Luck Happens when Opportunity and Preparedness Meet

Natalie Sisson is infectious. In fact, she’s a bit like a disease with no cure. She just shows up out of nowhere and she won’t go away. That’s how I was infected by The 30 Day Blog Challenge.

With most modern maladies, you can find a treatment protocol that includes a visit to the doctor, a pill, and a certainty of better days ahead. Not so with mystery bugs. And the only certainty I have is that the mystery found me.

So what is The 30 Day Blog Challenge? It’s 30 days of responding to challenges Natalie poses to her readers. Here is today’s challenge:

Write a post on why you started your blog, who you wanted to reach, what you wanted it to be all about. Then state why you joined this blog challenge and what you want to get out of it.

Question 1:  Why did I start my blog?

The answer to your first question is a long and winding road, but it landed me here. About 18 months ago I bumped into Chris Guillebeau on the interweb. Then I literally “bumped into him” in one of his favorite restaurants in Portland, Oregon, his home town.

Chris is a “just do it” kind of guy and he is the one who originally gave me a boot to my backside and said to start writing. In fact, he said I should start writing 1,000 words a day, even if I didn’t know what to write.

Being the action oriented person I am, my immediate response was to do exactly nothing. Then the husband of a close family friend – a recent college graduate – asked for a bit of advice one day and I gave him the best I had: start writing 1,000 words a day, even if you don’t know what to write (brilliant, right?).

I told my friend about freewriting, a concept I discovered in a book called Accidental Genius by Mark Levy. And I offered to hold him accountable to a daily writing ritual if he was interested. He bit.

For the next 15 days or so, he sent me at least 1,000 words of outstanding writing that left me wondering why I was a spectator and not a participant. My “paying job” can be quite demanding, I thought. My family is very active, I mused. I have a lot of other projects that take my time, I complained.

Blah, blah, blah. Those were my reasons (excuses) for not joining my friend as he continued to write and I continued to make excuses. Then he stopped writing. Cold. Not a peep for days.

Days stretched into weeks, until he finally called me and said he wanted to talk. Nearly a month later, we finally connected and he said he wanted to start writing again. That was just last week.

“This time will be different,” I said to myself. “This time, I will be writing, too.” And, so far, it has proven to be true.

Frankly, my blog began so I could enter The 30 Day Blog Challenge. When you read this post, you won’t find much else on my blog because I just built it yesterday. As the next 29 days pass, my blog will grow into something that may even make sense. For now, it’s a place to hold my thoughts and to answer Natalie’s challenges as they unfold.

OK, there’s a little more to the story.

My 50th birthday “happened to me” earlier this year and I had an epiphany: I’m not getting any younger and the current death rate, as I understand it, is 1 per person. That includes me.

If I really am going to die some day, it seems prudent to start living my life as if I believe it. To me that means it’s time to think less about stuff and more about people. Less about the pain of today and more about the rewards of tomorrow.

It’s time to do something that matters. To my family. To those around me. And, to those I will encounter as my life moves forward.

Why not live my life as if I really can make a difference in other people’s lives? Because I can.

We all have something special to share with others. Gifts that we are uniquely qualified to give. How sad it would be to go to the grave as someone who hoarded their gifts, refusing to share with others.

Writing makes it possible to share, so here goes.

Question 2: Who do I want to reach?

I have learned a lot in the first 50 years of my life and I intend to learn a lot more over the next 50. Since I am the only me in this world, the unselfish thing for me to do is share what I learn with others, even if it only impacts one person. That’s who I want to reach. Just. One. Person.

My target audience, so to speak, is someone in the 50-plus age bracket like me. Someone who needs a little push. Or permission to try something new. Someone who “wants more” from their life, but who doesn’t know where to start.

To narrow my focus even further (not that it gets much narrower than one person), I would love to reach someone who is afraid to fail. Why? Because the fear of failure has dogged me for most of my life, despite the many gifts I am uniquely qualified to share.

Question 3: What do I want my blog to be all about?

Because there are many in my “target audience” who are afraid to try new things, I am challenging myself to celebrate my 50th year on earth by trying 50 new things. If I can learn to play the ukulele, ride a unicycle, juggle, and so many more new things I have always dreamed of doing, perhaps I can inspire others like me to do the same.

Getting past the fear of failure is simply ignoring the “worst possible outcome” worry when thinking about doing something new. I’d rather imagine and focus on the best possible outcome, living my life with anticipation and hopefulness. If I can do that and share it with others, or even with one other person, I will have succeeded.

So, my blog will be about modeling success. . . and failure. Hopefully, my success will help someone else say, “If he can do that, so can I.” And my failure will help someone realize it is a normal and necessary part of the journey towards success.

Question 4: Why did I join The Blog Challenge?

When I was a lot younger, I read that luck happens when opportunity and preparedness meet. It seems I am just lucky enough to have found Natalie’s blog and her 30 Day Challenge when I did.

Here’s the crazy part. When I awoke on August 1, only 5 days ago, I made a commitment to write no less than 1,000 words a day until the end of this year. Mind you, that was before I learned about the Challenge. Chris Guillebeau encouraged me to write 1,000 words a day and it was high time I started. With 153 days remaining in 2013, I realized my daily righting ritual would produce at least 153,000 words by the time 2014 rolled around.

But wait, there’s more.

In recent weeks, I was listening to a podcast where someone talked about productivity advice from Jerry Seinfeld called “don’t break the chain.” In a nutshell, it’s all about doing something every day and putting a big “X” on a calendar to show you, visually, how you are doing. After doing this day after day, you will begin to see a chain of “X’s” across your calendar and you won’t want to “break the chain.”

I was hooked.

Right before I began writing on August 1, I searched the app store for something to help me. The first app I found was a simple calendar app with one function: letting you place a big red “X” on every day you do what you say you are going to do.

Shortly after placing an “X” on August 2, I learned of Natalie’s 30 Day Blog Challenge. “Wow, this is such a coincidence,” I thought. Or not.

Luck happens when opportunity and preparedness meet. For years I had been preparing, and the opportunity showed up. In fact, it showed up in so many ways that I couldn’t resist.

Question 5: What do I want to get out of this?

I want to see 30 days with a big red “X” on the calendar to prove I was up to the challenge. From there, who knows. But for now, I just want to believe my crappy little blog is good enough to get started. Because it’s mine. And it might just help one person.

1446 Words. X.