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First Think of What You Want to do Then do What you Have to do.

First Think of What You Want to Do Then Do What you Have to Do

First Think of What You Want to do Then do What you Have to do.

I think I’m going to have to go back to the Chinese take Out place where I bought these fortune cookies because they rock for my FortunateBluFrog posts.

Think of What you WANT to Do

There will always be things that you WANT to do. Call in sick to play Wii all day long on a rainy day. Eat an entire container of Ben & Jerry’s Chubby Hubby ice cream during a Buffy marathon. Buy that expensive car, take out another credit card or tell people what you REALLY think. However, each one of those things is going to bring down a world of hurt on you, maybe not immediately but eventually. You’re not going to be able to always do what you want to do.

Then Do What You HAVE to Do

When I think of this part of the fortune I equate HAVE with NEED. There are things that you NEED to do in life. You need to earn money to support your family so calling in sick to often might lead to loss of income. You need to watch what you eat and also need to exercise to maintain a quality of life. People always say that you have to exercise to live a long life. I’m not so thrilled with the prospect of a long life if that means shuffling around the nursing home waiting for death.

However, I’d like to have a good quality of life, I’d like to maintain a healthy body so that I can continue to function without debilitating disease. Of course now that I’ve been living with diabetes for a while hindsight is 20/20. Your mind goes to the place of, could I have prevented this, why are people who are much more unhealthy than me not affected by this disease? But you can’t look at things that way either because it will just make you more angry and upset. So you do what you NEED to. You eat better, you watch your sugars, you learn about the disease and you exercise.

What does this fortune mean for Bloggers?

You might want to head right to twitter or facebook when you start out your day rather than work on that post that you need to complete. You might want to spend time playing facebook games instead of reading blog posts and commenting. You might want to put off moving to WordPress when blogspot works just fine. All of these wants aren’t going to move you forward to success. If you have a task to complete then you need to shut out all distractions and complete it, first. We all know how important keeping contact with people on twitter and facebook is to social networking but it can consume you and take time away from writing the bests posts you can write. It can rob you of time spent visiting other blogs and interacting with other bloggers and their posts. You need to complete those things first that will bring you success. The rest can be done after.

For the season of Lent I gave up facebook games. I would spend hours playing them. I neglected some blogging while I did so and I certainly needed to stop. So for 40 days I gave up playing. No Mafia Wars, no Street Racing, nothing. And you know what, I feel more creative and less like I need to spend forever playing catch up with the blog.

Are you doing the things that you NEED to do so that you are able to do the things that you WANT to do?

For the Things We Have to Learn Before We Can do Them, We Learn by Doing Them.

For the Things We Have to Learn Before We Can do Them, We Learn by Doing Them.

For the Things We Have to Learn Before We Can do Them, We Learn by Doing Them.

Quite a long fortune for today’s FortunateBluFrog post. Experience is the greatest teacher and you can’t get experience unless you do things. Such is the case with blogging, you can’t get experience unless you blog. New bloggers who want the quick fix are not going to do well unless they get their hands dirty and start blogging. You might think that you have nothing to blog about, but most likely you do.

Blog About What You Love

There are blogs around from everything to insects to inspiration. If you love something and can’t stop thinking or talking about it then you’ll do well blogging about it. Will you make money doing that? I can’t tell you that. I can’t guarantee that. But I can tell you that if you blog about what you love you’ll earn a fortune beyond money.

How Do I Know This?

I know this because I’ve been blogging about photography, travel, technology and my family. These are topics I truly love. Along the way I’ve made a couple of bucks for my time. But what has made me fortunate has been the friendships I have made, the experiences I have had and the conversations I have had. All of that was because of experience, on the job training. Those were things I needed to learn by doing.

I remember back in 1997 I wanted to learn how to kayak. So I bought a book about kayaking, I read through it and started trying to learn as much as I could about kayaking. However, I knew nothing about kayaking until I got in a boat and started paddling, finally.

What are you going to do today?