New year

Taking Inventory

Garth Beyer

I’ve written a bunch about starting fresh this new year. This post is by far my favorite

Ship or Delete

Taking Inventory

Nah. It’s more like getting rid of your inventory. Very cut and dry.

Go through all of your lists right now: your projects, your folders, your notes, your journals, your goals, and either ship or delete them.

Simple right?

Well you’re going to come across a project and think to yourself, “Well this is something that I can’t ship right now because it’s unfinished and it’ll take time to be finished.”

Decide right now whether you will actually finish it within the next two months. If yes, then do it. If no, then either delete it or ship a short version of it. Put it out there for someone else to work on.

There are a couple of concepts at play here.

The first is that if your idea was remarkable enough, you would be working on it constantly or would be passionate enough to complete it within two months.

The second is that if you can withhold one of your ideas, one of your projects, then you are saying it’s not important enough to be delivered right away. (If it is, then now I’m mad that you’ve made me wait so long and won’t buy into it when you finally deliver it.)

The new year is about starting fresh. You have 21 days to go through all you have and either ship or delete. Ship or delete. Ship or delete.

In order for a door to open, you must close one. Actually, the cool thing about life is that when one door closes, a million open for you. How many will you have opened for the new year?

 

Stay Positive & Make Room For New Inventory

Garth E. Beyer

 

Start Flailing

Garth Beyer

Yesterday I wrote a post about making your 2013 new years resolution list now and trying to complete it by the end of this year.

The day before that, I published my book of poetry Sleeping Above Your Dreams.

Today is the day I encourage you to start flailing, thrashing, pushing, egging, thwacking, and a bit of swaggering to get your goals completed.

So often we wait until the last-minute for things and we flail to get them done. New years sucks because we have this idea that we can just set the goal to finish something next year. We have nothing to really trigger us to flail, no deadline, no one riding our backs.

In fact, everyone is supporting your effort to prolong yours. No one ever says to you, “No. I want to see that finished before the end of this year, not next year. You have better things to move on to and focus on for next year.”

Well. No one has ever said that to you until now.

This month of December has always been the month that the most items have been shipped. Let’s really stretch that list and ship our projects, our ideas, our writings, our muse.

I’m not sure about you, but I’m keeping tally of all the things I ship this year. I have a folder on my computer titled “Projects” and it will be empty by the end of this year. Clear, cleaned out, and ready for new ones to enter it for next year.

 

Stay Positive & What Do You Say To That?

Garth E. Beyer

New Years. New Goals. I Don’t Think So.

Garth Beyer

Start now.

There are millions of people around the world, right now, that are thinking about the new years resolutions they will write for themselves at the end of December. Are you one of them? Are you thinking how you are going to finish that book next year, ship that art piece next year, finish your project next year, make a change in your life next year? There are 744 hours left of this year. Have you any clue how much you can do with 744 hours? That new years resolution list you have been thinking about? Make it now.

Then do it before the end of this year.

“The great majority of artists are throwing themselves in with life-preservers around their necks, and more often than not it is the life-preserver which sinks them. Nobody can drown in the ocean of reality who voluntarily gives himself up to the experience.” Henry Miller

Quit holding on to things and ship them. Ship yourself. Strive to make next year a fresh slate. Write a new book next year, build a new non-profit next year, but for right now, finish what you started. Create a blog, finish (not perfectly) all of your next year goals this year, and throw them on your blog. Get them out there. Start again. This next year, is about showing that you can follow through with good ideas and you have so many more on the way that they can’t wait.

By the way, have you ever thought that if you can hold back from sharing something of yours with the world, that it just may not be worth sharing. Or are you telling me that you have held out on something I’ve wanted for more than a year?

The next 744 hours are about delivering everything you thought would be your one-hit-wonder, your  zipline to stardom. You’re better than that, the world (and myself) want more from you than one perfect project that’ll be old news in a week.

Make that new years resolution list now.

Complete it by new years.

 

Stay Positive & Start New

Garth E. Beyer