What if it does?
This week I looked over my new business plan and began breaking it down into practical steps to be taken each month, week and day. As I stared at the charts and calendars and my list of tasks for the week, three things became very clear.
1. I would soon be working hard. Really hard. Seventy-hour-weeks-hard.
2. In the near future, I would have an article published in a national magazine.
3. In five years, I would have a book finished and being submitted to publishers
If I stick with my plan, there's no way I couldn't finish a book, and eventually get one 'yes' from a glossy. You'd think this would excite me, and I guess the knot in my stomach could be 30% excitement. The rest...more like fear. Pure, knotty, sweaty fear.
Because as soon as I accept that these things really will happen, the questions start: when the magazine accepts my query, what if I dissappoint them with the quality of article I write? What if I become a nutrition expert and end up bored to death with writing nutrition articles? After I've spent five years pouring time and energy into finishing this book, what if no publishers will take it?
These are valid questions. They're also the ones that need to be ignored.
For now I'll deal with "what if it never happens," thank you very much. That other question will just have to wait.
1 comment:
Wow, Colleen, the fear of success. Wild, isn't it? What makes some of us wired to ask these "valid" questions and others barrel through? I've been trying to figure it out for years. But I'm just like you. And I have to work very hard to stop myself from sabatoging my efforts by asking those very questions. If you have your plan as well thought through as I know you do -- and you have your goals sharpened and focused, as I know you do -- you must go into action mode and just do! Life always throws a fast one in there; stay focused and go get them (by the way, I bet you'll beat your book publishing goal by two years!)
Anne
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