The Interweave: Effort

We all know that one person. He’s almost finished writing that screenplay, ten years later. She’s got all those great ideas for a new business, until next week when a new one catches her eye. Our ideas are great, they can be downright amazing at times, but they won’t go anywhere unless the dreamer is willing to put in a bit of elbow grease. (That translates to hard work for those of you not raised in central Ohio.)

If there’s one thing you can quickly grasp by skimming the contents of this blog is that I want everyone to get off their duffs and work on their dreams. Remember what I said about our ideas last week? They are uniquely ours. Sure, you could get a ghost writer to write your book but it wouldn’t be the same book. You could sell your unique restaurant idea to a friend but by the time it is built that restaurant idea is no longer the same. This is because our ideas are part of who we are and how we go about completing them and bringing them to life will be totally different compared to the person next to you.

Effort is easily defined as the work required to make our dreams a reality. In the Creative Loop this would pretty much be phases two through four. It is the hard work of dragging that really neat idea you have in your head into this reality. It’s a challenge sometimes. You have this seemingly monumental task set before you and sometimes it just feels to big. Sometimes it seems just outside of our ability to accomplish them. We get scared. We don’t want to fail. We turn back. Our screenplay collects dust for ten years.

I think most dreamers will have that one moment where their ideas and passions come together and suddenly the enormity of the dream dawns on them. It happened to me when I decided to write my first book. I was sitting in my living room reading a fantasy book. I closed my eyes and gave a wistful sigh as I thought about my own story that I wanted to write. Then I noticed the book, the physical proportions, the amount of pages, the words crammed onto those pages. I looked at my bookshelves and found that those books were just as large, sometimes even larger! My heart sank. I could never write something like that. I didn’t want to fail. I didn’t want to pour out my free time only to stop halfway. I almost didn’t write that story.

A few days later I sat down at my desk and began to write. What had changed? I was still afraid of failing but what I had done was simple. I told myself to write just a chapter. Just one chapter and see how it went. Then I wrote another. Then another and another, whole swathes of story were laid down as I furiously tried to keep up with my imagination. The one difference I made was simple. I didn’t have to write a whole book, I just had to write a chapter. I broke my idea down into manageable parts. This task needs to be done before this task. Piece by piece I laid down the foundations of my very first manuscript and one day, several weeks later, I held a copy of it in my hands.

Our ideas cannot be born into this world without taking the time and effort to bring them to life. We have to work hard on our dreams and at times it will seem like it is not really worth it. That is ok too. This is when passion gets its chance to shine.