Mantras

I have adopted some sayings as personal mantras for myself. I have them posted in my writing area as encouragement. I find the self-motivation posts and the self-help sayings do actually help. If you understand the saying completely.

If you don’t risk failure, then you don’t deserve success.

I have seen many people that get paralyzed, myself included, by the fear of failure. It is this dark lurking beast that stands over you while you are doing the thing that you love to do. In my case, it stands over me while I write my books.

But the trust in the matter is once you get over the fact that you fell on your face, you can get back up and ask the very important question. The question that many people don’t ask. What went wrong?

Many people get emotionally attached to what they are doing and when they find out that it wasn’t as good as they thought, then they give up. They put up the pen and do something else. They give up on that creative desire cause that desire was hard, or they slipped the first try.

You have got to risk the failure and fail to get anywhere. Cause it isn’t without failure that anyone gets any better.

The only easy day was yesterday.

This is actually a saying from the US Navy Seals. I say it and I liked it. The meaning is that every day you will need to work harder than the last. But when you work hard every day and see what you’re now capable of then yesterday seems easy.

And that is important as a creative and a writer. I have got to keep going, keep working hard at it. Each book needs to be better than the last. Each character that I create more real, each setting more natural. Each book takes a shorter amount of time, is cleaner. Fewer edits needed than the one before.

I don’t know if I am doing it. I am incapable of judging my own work. I see all the flaws in the novels, but I also see the good parts. I have to keep going, keep learning, cause the last project eas easy. Wait until you see what I have planned for next.

If your dreams don’t scare you, they’re not big enough.

Full disclosure, this was a sign that we saw one day at a store. At the time, I was making plans on how to ramp up my writing efforts and do less time spinning my wheels. I had just designed the schedule that can be found here. I saw it and it clicked.

But you need to dream big. Then if you don’t complete your goal, you will find that you had accomplished so much, even if you didn’t get your complete goal. Aim for the moon. Cause if you miss, you will find yourself amongst the stars.

And that is what I am going to do. I am dreaming big. It scares me. I will pull my socks up and not let the years roll by and then wish to myself that I had done so.

The worst day of the year for me is my birthday. It is the one day that I look and see that I am now one year older and that I have not done a thing that I wanted. That is going to change, is changing, has changed.

The way to do that is to make yourself better one day at a time. Read a book, cause the next day you will be that much smarter. Work out, cause you will be stronger. For me, it is writing my stories. Cause one day, the story will be finished, published. It is a long process, but it all has to start at one point.

Not at the author writing, “Once upon a time,” but when the author tells himself that he is going to do it. He is going to write that book. I hope this helps you out as much as it has helped me.