There’s lot of stuff I don’t know how to do. Most of the time it doesn’t bother me too much, but sometimes, when it becomes obvious that I have no idea how to make something work, it gets the better of me and I have a teeny tiny meltdown. Often the meltdown comes in the form of drinking too much coffee and pretending that I don’t really need to do the thing that’s bothering me. This time it’s my marketing plan. I keep drinking coffee and thinking, what’s the point of even bothering with all of this if no one cares about my writing anyway? Then I drink some more coffee. Soon I end up looking like this:

The dumb thing about no one caring is that no one can care if I don’t give them something to care about and no one is going to care at all if they can’t keep caring about whatever it is I’m asking them to care about in the first place. This is the whole point of developing a marketing plan…well, I think it is anyway, but I could be wrong. It’s rare, but it has happened a couple of times.

I struggle with the marketing plan because I really have no idea what the hell I’m doing. It seems impossible to take this giant mess that feels like a stringy blob and turn all the strings into nice lines that are functional and useful. I want to run away from it, but then I hark back to all of the difficult things I’ve dealt with like this in the past and I use those experiences to teach myself that even if I don’t know how to do this, I  can work my way through it, I just need to start DOING.

This is a shot of my notebook. Here it’s relating to starting this website, which by the way took me two failed attempts and more than three years to get going. You can read about the hike here. Hardest Words is the title of my unpublished memoir, which took me four years to write and is 75K words in length. Fitness and wellness kind of speaks for itself.  I didn’t know how to do any of these things before I started doing them and I would have never actually done any of them if I didn’t start doing them. None of it was easy; NONE OF IT, but that was never really the point. The point was to get stuff moving. I don’t like to say achieving a goal, because none of these things were goals, they are journeys that haven’t ended yet and probably never will because they continue to enrich my life.

Not knowing stuff is an opportunity for adventure