What Is Your Mission For 2015?

If it doesn’t move you or make you feel something than what is the point.

A thousand and a eleven years ago when I was a new blogger who was blindly following his way I didn’t think to use photos in my posts.

I could blame it upon the rudimentary tools Blogger provided us with but it would indicate more thought about how to tell a story than I used.

This is not to say I never used photos because I did but they were tied into the posts in a different way than I use them now.

Today I look for pictures and quotes that add layers to the tales I try to tell whereas then they were more like dressing on a salad, sometimes adding spice and sometimes hiding stale lettuce.

Tumult, Turmoil & A New Year

It would be false to say I have never had goals but until recently I wasn’t the kind of person who would write them down.

It felt too structured and too rigid to me to map out my life like that. I always felt like it would take away some of my spirit and the easy going guy I thought of myself as would choke.

Much of the past five or six years has been filled with turmoil, tumult and a double dose of stress. There have been sleepless nights and moments where I wondered when my breaking point would come but it never did.

Maybe it is because I am a Taurus. Maybe it is because I am nuts or maybe it is because I listened to a line in Rocky Balboa and took it seriously.

I heard that and rallied. I heard that and told myself that I could take the hits and keep moving forward.

And I did.

I took pride in it.

Took a beating and kept going because I needed to do it as both a father and a man.

I took on the big challenges in my life and solved almost every one of them. Figured out answers and solutions and just when I thought I had managed to pull us over the hump it fell apart…again.

That was brutal and among the hardest things I have had to deal with. I couldn’t spent hours trying to figure out how it happened so that I could avoid making the same mistakes again.

And then somewhere in the midst of it all I thought about what I would say if one day my children faced similar circumstances and I heard myself tell them not to be foolish.

Why take the beating if you can avoid it. There is no need or reason to do it. There is no benefit in it.

Be smarter.

Some people have secret feelings.

That has been me.

I wasted more time on being sad, frustrated and angry than I like to think about.

But somewhere in there I figured out that I could use those feelings for my writing. .

Somewhere during one of those moments I decided if I could use those hard moments to become a better writer than I would feel better about that time and it wouldn’t seem like such a waste.

And I decided I would have a better chance to avoid revisiting some of this crap by coming at life in a different way. I decided it was time to write down my goals and try to be more specific in what I wanted.

Don’t get me wrong, I knew what I wanted and what I was trying to do but I figured there was no harm in taking a different approach.

What Is Your Mission For 2015?

They tell me good bloggers build their blogs by using you more than I so let’s make this our mission.

In my world that means a continued focus on finding work that feeds my creative soul. In a perfect world it would mean I got paid to blog and write about whatever my heart desires.

Since we don’t live in a perfect world it means I’ll continue to be a professional storyteller. I’ll continue to take work as a writer and marketer. I’ll continue to spend time on the blog trying to find ways to become a better writer and a better storyteller.

It means I want to do as da Vinci suggests, write words that paint a picture you can see, hear and feel.

In a perfect world my writing would include painting, singing and music. It might even dare I say include dance because part of the point of this is finding a way to empty the contents of my heart and soul and touch someone while doing so.

Now that I shared my mission for 2015 I’ll invite you to share yours in the comments. And in the interim if you are unfamiliar with the speech I mentioned above here is a copy you can watch.

• Saved: Children, Life