100 Day challenge Days 70 - 61 - You should be motoring now

The 100 Day Challenge Program
Days 70 - 61

You should be motoring now:

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I was reminded of a quote today - it said

"Many of the great achievements of the world were accomplished by tired and discouraged people who kept on working"

Day 31 - yes, I did say Day 31 - no I didn't forget. Yesterday morning I was speaking at the Curtin University Educational Forum. It was part of their 40th anniversary celebrations and in response to some research that has been conducted on the program for Information Professionals. Fascinating morning - and a great deal of discussion ensued - and will continue as a result of yesterday. It was a great privilege to be able to share the floor with my fellow professionals. Why?

Yesterday was a great example of a profession that was willing to say "are we doing it right?" "what else can we do?" "how can we do it better?" Having worked in the Information Industry for nearly 30 years I've seen some massive changes to the way we deliver our services. Sometimes I thought we would never get it right, sometimes it seemed that all the testing in the world wouldn't help get our 12 million items inito a "database" so the users could search it by using keywords rather than going the hard road through subject indexes. But the hard work we did put in, in those days meant that what  followed could actually happen. Namely online searching of the catalogue via remote access using of course those other wonderful pieces of software we take for granted - the search engines.

Do you sometimes feel discouraged?
Do you feel like you are nothing more than a tiny cog in a very big machine and that what you are doing is worthless?

Well, sometimes we can't know the bigger picture until we look backwards, which reminded me of something Steve Jobs said - you can only join the dots afterwards (and I paraphrase), you can't know the big picture looking forwards

It is our daily actions which will show in all the tomorrow's to come what it is we have accomplished. Remember we are looking for over life success, not overnight success. Believe me - there is no such thing as overnight success, no magic bullets or secret pills that will create the world you want to live in. Sorry to disolusion you, but that is the truth. BUT and here is one of the keys - if you have persisted over the last 30 days, then you should start to find things slotting into place more easily. You should be slipping into top gear and motoring. As Jack Canfield rightly pointed out if you are travelling through the night all you can see is the next couple of hundred metres or so, only when you get to that point will the next couple of hundred metres be revealed, and so it is with our journeys through life.

As Steppenwolf put it

"Get your motor running
Head out on the highway
Looking for adventure
In whatever comes our way"

Because we can't know for certain where our roads will take us. As one of the speakers said yesterday - she went to uni to become a teacher librarian and ended up working for an oil and gas company in their records department because it was the challenge she was looking for but didn't know existed until she started.

Review the first 30 days of your journey so far.

• If you are anything like the rest of us you will have found some things to have been easy and other items on your challenge list to be incredibly hard. That's normal.
• You are more likely to work on the easier tasks first and are more likely to enjoy them.
  
• You may find that you get to the end of each day having worked ONLY on those things you enjoy. Human nature says in the main we will avoid doing those things that we don't particularly like doing. I would like to challenge you to work the other way around for the next 10 days. Work on the harder tasks first - don't put them off. Reward yourself for doing the hard things, by doing the easier items - AFTERWARDS.
  

While you could carry on doing the easier items, indeed you should be in top gear and motoring on these things by now. The other items you've got sitting on your list are like the stop lights. We know they're coming up - and we know it's going to take some doing to move through the gear changes to get back to speed if we stop the fun stuff to work on the not so fun stuff. Which is why it's a challenge.

Off you go and I'll speak to you soon.