Crippled CEO Blog #097: I don’t feel like it

Crippled CEO Blog #097:

There have been a few times over the last 97 weeks when I didn’t feel like writing a blog.

This shouldn’t be too surprising. 97 consecutive weeks is a long time. It is almost 2 years. It makes sense that there would be a few occasions when my mood, health, etc. was standing between me and getting this done. 

Today is one of those days. Maybe it’s because I haven’t eaten. Maybe I didn’t get enough sleep. But whatever it is, I don’t really feel like it. 

But I am doing it anyways, like always — on two occasions I’ve posted on Monday instead of Sunday, but I’ve never missed a week. Because, as Seth Godin often says, professionals ship the work. Your plumber isn’t going to cancel because he’s not feeling inspired. Your surgeon in the emergency room isn’t going to stop your operation because his girlfriend dumped him. Professionals show up. And they do the job.

For some reason, we understand this for service jobs and manual labor, but we somehow think that more creative/cerebral work — writing, graphic design, and so on — should be treated differently. We think we need to wait for inspiration, for the right mood, to be in the right head space. 

But this idea is just as silly for creative work as it is for laying tile.

And there is a secret, too. Just like exercising makes you want to exercise, and starting to have sex puts you in the mood for sex, and ordering food makes you hungrier, and so on, starting to do the work makes you “inspired”. Once your brain figures out that it’s not getting out of this task, it helps you do it. And doing this often trains this response. You just have to get the figurative ball rolling, and the hardest part of that is the initial push. 

And just like that, a blog has been written, despite whatever forces were fighting against me. That wasn’t so hard, was it?

(Do you know who’s always in the mood? Your grandmother. That’s right, I have branched out from your mom. They both also guaranteed they’ll never miss a blog post by sending a text to 484848 with the word CRIP as the message. You can do that, too.)