Sun. 8/6/2009 (11:12 AM MST)
Writing a novel continues to be a fun and fulfilling experience. There’s much I’ve learned and still have to learn about writing and making sure everything falls into place correctly. To get all this right is a time consuming process. But it is definitely worth it! I will only accept a polished and stellar novel before I get it published and printed, and not anytime sooner will this happen. Anyways, my wife Heidi has been helping edit my first draft and it is good to see there is much I need to improve. Getting into the habit of writing and working on this book did not happen over-night. I actually had the idea for writing a book about 9 years ago.
At that time, I wrote a few pages – pretty elementary stuff and very raw. Guess what happened after that? Nothing. The idea of writing a book simply gathered dust for the next 7 years. While this is unfortunate, I now know the reason for this, and it was simply my habits and expectations of myself and the life I was living. Writing a book and having it be known the world over simply did not enter my mind. Let me share with you my mindset for the first 7 or so years of my marriage (about Dec. 2000 – Feb. 2008).
I gave no thought to my career except I knew I could do something related to computers. The bar was set at simply getting a job doing computer stuff somehow. But let me backtrack even further. After graduating high school in June 1996, I moved to Utah with my brother Paul. I was content to work doing data entry at $7.50 an hour – and I thought this was great! Now there’s nothing wrong with a healthy attitude, but my state of mind was seriously flawed for a long time. And by that I mean that I had very low expectations for myself.
Now fast forward to February 2008. At this time, I was working with Media Learner, a company I helped start, which grew from theShipper.com, a website I helped start with another guy. I also played the online game ‘World of Warcraft’ at this time. I met many people online playing WoW (World of Warcraft), and saw that most of them had low expectations for themselves and generally struggled in many different areas of life. Mind you, these were for the most part, good, honest people, but I saw something common in most of them, as well as people I interacted with at work. I was beginning to notice more about people than I ever had before in my life. A stirring in me began and it started to pull me in a different direction, similar to a water skier on a boat that changes direction.
I created www.drjerm.com – basically a mind dump of the information I had collected to that point about life and what might help one find fulfillment and meaning. This took a few hundred hours, but the site is now there for anyone to read. And it all started with a thought! A thought to create something that would benefit others. A few months later, I began to slowly work on my book again and by the end of 2008, I was writing nearly regularly. Now I am at the point the first edited draft is complete and I am now working on it with my wife editing it and will soon have another solid editor helping me (thanks Wendy!)
What changed? Well, I’ve given up WoW for good, that was one thing. I left Media Learner and the chaos there. I seek to surround myself with people who seek to make a difference in life. I treat my time as something very precious – even mowing the lawn for a half hour wrenches me because I know there is something more I could be doing with my talents (not that lawn mowing is bad). I experienced the start of s shift that is changing the way I view myself, my time, and my life. This does not mean I have achieved perfection or complete fulfillment. And it does not mean I don’t make mistakes – I make plenty. It just means I have found a better path to take towards achieving what I want in life.
So how do I achieve all of this? Simple, form the moment I wake up to the moment I retire, I reiterate my focus and goals. I recite to myself the important things throughout the day. I pay careful attention to my state of mind and physical posture. If I feel my posture slouching and my thoughts drifting negatively, I correct it immediately. And beyond that, I proactively keep myself in an uplifted and confident state. This takes practice, but over time it will become a habit. It is amazing the change that happens in life just by focusing on your state.
This does not mean by doing this you’ll become a multi-millionaire celebrity. It does mean that you will have control over your life and the direction it goes, and your happiness and fulfillment will be dictated not by your environment, but by your state of mind.