photo credit: geoftheref
I lived for years in Someday-Maybe-Land. I had a villa. It was really nice: the views were great, the people were pleasant, and the soundtrack was a delightful retro-nostalgia mix. But all the time there was this weird feeling that I was missing out on something. That I was missing out on everything, really.
So I burned my villa to the ground, kicked over the postman, and went striding toward the Land of Getting Shit Done.
It’s mountainous here. You do a LOT of climbing, and not in the Sound of Music here’s-a-handy-field-for-me-to-sing-in way. More like a Mordor-on-a-bad-day-hope-you-brought-an-oxygen-tank way. Every day, you’re climbing. You start in the foothills, which sounds sort of pleasant until your quads give way and you’re desperately trying to rub your butt while smiling and hoping no-one noticed. Once you’re over that, and you’ve started accumulating enough rope and clippy thingies to move on, you start tackling full-on mountains.
Do you know the biggest advantage of mountains? Most of the action is slow and laborious and painful, but sometimes you get to run down a steep slope screaming, “Wheeeeee!”
Nice imagery, Catherine. Where are we going with this?
Jade and I made a product yesterday. In five hours.
But we also made it in three years.
Yesterday afternoon, I did three hours of recording, audio editing, one fast sales page, one password-protected page, a customised sales button and DONE.
I couldn’t have done that a year ago.
I’ve climbed a lot of mountains to get to the part where we can get that all done before dinner. The first time I made a sales button it took me about two hours, not ten minutes. I practiced. I climbed those mountains, built up calluses, gained muscle strength and bought one of those nifty headlamps. And I met other climbers, and found out if I could trust them to support my weight on belaying lines.
I could never have done this from my villa. I had to get moving, to start building what my word-ninja reader Adetokunbo Adeshile calls the “synergy of awesomeness”. Otherwise, I’d still be enjoying the mellow soundtrack and the view, wondering why I felt so hollow.
I chose calluses over comfort and I haven’t regretted a day of it.
The Announcement Bit!
So now, as part of the get Catherine to Vegas plan, as well as the Jade-is-awesome Scheme, we present our nifty product:
Awesome Non-icky Conference Networking
(Why yes, we DO have fun naming our products.)
It’s a guide on how to make sure you rock your next conference instead of coming home with a clutch of business cards and no real connections. Jade brings a gift of the strategy and smarts that is getting her flown out to BlogWorld on someone else’s dime (because she is super-duper-awesome at it) and I talk a lot about how to be awesome offline (naturally).
Go check it out!
(In related news, only a few days remain of the Vegas challenge. I’m not there yet but I’m still hopeful. Mwah.)
Have you started climbing ev’ry mountain? Tell me in the comments!