Tag: 750 words

Writing, that seems so easy

Posted on by philipdodson

I have always been able to write well and when I first thought about actually publishing stuff, I thought this will be easy, it’s only writing.

750 Words

I started to blog for my own site, the @Work Hub site and various other sites as guest blogger. I found it much more difficult than I had realised, especially when people asked me to write something on a pre-defined topic and by a certain deadline.

As soon as there was a pressure, then the writing became hard and I would often put it off and leave to the last minute.

The other thing that I found myself doing was correcting typos/spelling as I went along. This I found would interrupt my flow and that would make it doubly difficult to get the thoughts out.

So frustrated by this, as I really wanted to write and after all I can’t be that hard!! I talked to few others that write regularly. Then one day chatting to my mate Bernie, who’s a regular and great writer, he talked about 750 words, a site where you write 750 words daily and privately. Initially, I thought shit, I struggle to do a few blog posts, 750 words a day.

Anyway, I signed up to 750Words.com in September 2014 and so far I have written 112,248 words over 138 days, so I have missed about 30 days. If someone had said to me before September to find time and inspiration to write that many words in 5 months, I would have simply laughed. My best streak was 60 days in a row.

I now find writing easy again and my best pieces, that I publish, come from 750 words. This is because there is no pressure, it’s after all a private post. So I sit and just write, I don’t worry about the spelling or typos and I lust ‘spit’ it all out on the keyboard and go with the flow.

Then if at the end I like it and think it is good enough to share, then I copy and paste it into WordPress, tidy it up, fix the spelling and add a pic. Hit the publish button and boom, job done.

So I now find writing easy.

The lessons learnt – avoid putting pressure on yourself and don’t interrupt the flow or concentration. Also realise, that not everything you write will be good, so don’t put unrealistic expectations on yourself.

Are you worthy?

Posted on by philipdodson

We live in a world where our worthiness is constantly challenged and, we as individuals, are always questioning this in our heads. The society has created this challenge for all of us.

Worthiness

What is our worthiness based on? Not just by society, but how do we internally justify our worthiness?

This whole thing of feeling worthy is such a big thing and it has such a huge impact on our lives.

I am reading a book at the moment called ‘The Happiness Advantage’ by Shawn Achor. He talks about the fact that society wrongly believes that ‘success leads to happiness’. Where all of his and others research points to the fact that is ‘happiness leads to success’

Success is measure in many different ways, but typically success is always measured by numbers or how big something is or by achievement. This then leads to deciding whether or not we are worthy, whether or not we are a success.

So how many followers you have on Twitter, friends on Facebook, how many ‘likes’ your Instagram #selfie got. Then we’ll look at the title on your business card, how many A* GCSE’s you got, how big the car is, the size of your house, the labels you wear and the list goes on. The achievements that you can rack up and what you have done.

These will be the measures that others use to judge us by and then we can add on all the internal things that we will add ourselves, driven by our fear of what others think of us.

So we’ll compare our pay with others or wealth in general and then determine just how worthy we are or not.

This is serious stuff, as it will effect our sense of self-worth, our self confidence and will ultimately lead to judging ourselves against others. This will create this false truth that others are more important, or better, or more worthy of something because of it.

We have all been guilty of thinking that a ‘successful’ wealthy business person is more important or better than us. Or someone who society has told us to judge as being more handsome/beautiful is a better and more worthy person.

Our society is so infected with this damaging way of measuring success or failure, worthiness or not. It is having a huge impact on peoples mental and physical well-being.

The fact is that it is all a load of bullshit. We are all human beings, we are all as good and worthy as anyone else. The size of your salary, wealth, car, house, tits, the labels you wear, the number of followers, or any other achievement based measure is all irrelevant.

These shallow measures are a curse on our whole society and it is time to stop supporting this system and time to stay true to your values.

The fact is there is no right or wrong in life, after all, if there was the definitive rule book or manual for life, then Amazon would be selling it by the millions of copies.

Society imposes these measures on us and we don’t have to accept them. We need to stop caring about what others think, how others judge us does not matter.

As Brene Brown says in her book ‘Daring Greatly’, we are already worthy. No amount of stuff, achievements etc will make us any more worthy than someone else.

We need to start off with sorting our own minds and we need to start telling ourselves that we are worthy and we are equal to others. Then we need to stop judging others and we need to start viewing everyone else as another worthy human being.

Then we need to stop measuring our ‘success’ by these shallow things. We need to realise that success is a personal thing, where there is no right or wrong. We can define our own measure of what success is.

After all at the end of our lives, we will not look back on the stuff we owned, or the number of followers we had, or how big our salary was. We will look back on the legacy that we are leaving, the impact that we have had on others, the people we’ve met and the moments that we’ve had with them.

It is about being happy, building the life that we want and creating something that we leave behind. We all need to make our own personal difference.

So next time you look at your payslip or the number of friends you have on Facebook, realise none of that matters, it can’t improve your happiness and you are already a worthy human being. Chase your dreams and build your own life that makes you happy.