A year ago today, April 15, 2014, was the launch day of this blog, Richer Soul. Looking back, I remember how much I procrastinated on getting my blog going, even though it was something I had wanted to do for a long time. I came up with all kinds of excuses, didn’t build most of the website, and only had one idea for my first blog post. I had the idea for a post around January, and then I procrastinated until the beginning of April. Although it might seem like I could continue to procrastinate on the idea, the idea for the blog post was about taxes and tax day, April 15.
It was April 7th, and the only idea I had for a blog post was about to waste away. I would have to wait until April 15 of next year, a whole 373 days from now. Now, it didn’t seem so bad, pushing it off just a “little” bit longer. But an entire year? There was no way I was letting this slip through my fingers; I immediately became very serious about the April 15th self-imposed deadline.
The next day, April 8th, I posted on Facebook saying “One week until launch!” This, first of all, held me accountable, since most of my Facebook friends saw the post and there was no way I was going to back out now. It also created quite a bit of buzz and excitement; there were several comments saying, “What’s launching next week?” I smiled to myself as I read these comments, and they even provided some motivation to keep going in addition to holding me accountable.
However, there was a bit of work to be done, considering that I had only done a little bit of the website. I had to figure several difficult things out about WordPress, considering that I stopped whenever it got too hard before. I had to learn how to use all of the widgets and write the “about me” page and learn how the formatting worked and find pictures–it was definitely a struggle.
Even though it was difficult, I still managed to push through and launch on April 15th, much to the excitement of some my Facebook friends who were still wondering what was going to launch. It felt great to finally accomplish something that I had been hoping to do for several months, although I did feel slightly less accomplished when I realized that I would need to come up with a few more blog post ideas.
Since then, I’ve continued to move forward, definitely coming farther than I expected after that crazy week leading up to April 15th last year. I’ve had a chance to spend a week learning from Dave Ramsey. I took the tests to become an enrolled agent after lots of hard and torturous studying; it almost made me feel like I was back in college right before the end of a semester. This year I have even more milestones like these that I’m hoping to achieve.
Every day since then, I’ve taken a step. Even if it’s the smallest step known to humankind, I am still doing something, still moving forward. You have to take that step even if it’s tiny. Today’s world is constantly moving, and if you aren’t going forward, you end up going backwards. Doing nothing is putting you further behind than you would be if you had taken even the slightest step.
What is it that you want to do? What kinds of small steps could you take to achieve those goals?
So inspiring! This makes me want to write a bunch of posts right now.