Focus On The Goal…

…not the obstacles.

So, the question of the day is: If my current blog isn’t my goal (and it isn’t), is it standing in the way of the blog I really want to write?

An obstacle is usually somethign external, like the television, or the internet, YouTube video games, or it’s internal, like procrastination, or a lock of confidence. I would spend hours, days, on the internet, reading post after article about procrastination, trying to find a momentary fix for my problem, so that I could squeeze another page or two out of my brain before my resolve collapsed and I started procrastinating again…by spending hours looking for advice about procrastination on the internet.

Focusing on how to overcome your obstacles makes you focus on the obstacles themselves. How to overcome your lack of confidence. How to create a distraction-free environment. The goal becomes became building my confidence, improving my work space, my writing space, beating procrastination – instead of writing, and finishing and publishing my novel.

The goal, the real goal, has to be the focus of your efforts, of my efforts. It has to be. My focus should be, I need to do whatever is necessary to I need to get this chapter written, to finish this task, to meet my goals.

Because, there will always be obstacles. And, we will give them our energy, or we will give it to our goals.

Originally, when I envisioned this blog, I was going to write about current events, social topics, politics, ideas. I was going to make a blog that was a hosting place for my ideas in my head. There were only supposed to be a handful of articles before them, just introductory stuff about me, a prologue, before the first chapter.

I wrote earlier about resistance, that psychological force we generate that works to keep us from achieving our goals, from doing what we are meant to do and being who we are.

There is a lot of resistance in this blog – all the posts I wrote instead of what I should have been writing. Those posts are a different kind of resistance. Not writing was resistance: writing another post-of-the-week piece was resistance, also.

So, I have to begin again, where I should have begun, and be careful not to write myself back into a false sense of accomplishment. Yes, starting and maintaining a blog is an accomplishment, but I haven’t accomplished what I set out to do. I haven’t said what I intended to say, haven’t touched on why I started this blog in the first place.

So, onward…to the blog I intended to write before I began this long run up to the starting line, this long prologue. On to chapter One.