I will not pretend I came up with the slogan Just do it. My generation has heard that tagline since Nike coined it in 1987 to inspire and motivate people to chase their dreams no matter how far out they seem. However, it recently sunk in. Some seeds take a long time to bloom.
While it may interest you how the slogan was forged, I will avoid the temptation to dive into the origin, which had nothing to do with a man on death row. Oops. Here’s your tea for the day.
What I love about the new year is putting the holidays behind me. I don’t particularly dislike the holidays. They are restful and calm now that I have removed the distasteful energies from my traditions. Things like spending too much money, feeling a pang of overwhelming guilt for seemingly everything I was unable to provide, and removing toxic people from my visit list.
There is something in that sweet spot between Christmas and New Year’s that brings clarity, ideas, and motivation. While I do not participate in New Year’s Resolutions per se, I ponder the last year and tend to catch some things I want to change.
What I Need to Change.
There were many things I was proud of, like my increased travel, taking Forward Focus and Angler X to the next level, crushing my athletic goals (#burnbootcamp), and creating new oh-so-fabulous recipes, I couldn’t help but fall on my failures as well.
For starters, I was not particularly proud that I had developed the habit of not responding to people via social media, text, phone, or email. This was usually not intentional. I often felt like I wanted to think of a good response. Or I would glance at the message and tell myself I would respond when I had more time. The other culprit was my car. I noticed the sneaky thing would tell me I had a message while driving but then remove the notification on my phone, and I would completely forget!
The excuse doesn’t matter, only the result.
And to me, the result was people may be feeling like I didn’t think their time was valuable. They were taking time out of their day to contact me, and I was not responding. (Minus the solicitors, you wouldn’t believe how many emails I get about how someone can launch my business into the next biggest thing, 😒.)
Another thing I noticed was I eye-rolled a lot of my daily duties, such as cooking, laundry, dishes, and sometimes even going to the gym. I find these activities relaxing. (I am aware of what I said.) It was unusual for me to get an attitude regarding my to-do list.
I did not appreciate these new habits; they added unnecessary stress to my workdays and made everything seem harder than it is.
Recently, I was sick of my whinny attitude and I snapped back at myself, “Just do it!”
To my surprise, I did.
Since then, any time I complained about something I had to do or tried to procrastinate for whatever excuse I offered, the voice in my head shouted in irritation – Just do it!
I am flabbergasted at how that simple, overused phrase has changed my life. I have been more productive in the last six weeks than in a long time- consistently, too! It has freed me up to do more of what I like! I suddenly have more time to read. My house is clean. There is progress left and right. It almost makes me feel like I am forgetting something. You know, like when you have money in the bank after paying your bills, and you fear there is a bill you have forgotten?
This may not work for you, but it has clearly worked for me. As you can see, I haven’t written a blog post in a couple of months, and here we are, all because I had “time.”
The code to success was simple all along.
Just do it.
