Finishing

I am an ideas guy. So is my brother. We love to kick around new concepts: business ideas, book ideas, wild money making schemes... Ideas are so cool. I love to imagine some new concept and the extrapolate it out to it's logical conclusion.

Here's an example:
My bro and I have been kicking around ideas for making email and the Internet accessible to the elderly. We've got all these big ideas about revolutionizing the nursing home industry. Of course that will lead to us becoming billionaires when the baby boomers start hitting nursing homes in the next few years. I'll travel the country speaking at conferences on accessibility for the elderly and eventually get into politics. I'll run for Texas govenor, then push in to the White House where I will usher in the greatest period of prosperity and freedom in our nation's history - and in global history.

This is the way my crazy mind works. What it does not do is figure out all the little steps and stumbling blocks along the way - the raising of venture capital, the slogging along on beans and rice for 10 years while the biz takes off, the eventual fights that break out between my brother and I over how to run the biz, leading to a parting of ways and our eventual estrangement. Finally, it leaves out completely my assasination while campaigning in San Francisco for the Libertarian party.

My point being that I prefer imagining the high points to dealing with life in the trenches in the nasty now and now. My brother and I have just been taking this week about a book he's starting to write. The concept is great, and his initial work is facinating. I just want him to plow through. I know it's going to get hard. I know it's going to be brutal writing and re-writing with no guarantees that anyone will ever even look at your work, much less publish it.

And I need to push on several key ideas as well. Just keep slogging through.

I'm hoping to start teaching improv again. I've got a class supposedly starting Sept. 14th, but I haven't picked up any takers yet. I'm probably going to have to reschedule the class. I need to stick with it, though. I need to push through and try again to come at marketing my class in different ways. Part of me just wants to say, "Oh well, I guess no one is interested. I'll just quit and do something else."

I need to practice the discipline of finishing.