Or where I’m at right now and what that means for my content.
For the five or so of you who follow my blog, you would have noticed I have not been publishing at my usual pace. I have been coming up against a wall
I’ve also had a persistent sense of fatigue, so I decided to pull back from everything for a bit and disappear. Which was the perfect opportunity to do some reflection around this blog.
I have always said that I don’t know why exactly I write, just that I must. And I shared this sentiment with Kofi Ofori-boateng at a workshop the other day and he was quick to reply ‘of course, because it is a calling.’
I agree.
This is important to me, so I always try to write from a place of authenticity. Meaning that whatever I post is something that is important to me at the time or reflective of what I am going through. I believe that is what makes for writing that resonates. I would never want to lose that, and have it feel like just another job because this is sacred space. This blog and platform has always been first and foremost, a space for creation.
The creation of what?
Myself
“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
George Bernard Shaw
I have always viewed what I do here on this platform as a form of self-creation – birthing the person I want to be and the kind of work and projects I want to engage with. The more I blog about ideas like mindset and success, the more they are ingrained into my mind and my spirit. The more I put out books and projects, the more I become the person I want to be – a creative, an author, etc.
In a world where the old rules don’t apply and new opportunities abound, it is useful to create a brand and a platform for yourself, where you can be yourself, and live life on your own terms. You can create something that is uniquely yours and fulfilling to you.
So, that is what this platform is – a place to create something authentic.
Over the years, I have written mostly around mindset, exploring the thought patterns, predispositions and changes we need to make on the inside to get to where we are going and to get what we want. And over my years of writing, this blog has generally mirrored where I was at the time.
My earlier years 2010 – 2014 were concerned with asking the bigger philosophical questions of life. What is it? Why are we here? How do we find or create meaning? What do we do with this gift. It was a time of angst, of searching and wrestling. And my writing reflects that, distilled into my first book – The meaning of Life and other such nonsense.
My next phase after that was more mindset driven. I had come to some resolution around all my searching and had set course for a goal, to create a certain kind of life for myself, doing certain kinds of things. Over this period between 2015-2018, I explored mindset and the principles behind success. The things you must learn, accept and integrate to make anything of yourself. How do you reprogram your mind for success? It has been very rewarding season and truly changed the way I think and behave. This will become another book – How to get what you want.
But now I feel like I am in a different phase. More in a doing phase than thinking. I’ve got the mindset stuff cold, and yes, I will keep being a student of it. I’ll keep learning and reprogramming my mind sure. But this next phase requires a lot more doing, a lot more living.
I’ve seen my curiosity shift from the principles and mindset stuff to the tactical. I wonder how to fine tune my schedule to match my natural energy and give sustainable output. I want to know more about routines, how to create habits, how to stay organised. I want the perspective shifts, hacks and tools that maximise output.
And so in the same way, my content seems to be shifting away from the higher ideas to more tactical content.
End of last year, I inadvertently wrote a short book called – How to live intentionally. Primarily about setting intentions and then goals and systems to get there. I did it in 7 days and in the aftermath of releasing it, I
But I had also gotten gripped by a new theme idea – How to max out your potential which I figured could be the theme for the new year.
Maximizing your potential means doing all you can. Leaving all on the table, breaking through to exponential results and all that. And that is where I really want to go. But as I wrote on the topic, I realized I had jumped the gun. You cannot maximize what you haven’t established.
In the journey of entrepreneurship according to Michael E Gerber’s book The E-Myth, there is the crucial phase between the technicianand the entrepreneurcalled the managerwhere you begin to design and implement systems, culture and execution that enable an enterprise to scale and become more than survival.
The same happens in the journey to personal development. You set your focus, and then you take action. But over time you realize that to do this sustainably over the long term, you have to set in place systems and routines to make things easier. It is only when those things are in place that you are then able to really push forward and optimize across the board to reach exponential results.
That is where I am now, exploring this process of establishment, of building. My content will shift more to the tactical, things like routines, organization, planning, systems, the tools and habits that enable us to live more intentionally. So our goals can become crystallized into the actions we take on
