Everyone says they’re committed to their goals, but how many actually take regular, massive action to achieve them? How many people are actually committed enough to come home from their day jobs and work for hours on an art project, a novel, a side business?
We hear about these people all the time–people who work full time and still spend 20 hours a week building their business until they’re able to quit that full time job comfortably. People who put themselves through college or university by working full time and still get excellent marks. People who put their entire lives on hold and spend 80 hours a week working to release a new project or create a new business.
We hear about them all the time, but the people who actually pull these great feats off are a small fraction of the population. Most people come home from work emotionally drained and spend all their free time surfing the web or watching TV.
But here’s what you don’t often hear: you can achieve a year’s work in a single month of massive action if you’re strategic about it.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because I was recently featured in a self-help book called COMMIT: How to Blast Through Problems & Reach Your Goals Through Massive Action. It happens to be written by one of my favourite bloggers, Linda Formichelli(The Renegade Writer).
Before the book’s release Linda asked her subscribers to send in stories of when they committed in a big way and managed to change their lives. I told her the story of my first Nanowrimo–over ten years ago now–and she decided to include my story in her book, which meant I also got a free copy of COMMIT.
The book is simple and offers clear strategies for achieving your goals, with writing exercises to help you create a concrete plan. If you’re struggling to create a detailed plan that will propel you towards your goals, COMMIT is an essential guide.
Many of the strategies are things I already actively do–fill every spare moment, participate in 30 day challenges, rely on a community to keep me accountable, read books and blogs related to my goals and maintain my own space to do all this work in.
To be honest, I think COMMIT would have been much more useful to me if it came out three or four years ago, but I still loved reading it and it got me thinking:
How committed are you to your writing career? Do you regularly take massive action towards your goals? Let me know in the comments below!
I write full time now but for the first few years of my career, I taught school all day, coached after school and attended my four children’s events. I didn’t sleep much those years, about five hours per night but I managed to write a lot. I still do my best writing late at night.
Wow! A lot of people think teaching is a great job for a writer because of all the “free time”, but they seriously underestimate how much of that time is spent marking work, especially when you get to the higher grades.