What is The Magic Word of Success?

I didn’t realise that I have procrastinated for one and half years already. I’m ashamed at myself to even write about it in this article. But I guess it serves a reminder for myself. What is it that I have postponed doing for this long?

Actually, I have not written a single article for 18 months. The last one was published by Triond in December 2008. While many other writers in my cohort has expanded their repertoire into the thousands, I was still stuck at my 101st article.

What was the causes?
1) Depression
I was depressed for quite some time due to family problems. I stopped writing. But even after awhile and I was coping slightly better, I still remained unproductive.

2) Lack of Motivation and Confidence
Due to the problems I had mentioned above, I had little motivation to write. My depression also resulted in a lack of confidence in my abilities. I felt that nothing I did was good enough anymore.

3) Lack of Focus
I soon began to lack focus as time continues to fly by. I had a job then and it was easy to say that I need to focus on my job instead of my writing. But I was focusing in neither of these activities. I told myself that I would write later, or tomorrow or next week.

It was never “I will write an article now, right now”. As I began reading motivational materials, I realise that the magic word of success is “now”. I used to be that I tell myself this – I will write an article later when my daughter takes a nap in the afternoon. When the time came, I was tired from taking care of her the whole morning and I felt like taking a nap as well. I will tell myself again that I will write later on when she has gone to bed at night. But again, my energy levels have dipped to an all-day low by then and I am just mentally drained from the day’s activities.

I know what I want. I want to increase my repertoire of articles to increase my passive income I’m getting from submitting articles online. That’s my goal.

What is my strategy? My strategy is to find the best time to write my articles so that I’m productive, effective and efficient.

So, when is the right time? I discovered that “now” is always the best time. Whenever I have an idea up in my head, i’d grab my computer to start writing, even if I only had time to complete a few introductory sentences. Alternatively, I’d grab my cellphone and type into the word document immediately. For this, it can be done anytime, anywhere.

As for this article, my daughter was trying to attract my attention when I was half-way through it. She wanted to watch some cartoon videos on Youtube. I switched on my computer and carried on writing using my cellphone, until I complete it. After two videos, I have already completed this article. It would not have happened if I said to myself that I would do it “later”.

It does not really take much time to write an article and I really need to cultivate the practice of writing “now”, not “later. That is the magic word of success – Now!

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