The first month of 2014 is almost over, the resolutions are lying desolately in the corner, and your to-do list keeps threatening to smack you in the face if you don’t pay it more attention.
I’ve started hearing from people who didn’t do so well in January. One writer emailed to say that she was inspired and motivated about making six figures in 2014 at the beginning of the year, but the last few weeks have been rough and so she’s going to try again next January. Another wrote that sending 30 queries in 30 days seemed like a fantastic idea until she tried it for two days and failed miserably. Next time you hold a session of the 30 Days, 30 Queries course I’m in, she said. But I think I’m not quite ready for it this month after the awful week I’ve just had.
I get it. While I met my goal of making $2,000 a week for the first two weeks of January, this week I’m woefully behind with a mere $600. But I’m not going to quit and I’m not going to try to make up this difference in the next week or two. I’ll treat Monday morning as a fresh start to the week, a blank slate and start again with the goal to make $2,000 by Friday. This year, each week is a chance for me to reboot, no matter how well or how badly I did the week prior.
January happened to be a bad month for you and you still want to have a six-figure year? Start your year from February 1 instead, or heck, January 27. Who cares? Calendar dates don’t have to mean anything if you don’t want them to.
Your year can start whenever you like. So can your week or month. We often use calendar dates as a way of procrastinating, of putting things off until next year, next month, next week, even tomorrow, when all we’re really doing is moving our discomfort one day forward. You’re never going to have weeks on weeks when you’re inspired and productive. Lethargy and procrastination will inevitably try to set in. You will have great weeks but you’ll also have positively awful ones. Sometimes your goals simply don’t get met.
It doesn’t matter. Because tomorrow, you can start again.
Couldn’t send more than 5 queries in January? No matter. You can still send 30 in February. Didn’t work on that novel this week? You can try again the next.
There is only one thing successful people do differently from people who give up. When they fail, they get back up immediately. Not next week or next month, not even tomorrow. Immediately.
I started running again this Wednesday. I’d been putting it off with my own excuses—I’ll start a new routine in the New Year, I’ll start Monday, it’s too cold, I’m too stiff, I don’t have the right clothes, blah blah blah—and one day, the list of excuses was too big and my motivation too small and I realized that there was never going to be a day in which I felt 100% on board with the prospect of pushing myself physically (I prefer lying in bed reading novels while eating crisps.) There is discomfort attached with the whole idea of gearing up and venturing out into the cold winter air and it didn’t matter whether it was January 1 or February 27, it was never going to be something I would be eager to do until I was in the middle of doing it.
So I put on my shoes, beckoned the dog, and off we went. It was the 22nd of January, a Wednesday, 7.30 p.m. I didn’t want to wait anymore for Monday, or February 1, or tomorrow morning. It was up to me to make the most of my life today, right this very minute. And so I ran. And today I’ll run again. Tomorrow, I’ll pitch three new editors and over the weekend, I’ll write 200 words on my novel. It will never be perfect system, but you better believe I’ll try.
What are you going to do today that doesn’t need to wait until next Monday?