My Goal With These Blog Posts/E-Letters

In last week’s blog post and e-letter I wrote about the need for each of us to think and act like an entrepreneur, the point being that one’s only safety net is the value proposition he or she offers to the marketplace.  More on that next week.

But today, given the growth in the number of people following my e-letter (which makes me happy), I want to speak to the objectives I have for my writing.

I don’t need to tell you that the world is changing amazingly quickly. When it does, we can at times lose our sense of balance.  As Alvin Toffler wrote in Future Shock (in 1970):

“When the individual is plunged into a fast and irregularly changing situation … he can no longer make the reasonably correct assumption on which rational behavior is dependent.”

In short, when there is too much going on, people (just like machines) can go tilt.

My hope with this post is to give you one or two thoughts or ideas every week that can help you move your life forward.  This week I want to address inertia, the force of nature that will most assuredly having you do tomorrow what you are doing today (and so and so on and so on) unless you marshal your energies and focus to make the changes you need to.  So, today my pitch is to be YOU.  To stop the deliberation, the worrying and the uncertainty, and to start taking steps to bring your day-to-day life more closely into sync with your core values and dreams.

Studies have shown that when people look back on their lives, they regret inaction much more than they do action (mistakes).  If you want to know more, see “The Experience of Regret: What, When and Why” published by the American Psychological Association.

Or, as newspaper columnist Sydney Harris said:  “Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.”

Inertia is tough to resist…especially when everything is moving so quickly. We tend to find comfort in ritual - doing the same things over and over.

But inertia is the villain. We need to get off the path every so often just to check our bearings. We need to be sure that the steps we are taking are conscious decisions. We need to be sure that we are not just doing what feels safe.

Jim Randel is the founder and co-author of The Skinny On™ series. His most recent book The Skinny On Credit Cards: How to Master the Credit Card Game is available at www.JimRandel.com.