MSi9W – Week 1.1

I thought I would do a quick post on where I am on Tuesday of the first week of this blogging challenge. So here it goes…

I must confess that I’ve started a lot of these marketing/business concepts before only to get discouraged and then allow them to drop by the wayside. I’m looking to use this challenge as a way to be held accountable by my peers and by a person who has had success with marketing (Ariel). I think that I read in a Stephen Covey book that it usually takes 3 weeks for a new habit to form (and in the process break old/nasty habits). The catch is the ability to stick to it and make the action a habit.

I’m aware of a lot of the names in the entrepreneurial self-help business: Pam Slim, Stephen Covey, John Jantsch, Ali Brown, Bob Baker. Often, awareness breeds contempt and a kind of resentment at the fact that these people are making money off of me for something that should be free. It feels like a Ponzi scheme at times: I tweet a little, grow a FaceBook page, grow a list and then I tell everybody else what to do and make money off of it. That’s the contempt and the cynicism. The reality is this: HARD WORK AND CONSISTENCY. Hard work – nothing in business is easy; Consistency – doing it again and again like practicing scales and modes and rhythms. If you happened to read Derek Sivers’s blog post last week you read that success is about doing something, failing and then getting right back up and doing it again with the knowledge you gained from getting your teeth knocked out the first time. This is where I am: I do something, get punched in the gut, but then I don’t get back up and figure out the best way to punch back. Well let’s put a change to that, eh?

So I sat down last night and read the first chapter of MSi9W. I made some notes and sketched out some short term and long term goals that I will tweak today. I dusted off my success journal which I kept for a time and then let go of and placed it by my bed and will write in it tonight.I am also going to start up my ‘Gratitude List’ which I send out to a lit of a few people who I know really care about my well-being.

I’m getting up
I’m bloody
I’m throwing a left jab, but it’s a feint ’cause here comes my right

~ Darryl