Things I Think: You’re Not Doing Anything Until You’re Doing Something

If you have a great idea for a book, but haven’t written a book, you don’t have a book.

If you have a great idea for a business, but haven’t outlined a business plan and started checking things off a list, you don’t have a business.

Until you put your foot on the base of Mt. Everest and then start walking upward, you’re not climbing Mt. Everest.

If you really love your wife, and you don’t tell her (and show her) you love her, you don’t love her.

If you really want to lose weight, but are sitting watching TV, you’re fat.

I talked to a guy today who wants to write a book. He really wants to write a book and he’s cobbled together a boat load of his blog entries, Facebook posts, his Tweets, documents, and articles clipped from the paper. He’s been working on this for four years. Someone told someone told someone that I could help him. And I will.

His book and his story is amazing. But more amazing is he wasn’t just sitting there, watching TV, saying to himself, “ooooh, I wish I could write a book.” He was doing something. He could, for the last four years, look people in the eye and say, “I’m writing a book.” Because that’s exactly what he was doing. He didn’t quit his job, rent a cabin in the Colorado mountains, buy himself expensive coffee, and wait for the perfect writing conditions to happen …he just kept doing little things, moving it forward.

Between me and you, he’s got the book pretty much written. It just needs a little spit shining.

His latest “little thing” was to talk with me. He has either (a) the most shocking, crude, and bare bones tell-all book that will trash all the people who’ve done him wrong over these past four years or (b) we’ll write an incredible novel, based on a true story, that will make people shake their head and say, “there is noooooo way that happened.”

I hope I get to write it, either way. Because if I do, I’ll be doing something.

It’s about stories. Tell stories. Help people tell their story. Tell your story.

My more boring stories, like what I saw while sitting at a red light, is updated all the time at @donkowalewski.