Editors Note: This is a guest post by David Aimi, owner of Split Mentality.
The Zero Hour
I was ill. Not because I had caught a cold but because I literally made myself sick worrying about what I was going to do with my life. In the past, I’ve had troubles attending school and holding a long-term job. It’s not that I don’t enjoy learning or working, I was just never keen on being held forcefully somewhere for 40-60 hours.
So what was I to do then? Society does not have much use for someone like me, or so I thought at the time. I assumed there was something wrong with me. People would refer to me as lazy, degenerate, immature, etc. I was even called a loser by my own father.
Over the years, I kept trying to “hack” myself and force myself to be like everyone else. I would constantly try to challenge myself to better “fit the mold” society had designed for me.
Well as I’m sure you can guess, it never worked. Why did it seem that everyone else was so much better at functioning in their everyday life than me? What did I miss and where did I miss it? Why does society ostracize me?
I was so mentally afflicted I made myself sick. It was then I knew if I didn’t figure something out soon my life would soon become a very, very dark place.
The First Hour
So I ran to Google out of desperation and started queuing up a series of vague random questions. Most of the questions were void of specificity and would probably alarm a significant other or school guidance counselor. “Why can’t I be happy in life”, or “why can’t I be happy with just one job for the rest of my life”.
I was scraping the barrel for anything that could be a morsel of help. Most of these lead me down dead-end roads of pathetic happy feel good blogs that provided no real content or substance. Crap. I was getting nowhere. I began to lose steam.
I was about ready to give up when I noticed a post “Why some of us don’t have one true calling (and why we’re better off that way)” by Jonathan Mead. Reading this article did two things for me:
- It made me for the first time in my life come to the realization that maybe something wasn’t wrong with me. It made me ask myself “why are you fighting so hard to mold yourself into a type of a person you will never be?” Why not do the opposite and become great at who I am?
- I found out I was not alone. The article opened my eyes to all sorts of new community members and terminologies for people like me. Multipotentialites, scanners, renaissance people, generalists and more.
FINALLY. Something that hit home and made sense!
The Hour of Initiative
The fog in my head cleared and I arrived at a simple conclusion.
If I don’t change and do something now I will never be happy. End of story.
After reading about the different members in the Multipotentialite community, I realized I wanted to reach out to others like myself. I wanted to help those people that were still lost. I wanted to give to others the clarity “Ah ha!” moment I had just received.
So I decided to start by building my blog, SplitMentality.com. The name just popped into my head as if it were waiting for me there all along. I quickly registered the name and installed WordPress. I wasted no time.
The Hour of Doubt
I must have doubted myself at least 100 times throughout the course of the day, but I had a little voice in my mind telling me just get there. Keep going.
Within a few hours, the blog was up, and over the course of the day I wrote several articles. I’m going to admit I was scared. I had never fully exposed myself like this to people around me so openly. I doubted almost every single aspect of what I was doing ranging from the blog itself to the articles I had written. I was hungry for accomplishment, and I reminded myself just to keep going.
The Hour of Success
In less than 12 hours, the blog was live with several articles. I rarely complete projects I start so this on its own was a miracle feat.
The blog was live! Success! Not only had I created an entire blog from the ground up but I did everything from the logo design, set up social media profiles and wrote articles in less than 12 hours. I shared the articles with the world. Yikes…here we go.
The Final Hour
So as you have probably realized, it’s not like there was a line outside the door of people hooting and hollering to come in and read my blog. This is the unfortunate reality of launching a blog.
Most of the people that viewed my blog were my friends, family or randoms from Facebook. I appreciated the support and traffic but knew they weren’t really my target market. I was very happy my blog was now live, but I knew my next big challenge was to find my community and target market.
Stayed tuned for Part 2 of “Bored to Blog: How I changed the direction of my life in less than 24 hours”
KEY TAKEAWAYS THAT WILL HELP YOU BE SUCCESSFUL
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Iterate. Iterate. Iterate. I can’t stress this enough. When you start something or have something you’re ready to do it is imperative you do not try to be a perfectionist. Get used to saying “I can improve on that later”. Perfect over time, not all at once. I was successful because I did not hang on anything for too long and just told myself I’d improve it later. This was a massive help because I never got stuck anywhere long enough to be discouraged and quit.
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“Action conquers fear” – Peter Nivio Zarlenga. Keep taking actions and keep moving forward. By occupying yourself with action, you are displacing fear. Fear and worrying cannot exist while you are taking action.
David Aimi is owner/author of SplitMentality.com, a community blog for those who seek to free themselves from the clutches of everyday normality.
YOUR THOUGHTS?
Can you relate to the above? What actions have you taken to keep moving forward?
