I've Been Reading a Lot of Motivational Nonsense Lately...

I've always had a problem with motivation. The problem being that I am not very motivated. Never have been. I'd go so far as to call myself lazy. Yeah, that's pretty accurate. Lazy.

Now I've learned a lot about visualization of your goals. Which cracks me up, because visualizing myself as a a Roman emperor with a harem laid out at my feet is pretty funny all by itself.

I've learned about goal setting. Which is simply making a list of the shit you aren't going to do. I take that back, the list thing actually works kind of. I mean there is something very psychologically satisfying about checking things off the list.

And I've learned a whole bunch of other shit about time waiting for no man, and bank deposits and work, and in a year you'll wish you had started today and all that yada yada yada.

And not one bit of that shit really got my ass in gear. The funny thing is I think that I'm motivated by inertia. Inertia is the only thing that'll get me moving. Ya know, an object in motion tends to stay in motion. And motion if you ask me, is life.

When you stop moving you stop living. And I've done my very best to stop moving in the past. Now luckily for me I've got a princess that loves me that has grabbed me by my flipping ears and dragged me into motion for the past few years which has worked out famously for me.

The only way I can describe her is thus, somebody at our wedding asked me if she got lucky with me. To which I replied, "She did alright...I did better."

Now for whatever reason, and I haven't even been able to put my finger on it just yet, I'm hoping to though. Over the past two days I've finally gotten my ass into first gear. I'm writing again, I may be writing about complete bullshit but I'm writing which is better than not. And I've spent a few minutes on the treadmill and I've gone to work, done some homework and I've managed to actually use damn near every minute of the day that I've been given.

Has it been perfect, nope not even close. I still fall down and spend some time watching the Vanilla Ice Project and poking around tumblr checking out all those bodybuilder chicks, don't ask me I have no idea.

But I feel like I'm a huge boulder and I just started rolling down the hill. I haven't got that much speed going yet, but it's in the mail and when it gets here, whoa baby get the fuck out of the way this isn't going to be pretty.

So that's what I've taken out of that past two days.

Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.

Dale Carnegie was apparently a pretty smart dude.

Once you get your ass moving, everything else will follow. Feels pretty damn good.

Starting 2014 Off Right...

Am I making a bunch of resolutions that will last approximately as long as it takes me to write this sentence? Nope.

Am I going to shed a few pounds? Probably a good idea but also probably not going to happen.

So what am I going to do?

I think that this generation and our access to social media and the internet and all that comes with that (to include nonsensical blogs such as this.) has stripped us of one thing that previous generations did have.

We don't actually do much anymore. We don't actually produce much anymore. And this dear friends is a problem. I mean, what I'm writing here is called in internet jargon "content" it is the content of my blog. The shit that you read and comment on and love me for or want to have me castrated with a cattle prod for.

That's content. It doesn't take me much to produce it. Just a few hundred key strokes and there it is. Hell, a lot of the time my best writing is done without having put one iota of thought into it ahead of time. I don't understand, nor could I tell you the mechanics behind the wifi internet that I am currently using. I mean how the hell does this shit get transmitted through the air and come out on the internet?\

Then there's the computer. I have no idea how it actually works, and I mean at a component level. What connects to what exactly to make tetris work on the screen. Then to think there are millions upon millions of lines of code that are present just to make that goofy picture with the quotes appear on the top of the screen.

When I was a kid, my grandfather was a Mr. Fix-it. And he had a radio that he was constantly repairing in the basement. He took it down there, took it apart, found what was wrong with it, fixed it, put it back together and made it work. Then it broke again (normally myself or my brother were responsible for that). He did the same thing with my toy trucks. He did the same thing with the lawnmower, the snowblower, the car, the blender, the furnace and whatever else you could possible think of.

Now if our computer won't download porn at light speed we hit Best Buy for a new one.

You see, my grandfather and to a point my parents generation, and a few notables in my generation actually interacted with this world in a very real, nuts and bolts way. Whereas for the most part, me and mine are just using the shining little tools and flashing light gadgets put into our hands in a very superficial way, and if they don't work we simply throw them out and get a new one.

So that's what I'm going to do this year. I want to dive in and learn how the world around me works, what the components are, what each does, how they fit together and how to fix them. I'm going to have meaningful interactions with the world around me and the people around me, not just 140 character tweets, how about a conversation?

That's how I'm going to start this year off.