Episode 099 - The Bleedin' Obvious...

The Thursday Thesis  - 17/05/2018

I could have kicked myself.

Come to think of it, I felt so stupid at that moment that it would have been a better idea to hire someone to kick me instead.

There had been a dim recognition, somewhere in the deeper recesses of the old grey matter, that I’d soon bepublishing the 100th  post of this blog – The Thursday Thesis: I knew I’d been posting once a week for almost two years, I just wasn’t sure about how many posts I’d made.

My inner troublemaker was playing up again, telling me how awesome I was to have been so consistent and got something out every single week. He also said I should have a celebration to mark the event, and to be proud of myself for yada, yada,yada...

But I had a problem – I didn’t know how many posts I had actually made. I’d always posted by date, rather than by episode or post number, and I had no easy way to accurately track the number of posts.

Bum!

It takes a lot of work to re-name all the posts in a blog and add an episode number, then to re-name the original document file in the archive. It’s also intensely dull, unless you can transmogrify the process into a game and make it fun for yourself – perhaps by thinking of the process as “capturing and branding” the wayward episodes.

Life’s like that, too.

So, here’s the thing I want to share: start out as you mean to proceed.

When you begin something, be it health, relationship, financial, or whatever – begin with a vision of how things will look when they are done.

I hadn’t started the blog that way: I just thought it might be fun to share some of the things I wish I’d learned a lot sooner.

So I didn’t think of how many posts I might make, about the milestones and celebrations I’d miss out on if I didn’t keep score, or how to refer to previous episodes.

It was an embarrassing planning failure, frankly.

Next week I’ll post the 100th episode on this blog, so I am going to celebrate the milestone. Celebrating is something we could all do a lot more of – especially me.

When I was awarded a First I didn’t want to go through the rigmarole of attending a graduation ceremony – I think that I was secretly afraid of being rumbled as the imposter I knew myself to be. Fortunately, my then-girlfriend was a lot smarter than me and persuaded me to collect my degree in person. Without her intervention I would have missed a memorable day and more or less dismissed my achievement, so I’m grateful for her wisdom.
But we all do it, don’t we?
We all seem to dismiss our achievements; it’s a British thing, I reckon.
There’s a daft idea that anyone who celebrates their achievements is arrogant, big-headed and probably not very nice.

It’s totally wrong-headed, of course, but it’s very common.

One friend of mine has gone from not running at all to running 10km, solo, in less than six months: not too shabby for a woman in her sixties, is it?

But she’ll have none of it: none of your fancy-pants celebrations, no “well done” messages, and no recognition of her achievements in her own mind.

Personally, I’m impressed by people who set themselves a target, plan their trajectory, and launch. Oddly, their actually hitting the target is not the main thing for me – it’s the intention and the action that matter most, in my opinion. The medals, certificates, and T-shirts are just markers of what has been achieved. In themselves they are mere trash, worthless clutter – but they are concrete evidence of what happened before race day and before exam day.

If we examine each fresh new day we can find something to celebrate, every single day of our lives. Embracing our own achievements can release a spurt of dopamine (your brain’s feel-good chemical) into your system, setting-up the anticipation of more and greater rewards.

What’s your celebration going to be about, today?

What awesome thing was it that you did?

How awesome are you, today?

Write it down...

Do it more...
 
 
 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2018
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Neil@cowtownguitars.net