The Virgin Notebook Beckons. Answer the Call.
Your blog posts are important. Think of each post like a virgin notebook sitting on your desk in front of you. It’s open for you and you have a pencil in hand.
Almost nothing has more allure than a virgin notebook, right? Each page calls to you to spoil it with your graphite. The longer it sits open in front of you, the more it can be anything you want. Perhaps it could be your memoir? A romance set in 1920’s Chicago? A sketch book? A place to keep track of your dreams? It could be any, all or none of those things. Until you decide what you want it to be, it stays shrouded in mystery. You look at opportunities, but the rest of the world isn’t yet looking. Without putting a pencil to paper, there’s no story, no romance. Without your acknowledgement that you have begun to create, you have nothing.
Getting started with something new is a difficult task for most people. Recently, I started using the Couch to 5K iPhone app to aid in starting a new running program. The hardest part of my run isn’t waking up early, it isn’t even the run; the hardest part of running is getting motivated to put my running shorts and shirt on and stepping out of the apartment onto the street and down to my running path. It’s getting started that is the most difficult part.
In order to get started, you have to destroy your barriers to entry. The biggest barrier for me is my attention span and my desire to do things like check email, Twitter, Facebook or RSS feeds. to combat that, I write most of my blog posts in a notebook before typing it out. It helps me collect my thoughts, and while I’m typing my notes and text, it affords me extra time to sculpt my message.
What are your barriers to creativity? What have you done to overcome them? Leave your barriers and how you overcome them in the comments and we’ll continue to talk about it in my next post.
My introduction to the Upstart Blogger audience: My name is Rob Blatt, I’m a content strategist, web producer and owner of a podcast recording studio in Brooklyn, NY. I look forward to writing more about the creative process in collaboration with the Upstart Blogger community of readers and other bloggers. I encourage you to follow me on Twitter at @robblatt to continue the conversation between blog posts. Just make sure to send me an @ message to let me know you read the post.
Welcome Robb! I am excited to read more of what you have to offer in the future.
To answer your question, I too am distracted by what other things I have open on my computer as I work. I make my living online, and it is too easy to get sidetracked by many of the things you mention above. I find that I have to follow a strict schedule in order to stay focused. In fact, I do a fair amount of consulting, and it is one of the things I warm my clients about. LOL
I am also a father of 4 and oversee the day to day operations of our horse ranch in Northern California (my wife is a full time nursing student), so needless to say, I can be easily distracted if I let myself.
Anyway… enjoy your stay here at UPSTARTBLOGGER
Hi Rob,
Great first post!
I know all too well about getting sidetracked.. LOLcats anyone? =P
I look forward to reading more!
- Ashleigh
What on earth is a “content strategist”?
@Boro – Content strategy is “Content strategy has been growing as a practice within the industry of web development since the late 1990s. It is recognized as a field in user experience design but has also drawn interest from practitioners in adjacent communities such as content management, business analysis and technical communication.” according to Wikipedia. I interpret it as a scientific look at the content that you produce; what it means, where it can have the best impact, and what every little minute detail means. You might also want to think about it as a “content specialist”, but that’s not an official job title anywhere. Taking my first UB post as an example, I want to create a dialogue with the community that surrounds the blog, so my post was purposefully open ended. Had you clicked through to my personal blog the day this was posted, you’d know you that you were in the right place because you would have seen a special welcome to the UB crowd. While individuals might take this as second nature, it’s difficult to grasp the scope of these things as a company, and that’s where I come in.
Thanks for the info, Rob. Hadn’t heard of it referred to as a role or a title.