1/ The best lesson I ever got about how to stop procrastinating was from a podcast episode called The Drama Denominator - tropicalmba.com/drama-denomina…
2/ The drama denominator is a simple, yet powerful: you are the common denominator of all the drama in your life.
3/ You haven’t had 5 crappy jobs or 3 crappy relationships in a row. They did not happen to you. You happened to them. You are crappy at your job or you are crappy at your relationships.
4/ At the time, I had a job teaching English that I didn’t like very much. There was a moment while I was listening to the podcast that it clicked with me so clearly that the problem was me, not the job.
5/ I had applied for a job that I really wanted and been turned down a few months earlier.
6/ The interviewer did me the favor of being honest about why he turned me down. I believe his exact words were “You have zero marketable skills.”
7/ I wasn’t upset so much as shocked. I had gone through 18 years of schooling. I got good grades. How did I not have a SINGLE marketable skill?
8/ The day after I listened to that episode, I started reading the @Moz Guide to SEO and bought a beginner’s guide to Wordpress e-book.
9/ The next week I did some keyword research bought a domain and set up a Wordpress site.
10/ It was in the kitchen remodeling space, which I knew precisely zero about. But, I had decided I would figure it out. I read about kitchen remodeling and started writing articles on kitchen remodeling and SEO optimizing them and the site.
11/ I wrote almost twenty thousand words about kitchen remodeling over the next few months. The site started to rank in Google and I started getting website visitors.
12/ It was working!
13/ I put Google Adsense, Google’s advertising program for publishers, on the site. I still remember the first time someone clicked on one of my ads. I think I made $1.25.
14/ I promptly went out and bought a $6 bottle of wine to celebrate and was back in the red. I didn’t care. The market paid me. I had a marketable skill!
15/ I cold emailed 10 marketing agencies a month later after the site had continued to grow and said “hey, I know SEO and I can prove it. Here all the stats of my site. I’ll work for you for free or cheap on trial. If you like it, hire me. If not, no worries."
16/ I got 1 response. He agreed to meet for coffee and I walked him through my site and all the strategies I used and explained how I could do the same thing for his clients.
17/ He hired me the next day.
18/ It was an important moment for me not because it was a great job (though it was a great job), but because it made me feel alive in a way that I hadn't before.
19/ I had started something that I didn't know if I was capable of doing and I had done it.
20/ Why did I procrastinate starting to learn SEO for so long? Why do you procrastinate doing something until you’re 90%, 95% or 100% sure about how to do it?
21/ The main reason I procrastinated, and that you procrastinate, is that you are afraid of looking bad.
22/ Why had I taken so long to learn a marketable skill? It wasn't money. The domain and hosting I bought cost me less than $50 for the first year.
23/ The truth was that I was afraid of looking bad. I was embarrassed because I wrote a fifty-page thesis on U.S. Cuban foreign relations during the Cold War and I thought writing about kitchen cabinets was beneath me.
24/ I have re-learned this lesson over and over.
25/ Whenever I am procrastinating and unhappy, the drama denominator is always me being afraid of looking bad.
26/ The cure is always to leap. To find that which I am most afraid of and dance with it.
27/ Sometimes it's a new project. Sometimes it's a difficult conversation with someone about dropping out of a project when I'm over committed.
28/ Sometimes it works and sometimes, it doesn't.
29/ But it’s not about whether you succeed or fail. It’s about what you become in the process.
30/ The purpose of life has nothing to do with starting a successful business, helping the homeless, or starting a band. None of that’s in our DNA. It’s dancing on the edge of failure.
