Picking the Right Moment

Most, if not all of us, have agonised over decisions for far longer than is healthy at one time or another. The difficulty of leading a life of second-guessing and false starts is that it becomes hard if not impossible to move forward with any kind of momentum and confidence, against a backdrop of uncertainty. The longer it goes on, the harder it becomes to break the cycle. When something becomes habitual it becomes part of the structure of your life. This is a simple fact, and part of why addicts find it so difficult to kick the habit. They may want to consign their dependence to the past, and have long ago stopped feeling the benefit of the substance to which they were addicted, but leaving it behind means changing the structure of their lives – and that is difficult.

All of us have a certain structure to our lives. Even if the structure seems chaotic, there is generally an element of routine in it, even if that routine does not extend very far beyond getting out of bed every day. Moving away from the habits which are holding you back means making a change to that structure. Perhaps a good analogy for this would be that you are standing in a burning building. To escape you need to climb down a ladder. In the burning building, you have the temporary advantage of solid ground, but sooner or later standing there is going to cause you problems. That ladder may be unfamiliar and even a little bit unsteady, but by climbing down it you are going to improve your future prospects.

There is no shortage of people who will hesitate before stepping on to the ladder – metaphorically or literally – because there is something there to be afraid of. It doesn’t feel all that safe, and the fear of the unknown is something which affects all of us at one time or another. Making a change requires determination. It is a case of looking at the problems which stand behind and around you and seeing a way that you can say goodbye to them. They may be old and familiar problems, and stepping on to the ladder may well hold problems of its own later on, but getting on the ladder is the thing. You are putting behind you something which is definitely causing you problems, and giving yourself a chance of directly improving your situation. Future problems are to be worried about in the future.

If you are having difficulty making a necessary change because your current problems at least have the advantage of being familiar, it just takes one decisive action to consign the problems of the present to the past. It requires bravery and determination, and it will ask a lot of you, but it is better to simply make that decisive action and free yourself. Once it is done you will immediately begin to relax, and then you are in the position of being able to dictate where you go next. Rather than letting your life burn down, you can build it so as to resist future fires.

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Why You Should Blog

A decade ago, had you mentioned a “blog” to just about anyone, they would have looked at you as though they thought you had gone mad. Even today there are many who don’t even know what a blog is, but their numbers are growing ever smaller compared to those who not only know, but blog enthusiastically themselves. In fact, the word blog has become more and more frequently used both as a verb and a noun. “I blogged about this” or “I wrote about it on my blog” are sentences that are technically possible, if a little self-involved. There is a persistent strain of opinion which holds that blogging is the preserve of the self-obsessed and conceited, but this is to do a tremendous disservice to the medium and many of its practitioners.

There are many different ways one can approach a personal blog. Some find that it is a good place to vent about things that have upset them, while simultaneously a good way of communicating positive feelings. Others may get creative with their blog and build up something of a character around it. Some of the most popular blogs are read by millions worldwide, considered by many to be better than a soap opera due to the interactivity that a good blog can have. Others just enjoy putting up opinions and observations, either inviting or at least not discouraging feedback. If all of this sounds a bit like a glorified diary, you’re close, but not quite there. A diary is, after all, intended to be extremely personal while a blog is very much shaped by its potential for wider readership.

So far we have seen blogs turned into books, films and TV shows, and we have further to that seen the medium itself take several different shapes. “Vlogging” is now an entity in itself, differing from blogging in that practitioners do not so much write about their subjects as speak directly to camera and post the video content on a blog, or on the popular video hosting site YouTube. Everyone with a webcam and a microphone, or with a modern cell phone, can now be the star of their own video show. This medium has the further advantage above blogging of being more demonstrative. Words typed sarcastically on a blog can become damaging by virtue of the fact that typing has no inflection. When vlogged, they are better understood.

Of course, you don’t need to make your blog public. It can be as private or as open as you wish, and you can ring-fence it for only your friends to see. Top bloggers have made careers in the wider media, too, so if you have a gift for the written word it can be advantageous to let your opinions be read by an audience. You may simply want an easily archived journal of your thoughts. The only limits are those which you choose to place yourself – which in itself is good practice. It is generally better to keep some things for your eyes only.

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Take Inspiration and Motivate Yourself

There are times when it can be difficult to motivate yourself to do pretty much anything. These times can spring from anything from tiredness to fear, and there are certainly cases where the reluctance to act can be caused by a medical condition, but what it boils down to is that a reluctance to act, which can be extensively damaging, is often the product of a combination of matters and can be hard to overcome. In these situations you need to look at the problem head-on and say “I’m not going to be broken down by this – I’m going to break it down”. Although this is generally easier said than done, managing it brings many rewards.

The ability to stick at things even when it seems difficult or pointless is something prized highly by bosses. It wouldn’t be fair to say that apathy is endemic in society, but it is troubling to see talented people laid low by a lack of confidence, especially when that lack is brought on by what amounts to an arbitrary failure. Say, for example, that a person has competed in a talent contest or an open training session for a sports team. In such cases, talent is very much in the eye of the beholder. Coaches and record execs have often made the decision to plump for one of two people based on a very subjective selection criteria. The people who have been passed over may have gone on to assume that they would never succeed, but that is not always the case.

Witness the NFL. Every year teams draft players to feature in the playing squads that will take them through a season, and they have their selection criteria set ahead of time. It is universally accepted that guys selected in the first round of seven are expected to succeed, those selected in the second and third rounds are hopefuls, and below that you may have a 50/50 chance of making it if you put everything into the game. In 2000, Tom Brady was selected in the sixth round by the New England Patriots. Nine years later he has won three Superbowls, being voted Most Valuable Player in two of them. 2000 was widely viewed pre-Draft as a thin year for quarterbacks, and five were selected before Brady. The truth is that sometimes people don’t realize what they have passed up.

There are stories like this in all categories, and every time it is the story of the individual who was passed over for an arguably less talented person because it’s just this simple – opinions differ. If you let one person’s evaluation of you be the one that sticks, and it’s a negative opinion, then you don’t give anyone else the encouragement that might be the difference between choosing you and passing you over. Keep in mind that sometimes people need to keep trying in order to succeed – take inspiration from one of the many who may not have got there first, but have stayed there longer than those who did.

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