I hereby commit to a minimum of one hour specifically writing articles for my blog. Why? Read on.

Steve Pavlina recommends using journals as a tool for working through mental blocks, for example, “Type a question like, ‘Why am I feeling unmotivated to achieve this goal?’ Then type whatever answer comes to mind.” This approach is not suitable for all blogs, but this sort of Q&A is the perfect combination for All Things Bright, being as it is a personal site about entrepreneurship etc. I’m considering making this a regular feature, so do let me know whether or not you like this article and if you want to see more like it, just comment or email me. I highly recommend Steve’s posts about this: Journaling as a problem-solving tool and Motivation for smart people, sans chest pounding.

Goal: 25 December 2006, I am making £500/mth as an entrepreneur

“Why am I feeling unmotivated to achieve this goal?”

I need to be courageous!

I fear failure. Why? If I do nothing, I gain nothing (in fact, I fall behind). If I do something, I fail or succeed. If I fail, I learn something, therefore I gain something. If I succeed, I learn something & achieve my goals, so I gain even more. It’s a no-brainer - the only risk is doing nothing!

Make More Mistakes, exists to encourage me to think about mistakes I’m making & why, particularly in the area of entrepreneurship. The hypothesis is that making mistakes is a great thing (hence, make more mistakes) because if you’re not making mistakes, you’re not failing, which means you’re not pushing yourself hard enough. (I recommend Eric Allam’s 5 reasons for embracing failure too).

However, I still have that fear. Why? I know that I’ll only realise my complete potential as an entrepreneur when I overcome fear of failure. Perhaps I fear something else.

Maybe I fear success.

“When I succeed, what will happen?”

I will need to maintain a regular & frequent updating schedule. I’ll need to live up to the quality of my past writing. I’ll need to innovate & execute lots of ideas. I’ll need to exceed expectations. I’ll need to keep moving onwards & upwards.

These are all things that I look forward to, as the trappings of success; they also represent extra work. By becoming more conscious of these side effects I will think of creative solutions, thereby dealing with my concerns.

One of the solutions I’ve identified is to be more organised & plan ahead. My last post for Make More Mistakes took me four hours, but I didn’t start it until very late, so it was late and I was shattered; I experienced a lot of anxiety about this even though I love writing for my blogs.

I need to write well in advance, allowing myself to come back to the posts, edit them and then just publish when the time comes. One problem with this is that I wrote this post some time ago and recently Darren Rowse has written about this same topic in Marinating Ideas into Blog Posts, which makes it seems like I’m propagating the ‘Echo Chamber’ (i.e. just blogging about what other people are blogging about)…

Here’s a question for you: How does one reconcile writing articles well in advance with other bloggers publishing simialr articles independently before you manage to post yours?

As it is, I tend to spend hours and hours researching with nothing to show for it at the end, even though there’ll be lots of ideas in my head, which can be quite de-motivating. No more.

Each day, I spend at least an hour writing articles for my blog; this does not include research time.