Idea.

I’ve been feeling inspired lately. There are a few goals I’ve been thinking about lately (as if I don’t have enough to think about).

Writing. I want to write more often. Not necessarily thoughts and musings, but story, journalism, and other types of descriptive narrative. This November I’ve decided to compete in the National Novel Writing Month’s competition to author a 50,000 word novel. It’s not as much a competition as much as it’s an opportunity to force myself to write copiously and every day for a month straight. Research indicates that it takes twenty-one days to form a habit. Well now I’ll have thirty. 50,000 words in month comes out to roughly 1,667 words per day. I’m estimating that will come out to be about 200 pages of writing in a months time.

I also want to come up with twenty-five ideas per day. Preferably business ideas, or technological ideas, or design ideas. Ideas that improve upon the world in some way. Or ideas that allow us to engage with the world differently, be it in mind or matter. It doesn’t matter what they are, how they work, or if it’s technologically reasonable or feasible. The point is to exercise the mind’s imaginative faculties. I want to explore the realm of possibility. Twenty-five ideas a day, for a year straight, comes out to 9125 ideas in a years time. Even if 1% of them are worthy to pursue, that’s 91 ideas! Even if .1% were reasonable, that almost 10 ideas!

If you’ve read anything about intelligence, genius, nature, and genetics the past decade, you would know by now that genetics is a marginal factor for developing a person’s potential.

The people who succeed are the people who do the small things, day in and day out, when no one’s looking. It’s repetition. Repetition. Over and over. Writers write all day long, on any subject, whenever the opportunity presents itself. Inventors think ideas incessantly. Musicians practice perpetually. Olympians train the mind and body longer, harder, and more regularly than any other competitor.

Greatness is trained in the wee hours of the morning, and late hours of the evening, whatever the inclement might be. Greatness locates the limits, the ramparts where discomfort lives, only so it might push itself beyond familiar mediocrity. It elevates the conscious and transports its mind where it longs to be. When it wakes from the racing struggle, with the pain and exhaustion still gripping its senses, it finds that the world has become exactly what it was envisioned to be, and the pain becomes a marginal price when compared to the infinite joy of truly being.