“Oh! It’s easy not to be something!”

I mostly just want this to be on my blog.  This is a comment that someone made on a Ze Frank video and his response to it.   I like to read it two ways.

First, it’s easy not to be something, because being something requires a lot of work and not being something usually requires no work.  I’m sure there are a lot of us who specifically want to be authors and at many points felt that way even though we were doing nothing to work toward that goal. It was just a thing that would happen. You know, in the future.  In the years that I have been seriously working toward being an author, I’ve felt discouraged in ways that I didn’t when I just trusted that it would happen. But, looking at this quote, I realize that I can be something–an author–just by doing the work. It doesn’t matter if that work finds success or not. I’ll still be an author.

Second, there are a lot of somethings I choose not to be.  Sometimes when I am overwhelmed by all the things I want to do, it helps to focus on eliminating all the things I don’t want to do.  I don’t have a whole life list worth of dreams. I have a very short list, but the dreams on it are big and huge and scary, and it’s easy to distract myself with other things, but I know what I want, so I try to focus on being those things and not being other things.