Much of the time many of us have trouble getting started on projects we think we want to do. My observations have been that the people who have real trouble getting started on a project need external motivation. Usually, it’s another person in some way putting social pressure on them to get started and then to get finished with the task by a defined time.
Work and school have those types of defined tasks, and there are specified tasks and times that the tasks must be completed, and some standard of quality and quantity that must be attained. The usual background threat is losing the job, getting low grades, or losing status with the friend.
How do you get started, to get things done, when there is no external reason or person to motivate you? If you have decided to write a blog post every day, the person nudging you is yourself. Unless you became famous, which is unlikely, there isn’t anyone in the blogosphere who cares what you do. The instant you aren’t satisfying some specific interest of a viewer they go elsewhere to find something more interesting.
Wikipedia is better for finding most information than a search on a specific topic. Wikipedia is juried by whoever chooses to do so and corrected by others who choose to do so and thus becomes increasingly more accurate, meaningful, and well written. Why would anyone go to a blog post that is generally a one-person affair that has been written a single time, proofread a couple of times … and there it is.
A blogger is competing for attention with professional writers with staffs and copy editors and many other helps to get their words, facts, spelling, grammar, thoughts, and many other things perfected. And, they are usually writing about something of newsworthy interest.
How do you get personal thoughts written well by yourself if you are doing all of those specialized professional tasks by yourself? When you read most nonfiction books to the acknowledgments pages at the end, you usually discover that there are many people thanked for their inputs. One author suddenly becomes dozens of paid specialists making the thing readable.
Having said that, it amazes me that anyone reads what is essentially little more than my diary. They certainly don’t read it for emotional drama, because my life would be boring and incomprehensible to nearly everyone. Nor do they read it for recently scientifically discovered phenomena because I don’t do research. I do make observations, I do think about the things I notice and attempt to understand them, and I do attempt to create solutions to the problems that come my way. I do try to do a good job with each of those things, but everything I do is little more than a personal inquiry; it isn’t science, and it isn’t news.
I encounter problems every day. Things bother me for a while and then I try to create a workable solution. I try to expose my discoveries to the world in writing and pictures. That requires some rewrites, and more rewrites, but when the idea is clear enough that I can understand what I’m saying, I move on.
Do it well! Becomes … Get it done! Which if there’s time becomes … Do it well! I rewrote the Hope essay 29 times, and it still needs work.
Probaway - Life Hacks 
We read your blog because you are a philosopher (even though you may not be, if are truly a philosopher). It is always comforting to see other philosophers who get their facts worng about as often as their misspellings or typos. It is also entertaining to see what doom and gloom predictions that you parrot from the nightly news because we neither listen nor watch anymore. We know that any predictions of doom and gloom gleaned from the media is unworthy of concern and, in a strange way, kind of comforting because they have always been worng. Things have never looked better. Keep up the good works and remember; “Old age is far better than the alternative.”
The only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing. – Socrates
Thank you! R. Lee Darby and friends.
I wholeheartedly believe that the things of our world have been the best they have ever been for humanity, for my whole life. That includes during the Great Depression when I was a child, and World War Two when I was as a nine-year-old kid driving a caterpillar tractor on our farm. All of my uncles were off to war and it was up to me and my grandpa to run the farm.
The proof of the health of humanity is that it has six billion more people now than the two billion when I was born. Without more food, those great numbers of people wouldn’t exist. Also, the Flynn Effect of improving results on “IQ” tests is based in part on better nutrition which is further proof that things have been getting better for nearly everybody and are still fantastic.
My sadness and world sorrows are that I don’t believe our progress in numbers can continue much longer without a population disaster. I don’t mean a pipe bomb in at a local public event, I mean a real worldwide population disaster.
Notice the pilots helmet in my photo taken in 1960 within a few weeks of when I was sitting on an H-bomb. It was at that time, a few days later that I was telling the base commander that I didn’t want anything to do with destroying the world with those things. He shouted angrily at me for a few minutes. I now understand his problem better. His whole life personal was bound up in his occupation and I was threatening his identity by my claiming I didn’t believe in his mission.
He said he would put me in jail for ten years if I didn’t obey his orders. I said, I had and would continue to do an excellent job, and obey every direct order as perfectly as I could, but I absolutely didn’t want this job. I would rather spend ten years in jail than kill millions of innocent people.
I was trying to save the world then and I am still trying to save the world. How? By trying to understand the problems and trying to think of ways of correcting them. The worst part of my whole world view and personal mission is that the finest people I have ever met were the very people who brought us to this precipice. Elenore Roosevelt, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Burris Cunningham, and many USAF bomber pilots. And many, many more really honorable people.
I truly hope you have the opportunity to live to be 84 in good health and within a healthy community.
Those of us who stood guard during the cold war did not threaten the world, rather we saved if from certain nuclear destruction. All of history has been a struggle against murder and slavery. Even today half the world is still enslaved. Yet there was a time when most of the world was enslaved. Many people fret over the cause of war. Yet if you study each page of history you will see that it all about the struggle against murder and slavery. If one would end all war on Earth they must first end murder and slavery. The men who manned those bombers with H bombs never had to use them because those who murder and enslave knew they would be sent straight to hell. Such are the hard lessons of history. I too stood next to Minuteman ICBM’s with multiple H bombs and prayed we would never use them (and we never did). However, every enemy of the United States should understand that should they ever attack our nation we will most certainly send them all straight to hell. Spread the word. Si vis pacem, para bellum.
Thank you for your service.