“Swim When You Are Ready” is Just an Excuse to Procrastinate
Interesting concept that Carla has come up with for this challenge, I have been reading the title of the contest all during May and every time that I read it, I thought, “Why wait? Jump in and get wet”.
Swim when you are ready has just never been part of my thought process, I am always game for a new interesting project, I know that there is not much that I cannot do if I decide to do it, “I think I can” is part of my vocabulary and part of the philosophy that I have instilled in my children.
If I don’t have a particular skill I know that I can learn it quickly or hire someone who already has this skill, if that is more expedient.
There are very few projects that you should stammer around waiting to start.
Story 1. The origin of Woodland Management Service
In 1988 I moved from New Mexico to Michigan to work as a Procurement Forester, a job that I quickly learned to hate, my boss was teaching me how to take advantage of unsuspecting landowners so that I could buy their timber for a fraction of its real value. A job that I did not want to become too good at.
Not wanting to quit a job after only a few months, I decided to start my business, a business that would work as an advocate for these landowners who needed protection from folks like my boss.
I set a start date for the end of the year, and then started spending all of my free time learning what it would take to make this business a success, I read a lot, I interviewed several Consulting Foresters in Michigan, and I set things up in Wisconsin for the start.
I did hesitate here a bit before starting, but not because I was afraid to jump in, but rather because I had a contract to fulfill and I could actually begin behind the scenes in my spare time.
In December I did pack up the family, my wife found a teaching job at Mt Senario College in Ladysmith Wisconsin and we started our firm with a bang on a snowy day in December.
Story 2. The Active Rain Saga
I am not sure that the first story counts for this contest since we are not supposed to tell how we got into real estate and this may be interpreted by the judges as too similar to that.
So I will talk about how I got into active rain.
I first signed up at the Realtors Convention in October 2009, and promptly ignored it, occasionally reading an article in the daily drop, and always irritated when I got to any articles that required me to sign in (members only).
I had no intention of getting involved in the whole thing; I thought that it looked like a waste of time. Both the writing of articles and the commenting on other peoples articles.
Though I was not afraid to get into writing, I generally kind of enjoy it; I just did not think that it was worth my time.
Then in December 2011 I read an article talking about how important it was for my webpage to have fresh content and lots of clicks in order to get the search engines to notice it.
I had already been making feeble attempts to post an article of some sort on my webpage from time to time; generally this project got a low priority and was done very infrequently.
So I thought that maybe if I started blogging I could get somebody to click on my feeble webpage, and, I thought that it would be good practice to start writing again.
January, February, and March were spent constantly trying to think of something to write and making a few uncomfortable comments on other people’s blogs.
Then in April I remembered something that an English professor had said about writers block, “Just write SOMETHING, and the words will start to flow”.
So I did, I found crap all over my computer, brochures, parts of proposals that I had written, and old press releases that I had written over the years. With a little bit of tweaking of this old stuff and a few reblogs I think that I had around 89 posts in April.
By May I was writing more fresh stuff, feeling comfortable and commenting regularly on others posts as well.
By early July I was celebrating my first milestone with 100 thousand points, and realizing that I could be a rainmaker by the next August.
Well since that time I have enjoyed a lot of great relationships with people from around the country while producing a lot of great press release and proposal copy. And my SEO is through the roof.
So I think that it is a good thing that I finally woke up, realized that blogging was worth my time, jumped into the rain puddle and got wet!
picture credits
Bob Crane, drake chasing geese, http://activerain.com/blogsview/4382648/earth-week-2014-ends-with-words-of-wisdom---a-little-bit-of-spring
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dog_swimming.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Swimming_tournament.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Duck_Swimming_%285111962180%29.jpg
Comments(20)