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Image by Hamed Saber. Flickr Creative Commons License.

Does anyone have a dilemma that goes like this:

• You haven’t started your list building yet.  Why?
• Because you haven’t got a squeeze page up yet.  Why?
• Because you haven’t finalized your free offer yet.  Why?
• Because you haven’t got any upsell products ready to put at the end of the free offer.  Why?
• Because all marketers advise you to create what the customers want, not what you think they need, incase you spend a whole bunch of energy creating something useless.

It can feel like an ever-tightening noose.  Not to mention a catch 22.

But sometimes you just have to cut the noose and launch right in.  Start with some product to bribe subscribers with – create something smallish – maybe up to 5 pages – that answers common questions and is in keeping with the direction of your site.  Then once you have, oh, maybe 100 or so subscribers, then you can start asking questions about what they are really looking for (again, in keeping with your topic) but can’t seem to find anywhere.

What dilemmas are paralyising you?

Image by bdwaydiva1. Flickr Creative Commons License.

Too many times we are far too hard on ourselves for not being at our goal already.

But being right in the middle of our own lives prevents us from seeing our steady incremental progress.

Have you ever periodically visited a growing child and remarked how much they’ve grown since you last saw them?

Or noticed how much weight a friend has lost since you last visited with them?

So, do you really think that you will wake up one day 10 kilograms lighter than the day before?  No, of course not.  You know with every facet of your intelligence that it requires prolonged steady progress.

Occasional detours are okay, provided you get back on track in due course, and continue your journey towards your goal.  Most goals are resilient enough to withstand sporadic relapses and diversions.  They’re not going anywhere.  It’s just you who needs to get re-focussed.

And remember that life is a kaleidoscope of interesting experiences.  And, personally, I choose these diversions because, although they may be distractions, they also help me to bring back more colour and details to my goal.  I love the concept of cross-pollination of ideas and disciplines – what you learn in one field can be applied in another and in a way that no one else has thought of before, at least as far as you can tell.  You NEED to fertilise your imagination in order to feed your dreams and your passions.

So don’t be so hard on yourself when you don’t think you’ve made as much progress as you think you should have.

What have you started?

What have you continued?

What have you created?

What have you enriched?

What have you incubated?

What have you nurtured?

And some days you simply find you are shooting the breeze, with no particular aim in mind.  Other than recharging your batteries and/or your soul.  That’s totally worthwhile too.

And if you’re anything like me, you’ve probably got a number of projects and goals in progress.  Not to mention your loved ones and your income earning obligations.  So it can be frustrating to feel there isn’t enough time to give to your preferred goals.

But slow steady progress wins out as well, in the end, as focused sprinters.  The tortoise approach is much more aligned to my personal style, and I’m going to stop wishing I was a hare.

Image by Wolfgang Staudt. Flickr Creative Commons License.

Go on! Start making a list of what you’re waiting for.

Permission?

Validation or confirmation?

Information?

An experience or event?

Cleaning up messy obstacles?

However, sometimes it’s not quite as straightforward as that.

Sometimes, we are waiting for a tipping point to move us from collecting information to acting on that information.

I believe that is why many of us read and read and read.  We are searching for that final bit of “a-ha” that pushes us into action.  Or maybe that’s what we think we’re searching for.

Often, ideas take time to ripen.  And to help them ripen, we continue to read and collect information.  This acts like the sunshine and rain to our ideas.  They become fleshed out, taking shape and texture and flavour.  Then there comes a time where the ideas need to be plucked or else they wither and die.

I think that we often incubate various ideas, reading all the while, and when we viscerally feel an idea to be ripe enough, regardless of what we are reading, we will begin to act on it, and possibly misattribute finally taking action to the text we were reading at the time.

Does this make sense?