The prompt that I wrote about today is actually from December 13 – Action.
When it comes to aspirations, it’s not about ideas. It’s about making ideas happen. What’s your next step?
This prompt is something that I’ve thought a lot about but haven’t really done much with…Making the ideas happen is the hardest part. I’ve got lists and lists of ideas that I’ve written down online, in my notebooks on my whiteboards and that I’ve talked over with friends. But few ever make it into reality.Why?Action is the hard part. It actually requires effort, follow-through and focus. It’s not the day-dreamy part where I can just lounge around staring off into space coming up with wonderful new ideas. That’s all part of the process but after the ideas have been created they need to be dealt with. They need to be scrutinized, fleshed out and implemented.Lately I’ve been trimming down my list of “next steps” to start making things a reality. When the list of the things you want to do in the next 5 minutes is a mile long, nothing gets done. All you do is daydream, plan and organize. No action happens. This year ended up full of planning, organizing and daydreaming. It’s not necessarily a bad thing but you need balance. Too much planning and not enough action is bad. Too much action with little planning is also bad. You spin your wheels whereas if you had thought about your road map for a day or two you’d have worked around some problems in the beginning.It’s time for me to put a cap on the idea machine and start up the action machine. Time to start working through those lists of ideas and putting some of them to good use. I’m bursting with things to do with my outdoor sites. I can see some of them being put to good use by those who are outdoors a lot, myself included. The next step though, is taking the first todo and doing it. No more planning. Time for doing.Those are my next steps. What are yours?***I’ve been writing with the Reverb10 Crew since the beginning of December. I haven’t published everything I’ve written but there are a few good ones. See my Reverb10 posts.These last few weeks of 2010 will be dedicated to reviewing what I did in 2010 and what’s next in 2011. See all the review posts here.***