Monday, May 11, 2015

Big Things Are Done With Small Actions



Hi all.
I have committed the fatal creative error of grandiose dreams.

When I fell off my blog, I kept wanting to come back bigger and better than ever. I'm sure it wasn't a coincidence when I stopped blogging just as I hit one thousand blog posts.

All of a sudden, I felt like everything should be much bigger than it was. And when I stopped blogging I thought I should come back with everything revamped, a new website, new goals, new everything and all better than I had been doing it before.

But the truth is that I got to 1000 blog posts because something about my blogging worked for me. My blog has always been a blog about process. It has always been casual and immediate and about sitting down every day to create and to document my creativity.

So here I am. Coming back. Hoping to stay back. Hoping that by returning to something that was an effective part of a successful creative process, I can make it work. Once again.

The thing about creating is that you can't do big things. All big things are made up of small things. You can't climb a mountain, you can only reach one handhold, then the next, then the next, and keep going until you have climbed that mountain.

I wrote a novel, but I didn't do it by writing a novel. I did it by writing a word, a paragraph, a page, a chapter, a draft, a final, and now a thousand different versions of a synopsis.

Big things are done with small actions.

When you feel overwhelmed with your big things, step back and see what small step you can take to get you closer to your goal.

So I'm going to make a goal to stop taking my blog so seriously, expecting it to be so established and perfect and professional and I am instead just going to commit to seriously sit down to write my small, imperfect, process driven, document of my daily creative life.