Face the Page

“There's a difference between interest and commitment. When you're interested in doing something, you do it only when circumstance permit. When you're committed to something, you accept no excuses, only results.”—Art Turock

No judgment either way, but it’s important to be clear about your intentions. This advice has come up for me a number of times over the years, both as it applies to myself and as it applies to others. Dieting, exercising, writing . . . Don’t say you want to do something and then make excuses as to why you can’t. Face it, if you have excuses – “reasons”—why you’re not doing it, it just means it’s not as high a priority as you might wish it was.

This quote comes up now because I almost allowed myself an excuse for not posting a quote today. I burned several fingers in a stupid kitchen accident last nightand I spent the evening holding a baggie full of ice. “How could anyone expect me to type with burnt fingers?”

Sounds legit, doesn’t it?

But in all honesty, I was able to post to Facebook, work on name tags for my upcoming workshop, reply to an email, and add a really cool widget to my website. So obviously, though my fingers hurt like the dickens and I frequently had to stop to hold the ice bag, I was still able to type. So why allow myself to make excuses for skipping the quote of the day? I made a commitment on September 9th, one I intended to keep for an entire year. How serious was that commitment? Did I mean it? Or did I mean ‘only on days when it’s convenient’?

Then followed a short discussion with myself, a search for an apt quote (during which I found a really cool blog I shared on my Facebook), and here I am, typing a bit slowly, lots of typos I have to fix, but very proud of myself for sticking to it.

Now it's time for me to put my fingers back on ice.

“If you don't want to do something, one excuse is as good as another.”—Yiddish Proverb