Monday, July 11, 2011

success

I like to think of that song as a reminder about keeping oneself open to all of the wondrous possibilities life has to offer and not focusing too much on exact specifications about what one wants.
Often times we set our sights on a goal and convince ourselves that we must have that thing in exactly that way. Then we find ourselves miserable and depressed when what we wanted doesn't happen exactly the way we envisioned it.
I've proved this many times in my own life:
As a teenager, I decided I wanted to be a writer. So I wrote story after story, article after article, and when I was 15 I sold my first 2 articles to national magazines, I started writing a column for my weekly paper, and I was had found a mentor in a published author of some note.
I was getting what I wanted right? Oh no. I convinced myself that I would only be a "real" writer when I wrote a book. The problem was I didn't have a book in me, I didn't have a single book idea. Even though I was making progress, my expectation that any good writer could write a book led to my frustration with writing altogether. I stopped writing altogether and didn't try again for nearly 10 years.

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