Mind the Beginner

A few days I posted about a possible .com for my blog I didn’t realise the challenge it would bring me. In the comments you can read about a Dutch guy calling himself Stretsh who has bought mindthebeginner.com in order to help me.  (The .net domain is still available though..) His comment stated that:

“I will give it to you for FREE if, and ONLY IF, you reach your said goals within 3 months, starting today. After those 3 months, you can buy it from me for the same price I charge my customers for a domain name. At any time you may decide you want to buy it right away.”

Well, now I’m in a pickle, however this is not a problem because in my mind problems don’t exist, there is never a problem only a challenge. A good friend of mine once told me that there is no hurdle to big, if you doubt yourself know that the hurdle would never have presented itself if you weren’t ready for it. Something similar is known from the Tao: “When the student is ready, the master appears”.

Bear in mind that I’m Dutch, and we Dutch have the international reputation of being frugal. So, I can buy this domain from Stretsh right away, or I can work very hard on this blog and have him hand me “my” domain for free.

With this all in mind I accept Stretsh’s challenge to get my blog to grow significantly within three months. After all, problogger has recently started his 31 days to a better blog only a week ago. The timing of it all is perfect, it apears I’m ready for it.

So now my challenge is to achieve any of the following by the 12th of July:

• OR I have more than 500 pageviews a day for 7 consecutive days.
• OR I have more than 300 subscribers to my RSS feed

Over next few days I’ll be drawing up a plan to get this done. In the mean time, I ask you all for al the help you can give me.

People have the great possibility of thought, thought about the past and the future and in this they can predict outcomes of certain undertakings. But thinking about the future has a great downside to it. We overthink, and panic.

Soon after the first thoughts on beginning a new business or planning a world trip the “but what if” ’s make their appearance on centre stage in our mind. Our mind is capable of churning out  thoughts at an astounding rate and there are always a few negative thoughts in there. The longer we think about something the more chance there is for negative thoughts to get the better of us. 

Eventually we end up with a very sorry state of mind I would like to call paralysis by negativity. We get completely consumed with finding the negative side to anything that is said, any ideas that come up and most of all any dreams we have. Once in this cycle it’s very hard to stop it. Once this paralysis by negativity truly sets in we don’t see a bright future anymore, we don’t believe in change and we certainly don’t feel great about ourselves or our lives. 

There are fine lines between states of mind. Unrealistic fantasizing, dreaming and life goals, realism and life goals, pessimism and abandoning goals and eventually paralysis. So, how about you and your dreams? Do you really see yourself living your dreams? Or is your mind pulling you down into pessimism about life and trying to get you to forget about it all because you can’t live your dream. 

Creativity is letting yourself make mistakes, art (and living) is knowing which ones to keep.

I dare you, make a mistake, learn from it and live. Stop the downward spiral of negativity and get out there. Visualize your dreams and get to work on them. Now, without thinking, turn off your pc (yes it’s scary, I know) and do something right now to set another step in the direction of your dreams.

Yes you can!

I wrote in my first post I’ll be giving a list of things I want to begin with. Scratch that idea, for now I’m writing on this blog and it’s beginning. There is more than enough to explore here, more than enough ideas to get committed to screen. Thanks to the comment of Samir on my last post I know now where to start and that is right here. Making the small steps I wrote about and that it’s perfectly okay to go flat on my face while doing so. 

It’s all part of the learning process, something I was afraid of for a long long time. I was afraid to do things because I might not do it perfectly. My mindset has changed dramatically on this. I’ll give just about anything a go nowadays and I’ll see where things go from there. It’s so much fun learning new things that you should never pass up the opportunity if you can help it. Take a gamble at times and plunge in the deep end. It’s liberating I can tell you and gives quite a buzz. 

This blog, in only three posts is not what I thought it would be, it’s so much more than just a blog, it’s a learning area. I’ll be making a huge mess at times, all in the name of learning. Come join me, make a mess when starting something new, really get stuck in there and then find your own way out.