Hi, guys! I hope you’re all nice and warm right now and survived yesterday’s freezing cold temperatures. Here in balmy Lancaster, PA, it got down to 0 degrees. Though I spoke with my best friend up in Boston, and when I asked how low it got for her, she said something along the lines of, “Eh. After a certain point, cold is just cold.”
So apparently I’m a wuss that I was feeling so exceptionally tired last week. In my defense, a lot of little things kept popping up – personal, professional and otherwise – or taking up way more time than I wanted. And then, last night, I got a seriously flat tire while driving down the highway and I’m going to have to get it all sorted out today. In fact, I’m shooting this video this morning instead of last night because things got so discombobulated yesterday.
I bring all this up for a reason.
Did you watch my fuzzy video last week? It was all about taking it easy on your New Year’s resolutions. Not that you shouldn’t take them seriously. Just that you shouldn’t take them THAT seriously. I genuinely think that the reason why we fail at them much, much more often than not is because we get obsessed with keeping them. And then when life comes in with some little hiccup that prevents us from keeping our goals – even just for one day – we go equally ballistic in assuming it’s the end of the world. Or at least the end of the year.
But it isn’t. Right now, there’s still 52 weeks left to 2018. And they’re still filled with opportunity.
Apparently, I made last week’s video for myself. Because, like I said, I had one “hiccup” after another after another. And I had to keep reminding myself that, yes, I hadn’t been able to get to my particular writing/editing project like I wanted to – adding in the historical notes to the upcoming Proving America – but I would have the next day to do so. Or the next week.
Nothing was ruined. I hadn’t failed. I had just been setback a short while.
That’s a huge reason why fellow author and entrepreneur Lia Mack and I are running The Genuine Writer’s Retreat in Deep Creek, Maryland, May 11-13. It’s not just to give you lots of distraction-free time to write. It’s also to give you the encouragement that you can write. No matter what you have or haven’t been able to accomplish before, there are ways to keep your chin down, staring at the keyboard or notebook paper with renewed optimism that, yes, you can finish this.
And if you need some inspiration, you can start right here.