I’ll get to LOLcats in a moment, but first I want to share a short discussion I had with myself earlier today.
I thought, ‘I haven’t been to the gym in weeks! I should go today. No, not today – I don’t have any chicken to cook at home. If I can’t eat healthy afterwards there’s no point in wasting energy at the gym, right? Yeah, I need to go grocery shopping first. Maybe I’ll go to the gym tomorrow…’
And JUST like that, I’ve talked myself out of doing something.
It’s so easy to talk ourselves out of doing valuable things. I catch myself doing it all the time. In business, I talk myself out of calling project leads if there are unread emails in my inbox. Obviously checking email doesn’t pay the bills… but it sure makes a convenient excuse for avoiding valuable (and potentially scary) work!
‘I can’t go for a run today – it’s too humid.’
‘I shouldn’t write any more blog posts until I redesign this site – right now it doesn’t even have categories or archives!’
Give me any task worth doing and I can fabricate some reason why it shouldn’t be done. It’s a bad habit that I’m trying to break. Maybe you can relate?
I recently came across an excellent video that, in part, talks about the struggle between doing anything and doing nothing. It uses the example of LOLcats – cute pictures of cats with cute captions. Creative or pointless?
Let us stipulate that LOLcats are the stupidest possible creative act. But here’s the thing – the stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act. Someone who has done something like this, however mediocre or throwaway, has tried something. They have put something forward in public. And once they’ve done it they can do it again – and they can work on getting it better. The gap is between doing anything and doing nothing. And someone who makes a LOLcat has already crossed over that gap.
Cross that gap and create something!
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Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to make a LOLcat…
