What to read if your inbox is trumping your dreams
- Tue, March 08 2011
- Filed under: Nonprofit leadership
One of the hardest things to do is to start a hard thing. Something that requires creativity, brains, soul and risk.
When I’m faced with hard things, I have to wrestle myself into a chair and go against every distracted impulse that descends on me. It is quite a battle to stop checking email, ignore the texts on my Blackberry and think about how to approach something big that really matters - like writing a book or dreaming up a new program.
If you have had those moments, I have the book for you.
It’s Seth Godin’s Poke the Box, a manifesto from his new Domino publishing project with Amazon.
This 84-page book is one long kick in the pants. Read it if your inbox is trumping your dreams, and you can’t quite bring yourself to write that strategy, start that social enterprise or begin that novel.
The name Poke the Box is inspired by Seth Godin’s uncle, who made a buzzer box that had switches and lights that responded to pokes and other prompts. It was popular with the kids in the family. Children have a natural tendency to try things out. Adults need to get better about starting - and experimenting - rather than worrying we’ll never get it right. In fact, the people who are most successful in the world have also failed a lot, because they fearlessly try new things all the time. Hence the call to action: Poke the Box.
When can you start? He asks. “Soon is not as good as now.”
If I were Seth Godin, I’d tell you to stop reading this blog post and go do the thing you most fear.