No more rough draft nonsense.

One thing every underachiever does is hides behind that excuse.  "I really COULD kick your ass if I wanted to," they start, "but that would require hours at the gym, exercise, devotion to training, and I wanna play Xbox."   I coulda written a great book, but I wanted to play poker.

Life–and the whole world–is full of ready made excuses for nonperformance. 

Pick one–any one.  If you’re gonna bother doing anything–be the best ever.

Being The Best In The World is Seriously Underrated.

I accepted mediocrity on this blog for a long time.  It was a space for me to publish rough draft material–so I didn’t have to think clearly, I didn’t have to produce high quality content.  I just put it out there–and I disassociated myself from the outcome.  What happens in that case is that I accepted mediocrity in my life.  Instead of trying to clarify my thoughts, this degenerated into a repetitive stream of similar content to every other blog where people are interested in personal development/success.

I look at the last 8 or 10 posts, and they are bland, bland, bland.  Now–by some measures, I’m a ridiculously successful blogger.  I’ve earned a ton of commissions from blogging.  But still–i’ve had the same 70-80 followers for years, and never bothered to really go for it (in many dimensions).

I’m going for it.

Ryan Holiday has a GREAT post on running and not competing.  I wanted a mental excuse to let myself off the hook.  Always have had that pattern.  I’m 31.  Time to put away childish things. 

I’m going take this as far as I can within some important constraints:

1. Average under 20 minutes a day:  For this blog, 20 minutes is generous.  That gives me time for 2-3 high quality posts/week.
2. Spend no money:  Again, I don’t want to buy traffic, some personal blogs do, not me 
3. Define "success"  I will.  Enough compelling info to generate 15 inbound links/week.  That’s it.
4. Ruthlessly Edited Content:  I have good ideas, but I let muddy thinking creep in.  I’ve gotta get better as an editor. 

Now, what are the purposes of this blog:

1. To learn to share ideas & communicate.
2. To be a source of accountability. 
3. To be an "as it happens" record.  I think I’m destined for some friggin’ cool things.  I want to have a record of me as I am.
4. To outline and record ideas for future projects; the kernel of the idea will be found here.

Being the best is seriously underrated.