Success - A Start

I have been meaning to get on here more, but life and writing have been preventing it. Not to mention the new Harley we bought. On a beautiful day, that is just far too tempting to leave in the garage. : )

Anyway, today I want to talk about success a bit. A new friend contacted me today through my other blog and said something about my success. I sat back and thought about that for a few minutes. I do consider myself successful even though in all reality I haven’t been in the freelancing business for very long. So what has brought me from newbie freelance writer to making good money every month? What has driven me to where I am now?

Now, perhaps this wouldn’t be all that unusual of a question for some people. But I am still quite young, and through my life I have not had the best reputation for being driven. Writing was the only thing I was passionate about for a long time, and even that was writing fiction, not freelancing to pay the bills. So what changed?

Honestly, I got sick of who I had been. I was smart, brilliant even, but I was unmotivated. One day I watched my husband head off to a job he doesn’t care for, and something just snapped in my mind. I had been struggling with depression and self-hatred for a couple weeks at this point, and for the life of me I could not figure out why. Watching him walk out the door with a smile on his face even though he doesn’t look forward to his work made it all fall into place.

I had the talent to make a lot of money. And I wasn’t using it.

Brilliance is meaningless if you’re not going to use it.

That was the day I got motivated. One of the first steps in success is to get motivated. Get the motivation to get up and take a bird’s eye look at yourself and your life. (We’ll talk about motivation more later.) Then get some courage. You have to be pretty brave to take a spotlight to yourself and find your greatest strengths and worst weaknesses. Often you will find that you have more weaknesses than strengths. Don’t let this tear you down. I let it destroy my drive for years and it got me NOWHERE!

This time I looked at my strengths and said, “Those are pretty darn good.” Then I looked at my weaknesses. I asked myself which could be done away with easiest, and started focusing on those. Don’t try to take on all your weaknesses at once. That could just overwhelm you. Instead, figure out one that is either easy to deal with once you focus on it, or the one that is REALLY standing in your way. Mine? Procrastination.

Procrastinators unite! Tomorrow.

Not anymore.

I still struggle with it, but when I find myself drifting away from my work, I clench my fists and say “No.” I get my butt back in my computer chair, and I work. If I’m really, really bored, or need a drink or anything that will cause me to walk away from my work, I look at the clock and make myself work for five more minutes. Each time I manage to stay at my work a little longer.

Another thing about your weaknesses: See which ones you can turn into strengths. I’m stubborn. I like getting my way, and sometimes I can be a real terror about getting it. Just ask my husband. So what did I do? I turned that ‘weakness’ that could have kept me from writing because I want to do other things, into a strength. I painted a mental picture of the life I want, but that I don’t have, and said, “I want that. And nothing is going to stop me from getting it. What is the best way for me to get there? Freelancing! Writing!” So now I have made my stubbornness work for me. Now it drives me to work more, because I want my dream life.

So take a good look at yourself. Write down your strengths and weaknesses, and post them somewhere you will see them. Every day try to diminish the weaknesses and turn them into strengths. Acknowledging them and working on them is one of the first steps to being successful, and everyone knows the first step is often the hardest.

There’s your obnoxiously long post! I’ll work on the next part and try to get it up soon!

--Lindsey Rainwater