A New Way of Doing It

Starting Monday I am taking a new tactic to finding work as a freelancer. In the past my tactic has been to find people who want to hire me to write something for them. This would guarantee payment and mean I had a product that would sell, but it has not presented me with security.

Starting Monday I will be finding my own stories, writing them and marketing them. The plan is always to have ten irons in the fire. I'll spend 8 hours a day, five days a week reporting, researching, marketing or writing. A minimum of 2 hours of that will be dedicated to fiction.

A Short Thought on a Deep Subject

Knowledge and practice are two very different things. Knowing ways to change, to grow or to make our lives what we want them to be is all well and good but without putting that knowlage into practice it will do us no good.

Of course there is the internal work that we need to keep doing. We need to know ourselves, and forgive others and ourselves, we need to learn to understand what triggers our behaviors and not forget to set goals for ourselves. At the same time as we are doing all of those things, we also have to put all those things into practice.

Create a 'Positivist Card' to Remember Your Strengths

We are better than we think we are. We can do more then we think we can. We are less limited then we believe we are. Unfortunately, we forget that.

We are more willing to see our failings and faults then our abilities and achievements. We become hung up on the things that we can’t do or that we have not done well.

This is not just something that happens on a personal level but on a social one. It is harder to see what others have done for us then what they have done to us. Bosses keep files of our mistakes but not of our successes.

With all this in mind I encourage you to pick up a business card and write your top three skills on it. Add to it two things you are working to accomplish. Keep the card in your wallet. When you accomplish something you feel is important pull out the card and make a note of the event and the date.

When the card fills up file it away and start a new card. On those days when things are not going well it gives a point of touchstone on the things you feel positively about yourself.