Career in transition? stop talking, start doing

If I had ten bucks for every time someone comes up to me after an event and says, “I’ve always wanted to write a book,” I could retire. I’m serious.

It’s a sad chorus because almost every time someone says it, I can tell the book will never be written.

If you really want to write your book, write your book. If you really want to go back to school, go back to school. If you want to take a year off and travel, take a year off and travel. Whatever. You shut up and find a way. I’m one of those people who believes that if you really want to do something, you make up your mind and do it. One of my mentors was a single mother who, when she was left with two young children, she drove a cab so she could study law and became a much admired judge.

We are capable of achieving so much if we only dare to commit and get started. When I hear the line “I really want to write a book,” I tell people from Rick Light, the service manager at my local Goodyear store. Rick once saw a box of books in the back of my car and mentioned that he was writing a novel. Every time I see him, he tells me how he’s doing. He spends every lunch break at the public library. He takes index cards and writes several paragraphs or sentences and maybe outlines a scene. Then he goes home and writes it all down on his computer. He’s been doing this for a few years, and I always knew he would finish his book, which he did. Unfortunately, a theft by vandals left it without an original and without a backup. Did he give up? No. He started over and won’t stop until he has a new and better draft. He reinforces his vision with the kind of determination needed to create success.

This is an era where millions of people are rethinking what they will do with their careers. If you’ve been pushed over the edge by a layoff, you probably feel like you’re staring into the abyss. But how you get out of this adversity depends entirely on whether you can do what Rick did. Figure out what you want to do, make up your mind to do it, and persevere, through anything, one small step at a time.

I know that’s easier said than done, and that’s the point. If it’s worth doing, and if your success is worth having, you have to suffer the pain to earn your reward. Don’t judge your success by what is easy, judge it by what is difficult. My motto is “Fall down seven times, get up eight”. It comes from a Chinese proverb that simply marks the course one should take in life because obstacles are unavoidable. they just are. When I started writing my first book, I expected to be able to write it, sell it, and publish it in six short months before it exploded onto the best-seller list and made me rich and famous. Things didn’t happen that way at all. I suffered humiliating rejections and obstacles that repeatedly tested whether I had the mettle to earn my success. Getting up every time I fell down required me to find strength when I had none.

Fortunately, I had a support group that kept cheering me on when I couldn’t cheer myself up. Count on your friends to keep moving forward. There were so many key moments where I felt like giving up, but others inspired me to stay in the game. If you don’t look for that kind of positive energy, you will get stuck in the defeatism that destroys dreams. If you have been stopped along the way, do not give in to bitterness. Reach out to your friends and tell them what you need to continue toward a positive outcome.

I recognize that many of us feel that we are caught in the 2009 vortex of negativity that makes it impossible to get ahead to do what we really want to do. The old notion that we should do what we love seems like a luxury at a time when people are worried about how they are going to pay their electricity bills. But I still believe that we can do what we’re meant to do, if we really want to do it. The challenges of this difficult economic year may mean that our steps are smaller and our progress slower. Still, we can do what we really want to do.

I always say the same thing to aspiring authors. “If you write a page a day, you’ll be done in a year. You just have to start it and finish it.”

The question is the same for them as it is for you. Do you really want to do it? And if so, what stops you from starting?