But not today, I’ve got too many things going on. Maybe tomorrow or the next day, but not today.
One of the more insidious aspects of living in a world where constant change is the norm, is most change does not occur so quickly we need to change anything or do anything right now.
Tomorrow we’ll decide. One of these days I’ll do something, but not today. I’ve got too much going on today. Tomorrow is good.
I am not talking about whether you start writing today or make sure you read a certain book, clean out a closet or get the oil changed in your car. Those things are comparatively small procrastinations.
I am addressing the issue of big things. Important things. It’s an interesting conflict for sure.
The lack of immediate consequences to change due to inaction or procrastination lulls someone into thinking, “Maybe we don’t need to change!”
As ebooks seemingly leveled off at 20% of book sales instead of destroying print completely, maybe we don’t need to learn anything about them after all! The entire digital thing is complicated and confusing. What is DRM anyway?
The lack of immediate consequence earlier is the reason most people, companies, organizations, churches, towns or even countries only make substantive, important changes or take strong definitive action when they absolutely must act. If we don’t do it today, we won’t be around tomorrow. There are many examples of personal and broader issues only addressed when the world was about to collapse around them and there was no more time to procrastinate.
We must act immediately.
So, publishers don’t need to make substantive change to the way they do business today. Tomorrow is better.
Authors don’t need to learn about social media interaction and develop a ready-made audience for their book today. Tomorrow is even better. Or sometime next week.
Consequences are rarely so imminent we can’t just handle the issue next week and still be okay. Wait, we’ve got some vacation time next week and then there’s inventory the following week, so, let’s put it on the calendar for next month.
We live in a world where change is occurring constantly, but since it won’t be different this afternoon or tomorrow morning. We can always address the issue later.
But a word of caution to authors…there are so many people trying to get published and many of them are aggressively training their minds and work processes to adapt to new realities. They feed their intuition every day.
Your competition is not procrastinating.
Just as the 12-16 year old future Olympians training now for the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, there are authors training their minds, honing their craft and working on writing projects which won’t see the light of day for years. Sure, they could probably take a day or week or month off, but they don’t.
Because the world is changing so fast and in so many areas, one of the most valuable personal traits is to be a life-long learner. Learn something new every day. You don’t toss away eternal truth, but you pick up some new ways to communicate it.
A recurring theme in my blog posts is the call to be serious about your writing. The competitive writing market demands those who participate work hard now.
Just as no one picks up world-class pole-vaulting in a few months, so authors don’t become good at their craft in a short time. It could take years of work.
Start today.
