Seth Godin said something that made me sit up straight real quick a while back…

“There are all these places we can go to dance with fear. And, my mantra of everyone should have a blog and everyone should blog every day is primarily because if you cajole yourself into speaking a truth, your truth, every single day on schedule, you will learn to dance with fear and you will be able to write until you are not afraid of writing anymore.”

I think that (and a few other things) flipped a switch in me… So when I heard that I spent most of a day working on my blog.

I used to refer to it as “my somewhat neglected blog” but it’s getting better.

There’s something that happens when you start getting traffic to your site (like I have been). You start thinking things like, “Wait, people are actually LOOKING at this stuff??”

Yeah, that was the point from the beginning, genius.

The only reason I actually started the thing (3 years ago) was because my folks bought me the domain out of the blue and then my friend/mentor Andrea Goodsaid pushed me out of the nest before I thought I was ready (like a good momma bird should).

I faithfully posted to it for a while but got distracted… Lost some confidence somewhere… The fact that this could potentially be seen by ANYONE is kind of a big hurdle for some of us.

Ever since I started, I guess I kind of needed something to jerk me out of my fear…

To help me even dance with my fear.

And I found a pretty good dance partner… It’s this new social media site called Tsu (launched Oct. ’14). It’s a whole different place where nobody knows me (and people from my regular life, professional life, etc. probably wouldn’t find me) and I just decided to not care so much and see what that felt like for a while.

And it’s turned out to be a pretty freeing experience.

I don’t know if I’m totally ready to post my long rambling (and sometimes vulnerable) thoughts on Facebook yet but I have finally posted these words to this blog. I shared this on Tsu in February 2015, by the way. 

I’ve written a handful of longer posts on there over the last year and it’s been a good exercise. You can find them by searching #longform or #gabesthoughts

A BIG key in doing any kind of creative work is a certain kind of confidence that you only get by putting yourself out there in spite of your fear. After a while, you get comfortable dancing with that fear and it’s not such a big deal. You make peace with what people might think of you. You’re able to make mistakes and get over them quicker.

On Tsu I just decided to stop caring so much what people think, to hang loose and be myself. I guess that’s what you have to do in order to dance.

I wouldn’t know… I’ve danced (in public) only a few times (poorly).

But I’ve been “dancing” over on Tsu. It’s brought me a fresh stream of traffic for my blog and forced me to “clean house” so things look decent when people come over. And in the ten months since I originally wrote this I’ve been writing more consistently than ever. My confidence has grown considerably and it feels GOOD.

Get on over there if you want to see my moves.

Gabe

P.S. That quote came from The James Altucher podcast (episode 86). He has some great guests and asks questions that others don’t. The episode with Seth is probably the one that’s impacted me the most. Both these guys have been inspirations to me as a writer and as a human in general. Read Seth here and James here.