Sneak Up On Your Dreams

One of the biggest obstacles I face is the recurring thought that there are so many other people who are trying to do what I am and there’s no space left for me.  Every time I see something written that is similar to what I would have liked to write I feel a twinge of panic.  I feel like I’m late and all of my ideas will all have been “stolen” before I can get to write them.  Of course no one steals my ideas because I haven’t gotten them out there and ideas aren’t just in my head, everyone has them.

What I realize, though, is that the same ideas are generally out in the world over and over again.  They’re rehashed and re-framed and rethought of in many ways and that’s the way we, as humans, grow and evolve and communicate.  What works to communicate with one person may not work for another.

A story: recently my mother was talking about writing a small book in a very niche topic, EMDR therapy.  She wanted to self-publish and self-distribute.  I told her I thought it was a great idea and she shouldn’t have much difficulty at all since she already knew her audience and wasn’t trying to make lots of money from it.  A few months later I asked her how that was coming along and she said that someone she knew talked her out of it.  The person told her that someone else she knew was already writing a book on the subject and that was all that was needed.  My mother thought that maybe she was right so she stopped moving ahead on her idea.  When I heard this, I explained that there are always other people writing or even having published similar books or ideas, but that doesn’t mean that hers wouldn’t do well.  Perhaps she’d explain things differently than the other person, maybe the other person wasn’t actually more of an expert.  Maybe the other person didn’t know how to market as well.

Who knows why some things become popular and others don’t Everyone in business has been trying to figure this out for the past bunch of years. It’s the key to earning money.  No one really knows all the answers. It seems that it’s a combination of things like timing and what else is going on in the world and luck and quality and so on and  so forth.  We shouldn’t set up obstacles in front of ourselves deciding we can’t do something just because others have already done it.  It’s better to go ahead and fail (or succeed).  perhaps what works is just a little bit different from what others have done.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 at 10:10 am and is filed under Obstacles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.