It was just too strange.

At 6:00 am I was lying in bed scanning through my RSS feeds. And there, in a post by author Donald Miller, was a photo of a card on which I had drawn the words I AM NOT A VICTIM.

My brain couldn’t resolve what was happening. Why was a photo of my little card in a post by someone who doesn’t know me?

The confusion thickened once I recalled why I had written those words down in the first place.

I attended Donald Miller’s Storyline conference last year in Portland and it helped me consider the stories I was telling myself and those around me. It was the starting point for eventually writing those words on that card.

And somehow, on a non-descript Friday morning, Donald Miller is unwittingly using that card as a visual in a blog post. What are the odds that he (or his assistant) would randomly pick an image created by someone he inspired to create the image he randomly picked?

It melted my brain a little.

I decided to reach out to him on twitter to ask for a photo credit. We exchanged a few tweets and, from a bus on the east coast, he graciously added a credit and a link. And that was that.

But it’s been a couple of weeks and I still can’t reconcile it. It’s just so impossibly random. I simply can’t work out the math on how something that started at a Donald Miller conference would accidentally end up in a Donald Miller article.

But maybe I’m making too much of it all. Maybe it is just accidental and random and coincidental and meaningless.

Or, maybe there is more to the story…

I write about things I care about, and I hope that what I have to say encourages you as you work to make things a little better every day, but I have no illusions that you need me.

It’s okay. Really. Because it’s not about me. It’s about the people who benefit from you making things better.

You see, I read a lot of blogs and books and all sorts of stuff to help me do my best work. I’m one of these people that needs to be reminded of the stuff I already know until I really know it.

Often I read blogs that are inspiring because they reinforce something I already know, or force me to face a challenging perspective I already know I need to wrestle with.

Some would call this a gigantic waste of time, but I call it the fuel that helps me do my best work. Perhaps it’s a shortcoming, but if I need those reminders to do great work then I’m going to seek those reminders out.

So trust me, I know you don’t need my advice today. You don’t even need me to tell you that you don’t need my advice.

But maybe you could use a reminder that the world needs your greatness. Badly. That what you do matters and that you are, in fact, making things better. That without you pushing your light into the darkness, even just a little, the darkness might win the day.

It does, you are, and it might.

So please, please don’t stop.

Slow and steady, in fact, never beats fast and steady. It also never beats somewhat fast and steady or incredibly fast and focused just long enough to complete the race.

The problem with the race between the tortoise and the hare had nothing to do with speed. It was arrogance and carelessness and lack of focus that cost the hare the race.

The moral should have been, “Don’t be a giant tool: Take a nap after the race.”

That means that you must approach your work with humility, and passion, and appreciation. It means that you must do the hard work up front. It means that you must endeavor to display excellence and mastery in the work you do.

Slow and steady is fine. Being consistent is incredibly important. But we need you to do consistently great work, and to care. It’s not enough to just show up or to turn in every assignment. You have to want to be better than the status quo…and then prove it.

I know you can.

I’ve heard people say, “you can’t be too careful,” for years and have recently decided the phrase is in need of a new meaning.

Instead of it meaning that it’s impossible to be overly careful I think it should mean that being overly careful is devastating.

Yes. Instead of applauding someones cautiousness by confirming that you can’t be too careful, I want to warn people that you can’t be too careful or the good things in life will elude you.

Things like love. Have you ever known someone to experience the full wonder of love by being extra careful? Love requires you to set your cautiousness aside and allow for the possibility that someone could deeply injure you. Jon Foreman of Switchfoot sings, “If it doesn’t break your heart, it isn’t love.”

And what of making things better? How exactly do you go about that if carefulness is your first priority? You can’t.

This is not to say that there is no place for caution, but that it’s time for caution to stop riding in the front seat. Or worse, driving.

It turns out I am very, very good at illustrating to others why things are a bad idea. I have always thought of myself as a pretty positive person, but man, I can find every reason something won’t work like it’s my job. (to be fair sometimes it actually is my job)

This can be very helpful in some settings, but I’m about to drive my wife crazy letting her know all the possible problems or inconveniences that I can conjure related to a cruise to Mexico with our daughter.

The best part is that she gets frustrated by how negative I am and I just don’t understand why. I’m being helpful!

Of course, as is true in most situations, she’s right.

So I’m trying to give my skepticism a rest and just choose to give more weight to what is likely to go right than what might, in the worst case scenario, go wrong.

I think I might actually be happier and end up making a lot of things better.

There is a time and place to shoot holes in ideas and consider the possible negative outcomes, but it seems problematic that such a practice is my default. I mean, everything is not going to fall to crap if I don’t consider every single variable in every single situation.

So I’m going to elect to see the brighter side. For a while at least.

Who knows, things might actually turn out okay.

What about you? Do you ever sabotage your own happiness by dwelling too much on negative possibilities? Does your skepticism make it difficult to make things better? Or is it a necessary tool to vet ideas?

That discomfort comes in two flavors: The discomfort of doing something I don’t want to do, and the discomfort of deciding what the hell I need to do.

Now, actually solving this takes a reservoir of discipline that I only sometimes have access to, but it’s helpful for me to at least understand the root cause of my inability to move projects forward.

When I find that a particular endeavor is stalled, and I am brave enough to ask myself why, I find that I either don’t want to do the project or, most often, I don’t know what to do next, which frustrates me and makes me want to avoid that discomfort.

The kind of procrastination that is born out of not wanting to do the work is easy to solve: Do the work.

The other kind is trickier though because I’m not procrastinating what I think I’m procrastinating.

I think I’m procrastinating an action like writing an article or installing a vanity cabinet…but I’m really procrastinating making some hard decisions about those activities because I don’t really know what to do next.

And that’s the most frustrating thing for me. When I don’t know what to do next, but feel like I should, I tend to go into avoidance mode.

Hmmm… It feels icky to not know what I should be doing about this project. Asking for help might injure my pride because I should know what to do. I better stop thinking about this because it makes me feel icky.

Except, when I am really brave enough to ask myself questions about why I’m stalled I find that solving one difficult, but small, problem is all that stands between me and actually finishing the whole project. That moment of release where I become unstuck is simultaneously wonderful and horrible. It’s great to have solved a problem and get going again but, oh, the horror of realizing how such a small thing unnecessarily clogged up the works.

The solution to most of my issues with procrastination isn’t doing more stuff, it’s being brave enough to confront the uncomfortable decisions that stand in the way of the doing.

But what about you? Do you most often put off doing or deciding?

Frustrated with my inability to move I finally hit a breaking point last Friday and scribbled this image out out one of my ever present junior legal pads:

So today this post is short and sweet. It’s time to move. I’m taking Seth’s advice to start shipping on this project…today.

And I implore you to do the same. Find a project that you are stalled on and find a way to move it forward…today. I bet you could find a project or two that, if you really wanted to, you could actually finish…today.

Move.

Ship.

Today.

Grown ups are weird. They make life look really hard.

This is what life looks like to me: Wake up, get dressed in clothes that make me feel beautiful (matching colors are optional), play, dance, draw, imagine, eat, learn, breathe. I can’t reach some things but I’m getting really good at the essential life skill of climbing on precariously stacked objects.

The world around me is an amazing place and I learn about a million new things every day. I am always discovering, imagining, creating, building, and wondering. I can’t believe that much of anything is impossible.

I may not know everything (yet) but life seems to be full of possibility. Why my parents can’t see that is a mystery…

I know that we can’t all climb around on random objects while wearing mis-matched clothes every day, but I don’t believe we should leave all of our childhood wonder behind.

We should be learning every single day. We should be imagining. We should be playing. We should be constantly aware of the simplicity of each heartbeat and each breath.

Life can be complicated, to be sure, but if we’re going to make things better I think we’re going to have to remember what life was like before we drummed all the wonder out of it.

We stand on the threshold of the new, ready to reach new heights in the coming year.

This thinking reminds me that every today is a new beginning. There is no need to wait for January 1 to make a change. In fact, I don’t believe anyone makes a choice on January 1 that changes their life.

Those who actually lose the weight, or write the novel, or learn the foreign language don’t do it because of a decision they made on a cold January morning. They do it because, as I wrote last week, they got up every morning thereafter and made the same choice.

And if you must make a choice every day to create and sustain meaningful change then it stands to reason that you could start that change on any day.

One way to prove this out is to start today. Don’t put off your change until the first. Start today. Make a move.

You are not a victim and the calendar cannot dictate to you when you can and cannot change. If you want something to be different, and you believe you have the capacity to make it happen, then don’t let January 1 hold you hostage.

And if you fall off the wagon, if you find yourself coming off the rails by February, come back and read this again. Be reminded, and encouraged, that there is no reason meaningful change can’t happen on the 8th of February.

Every day starts a new year. Every day is another chance to change.

It’s a choice that could mean the difference between mediocrity and greatness, but you will probably not see it as such in the moment. It will likely seem like a choice between comfort and pain. And rightly so, but it’s not nearly that simple.

This choice is not really about today. It’s about the rest of your life. It’s like choosing between a brisk walk and a Twinkie. Both have long-term implications if you do them every day, and yet feel pretty meaningless on their own.

But this choice is not meaningless. This choice really can change everything. Making this choice might be hard as hell, but it will be worth it. I promise.

And you know it too.

But only you know what this choice actually is. I can’t explain your choice to you, and you really don’t need me to either. You know, intimately, about the choice you wrestle with every day.

My choice, most often, is whether I will create something new or rest in the comfort of consuming another’s creations. Will I spend another 20 minutes in a shower generating great ideas, or will I choose to actually make something out of them today?

Ideas are safe. Making something puts me in an uncomfortably vulnerable place. But I hate myself when I muzzle my soul to favor safety.

So let me encourage you to consider your choice to be paramount. Choosing correctly will likely not change your whole world today, but over days and weeks and months and years it will yield amazing results.

You know what you need to do. Will you do it?