing on all cylinders...sometimes I feel like I'm failing. Sometimes I think I should scale back and just pick one that I focus on with intensity, and let all the others fall away until I'm done with that one and pick the others back up. But that's not how my life works, and these goals are like children - giving one of them up would be giving up a piece of what makes my life work, sing. Sophie's Choice this is not, folks. But. Instead of feeling like I was doing different things each day for #chophour, I switched my focus. The thing that all of these goals have in common? Their inherent purpose is to get me closer to the kind of life that I want to lead, which, for me, is a very specific vision (I'm not sharing it on here. But let's say that it's easily written on a goal card) and milestone. So I don't have to feel bad about working on the book for #chophour one day and Cyber Dating Sidekick the next. As long as what I'm doing for each goal is going to lead me closer to that all-encompassing one, it still works. So that's it. That's #chophour. Now get outta here and make some stuff happen for yourself.
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