Mel Robbins famously posited thus: “No one is coming. No one is coming to push you. No one is coming to tell you to turn the TV off. No one is coming to tell you to get out the door and exercise. Nobody’s coming to write the business plan for you. It’s up to you. It’s your job to make yourself do the crap you don’t wanna do so you can be everything you’re supposed to be. And you’re so damn busy waiting to feel like it. You’re never going to. You’ve got to parent yourself, you gotta push yourself.”
Bold and sobering words. You would imagine that after hearing them delivered as poignantly as Mel Robbins did, we would all quit resting on our laurels and burst headlong into execution mode of whatever we have been avoiding or putting off.
Yes. And no.
Yes because there are some of us who only need a tiny jolt into the right direction and we rise to the occasion. We are easily delivered and healed by encouragement and exhortation. It does not take us years to pick up our mat and walk. One word and our faith is renewed. We become the believers we once were. That word or incitement becomes the wind beneath our wings and we embark on reaching for the stars. All we need is a nudge and that fading light at the end of the tunnel goes from dim to sun-bright. Good for us.
Then there are those among us for whom those words, though encouraging and right, serve to show us how much we more we could be and do and how little of that we have done. We lack the ability to sustain steam and keep our engines running. Our lamps, though full of oil, just won’t burn as long we need them to. One slight wind and that little fire of an article or a blog a week we pledged to write and upload is blown out. We have more hiatuses than we can admit.
To the latter of us, Afrobloggers and this WinterABC challenge is the fire we need to burn again. You see, we want to be what we know we can be and more but left to ourselves, we go around the mountain of possibility and endeavor so many time without a step up the slope. We are so good at dipping our toes and removing them just as quick as though they touched magma at the bottom of that mountain.
We have one thing going for us, when we make up our minds to take on something of a challenge as AfrobloggersWinterABC2024, we really hate to lose. Some of you might never understand what a day like this, a submission such as this and this climax means to our feeble spirits (as some have judged us). It means we have beaten the slopes. We have come to the zenith at last. At least this time.
Our competition is with the man in the mirror. If we can be better today than we were yesterday even by one more line or paragraph, we are winning. In this case, we went for one more blog each day of the work week. That ‘one more’ is all we needed. Afrobloggers knows us so well that they let us rest on the weekends to recoup our energies and recharge our batteries. Afrobloggers, you are ‘fam.’
Writing in itself is a challenge, even in private. Imagine putting yourself out there and daring a continental challenge. To the seasoned, this is minor league staff. To some of us, it is a championship.
Lay your fears aside or try hard to. Put one word in front of the other until it makes a sentence you can live with. Mark the ‘you can live with.’ It is you who needs the improvement. It is you who yields the results. It is you who celebrates you first when no one is watching because the rest do not know the feat you’ve endured to make a coherent paragraph. Take on a challenge. If you ever feel stuck, come go through mine and at the back of your head know that I did not do it as the seasoned but as those who want the championship so bad, they will miss days or be late sometimes but keep going. Do you want to quit and be the thing you so badly wanted to avoid? Brave the sentences, and make them make sense if it’s the last thing you do and by all means write on.
Adios, for now. See you at the starting line, next time. I hope to see you in that number when the daring go marching in for another challenge. The world could use more of us.