Lee Davy continues his confessions series by revealing that he has written a draft of his first book and shares the lessons learned.
I have a yearning to swim in a sea of omnipotence. To look up at the stars and use my eyes to control their winks like a remote control. This ability of mine is ripening. I am learning more each day. The future looks as bright as those stars.
Two months ago, I signed up to pay £75 per month to join a group of entrepreneurs who all suffered from the same problem. Steven Pressfield calls it Resistance. You and I know it as the inability to get shit done. It’s a phobia of advancement, a stifling of dreams, and a stillness of water that gathers unwanted flies and disease.
Don’t let my volume of poker articles fool you. Telling you what Daniel Negreanu eats for breakfast is not within the scope of my life purpose. I believe everyone should understand meaning and purpose. You don’t have to create the process from within a laboratory. Have fun with it. And don’t worry about the permanence of it. You grow old, you learn, you change. Meaning and purpose is fluid. Let it flow.
My meaning and purpose is to help people find freedom and happiness through affordable and accessible help, support and advice; gifts that I then help people pass to others. There is a school of thought that everything you work on in life should somehow relate to your meaning and purpose. I like that view.
Poker articles are what I do to pay the bills. Because of that I prioritize my poker articles before anything else I do in life. That means my wife, my son and my meaning and purpose drop down the pecking order.
My new £75 per month group – known as The WAR Room – are working towards a 12 Week Plan (12WP). It’s a series of life changing goals that I am going to complete by the end of the year. Falling out of the 12WP is my One Next Action (ONA). Each day, we report back to The WAR Room and provide an update on our ONA.
This responsibility and the construction of my 12WP has brought about some amazing changes that I would like to share. Instead of starting my day working on bill paying work such as poker articles and interviews, I now start with my meaning and purpose work (my ONA).
The reason for the flip, is in the past when I have done the bill paying work first, and then tired later in the evening, I have allowed resistance to defeat me. I put off my meaning and purpose work until tomorrow, and we all know that tomorrow never comes.
When you flip it, and do the meaning and purpose work first, you are forced to do the bill work irrespective of your mood, because you have financial obligations and obligations to your clients. You may sleep soundly knowing that you didn’t write a chapter of your book, but the same cannot happen if you need to send an article to a client for publication to keep your job.
I have been promising to write a book for the past five years. The concept has languished into a bathtub full of excuses. Over the past two months, I have included an hour of book writing in my ONA. I haven’t completed this 100% of the time, but today I finished the first draft of my book.
The key to making sure your ONA gets done is to choose a current trigger that exists in your life, and use it as the marker for your ONA activity. I use the trigger of journal writing for the writing of my book. I wake up, meditate, write in my journal, and that’s my trigger to write my new book for an hour.
You may think that the decision to put meaning and purpose work ahead of bill paying work means there is more quality going into the former, and the latter will suffer through tiredness. It can happen, but I have not allowed that. I have kept myself in shape. I read a lot to maintain the muse. I meditate twice per day. I get 8-hours sleep.
Is it tough?
You bet.
I am working my little gonads off.
But that’s how the process works. You don’t get much for free in this life, and the fragments that you get relatively quickly aren’t worth very much. Meaning and purpose is nothing but a dream until you take action. It’s the action that turns meaning and purpose into something tangible.
Like a book.
It’s not enough to work hard.
You need to work hard on the right things.
Earlier today, I interviewed the World Series of Poker (WSOP) November Niner Neil Blumenfield.
He gave my teenage son the following advice:
“Do what you love. Never do anything just for money.”
He also said to embrace your mistakes.
“The deal is to learn from them and not beat yourself up too much. Make that part of the growing process and revise the plan, adapt as you need and move forward from there.”
He’s a smart man.
If you want to do what you love, then you need to take action towards that love. If you don’t, then the stars go supernova, and you find yourself floating in the sea engulfed in nothing but darkness.
