Be careful at what you get good at.

I was listening to the Unmistakable Creative podcast with Jessica Abel. She brought up this line from season one of True Detective, 'Life's barely long enough to get good at one thing. So be careful at what you get good at.'

If your lucky you are good at many things, but there's that one thing your really good at doing. Why? Because you spent all of your time doing it. It's like the Gladwell theory of 10,000 hours. If you put enough time and energy into anything you can master it after 10,000 hours.

The energy part is important here. If your doing something for long periods of time mindlessly then you're not getting the most out of your time. You have to pay attention, hold focus and be mindful of the moment to keep improving at what you're doing.

In a 2014 article for Esquire Luke O'Neail wrote about this quote compared to Kurt Vonegut who wrote in his book Mother Night, 'We are what we pretend to be, so be careful what you pretend to be.'

As Marty says, 'Or you end up becoming something you never intended.'

What are you pretending to be? I've pretended to be a lot of things, that seems to be the only thing I ever do is pretend and never end up being anything.

I spend a lot of time getting good at playing the drums, but never became a drummer. Lots of time learning multimedia production, but never become a multimediaist (correct term? Not sure because I'm not one). Spent seven years as an English teacher and got pretty good at it, but never appreciated by my employers so I got fed up with the work, quit and left Japan.

 Now what? What's next? I'm 34 going on 35, my next step has to be a wise one. I should just throw it all out there and see if it lands, otherwise I'll move to Thailand and live out the rest of my days in wild wild west of Asian. Living the lazy life writing dime novels and self-publishing them on Amazon. Honestly, that doesn't sound too bad. I just don't want to hate myself for never trying to pursue something important, if anything we do in this world can be considered important.

But maybe that's a philosophical question for another day.

*This post started as an upbeat motivational piece, but ended up being a self-deprecating slap in the face as I am not feeling that upbeat at the moment, but working hard to lift myself up. I apologize for the sour tone, yet also don't apologize  for being transparent. Thanks for your understanding. At a later time I may take the beginning and rework it into something more beneficial to the human experience. Until then.

Writing is hard.

I've mentioned The Moment podcast before, why, because it's an amazing podcast. Brain Koppleman is a great interviewer. He's smart, witty and funny. He also brings great guests who can articulate their struggles and successes in ways that make you feel, 'this will be me.'

In 2014 he interviewed Jon Lovett, speech writer for Hilary Clinton and President Obama in the White House. As well as creator of the television show 1600 Penn.

Around 56:00 minutes into the interview he says, "One of the biggest lessons I had to learn, as a writer, is that writing is really hard."

I agree with this point. As someone who wants to write for a living, I often feel this way. Writing is hard and doesn't get the respect it deserves.

Lovett goes on to say that he gets requests for help on writing toasts or letters and receives writing form "these people who are articulate and smart and the writing they produce is useless, terrible writing. And I often think the reason it's bad, no one ever told them writing was hard and, it will take you a while and it there will be a lot of frustration. And you need that and, you won't be done until it's been hard. Send somebody back with that piece of advice and they can come back with something a little bit better."

I don't feel like my writing is worth anything and I feel like he's talking about me, ever though he doesn't even know who I am, when he says that. But the hardest part is that I know writing is hard. It's a lesson I know already. And I'm working to write everyday to get better at the hard stuff.

Like he says here, he had to "learn from others how hard it was suppose to be. How much thought it was suppose to take. The care and consideration each paragraph and structure and all that stuff was suppose to take."

I feel that way all the time. But most of all I feel that writing needs to get out there. People who write spend a lot of time making it right. Making it perfect. Making it for everyone, when it just needs to be for the people who want it.