Do You Have The Drive? Part One

Jun 24, 2009 | No Comments | @andrewmarcec

This brand spanking new series will be a break from the weekly norm of my usual posts.  Instead of this being a review, or professional feeling article, this series will focus on more my weekly efforts to work a full time job to pay the bills, and also pursue my dream of becoming a published author.  As the posts go week by week I will detail writing rules and techniques that help me along the way, things that inspire me and my work, and things that might make you either question my sanity, or question your efforts at achieving your dream.  With that, I present the first installment of Do You Have The Drive?

First off lets look at the title, what exactly does it mean?  There are so many people I’ve encountered in life that say one thing, then turn around and do another.  They will walk around saying, “Oh, what do I do for a living?  Well, I’m an actor!”, sometimes what that means is, “Oh, I want to be an actor, but I just don’t make the time for it while working my day job”.  This type of thinking will get you to be exactly where you are, nowhere.  If you truly want to do something with your life, then you will do anything that it takes to make it, no matter how hard.  Easy to say and hard to do right?  Yes!  This is not an easy feat by any means, and I am no exception to the rule.

I work a full time job in sales in Chicago.  Every Monday-Friday I wake up at 5am, have an hour and a half commute to my office, where I try to sell product to customers in a down economy.  Then, after an eight hour day, I have an hour and a half commute back home from work, dinner, and anywhere from 2-4 hours of free time depending on how wiped out I feel.  Some days it’s incredibly easy to sit down at the computer, turn on episodes of “Family Guy” I’ve seen a million times and bust out some articles.  Other days, my mind wanders, my attention span is short, there is a sleepy haze that fogs my vision, and I question everything I’m doing with my life and going to bed feeling like a failure.  There are ways around this feeling, ways to get yourself to get the job done no matter how you feel.  I’ve detailed only some of many that I use on myself below.

What are some tips and tricks that I use to get myself motivated?

  • Nagging- it sounds like a silly motivation technique that my mom would use as a child to get me to make my bed or take out the garbage, but its a good one.  Eventually I want to stop hearing myself say “you should have written today”, or “you just watched tv and were bored, that time could have been used more wisley”.
  • Guilt Tripping- again a maternal technique I use on myself, but this is more harsh than nagging.  When I guilt trip myself it ususaly is along the lines of, “if you keep slacking off you’ll be just another forgotten nobody”, or “you’re going to be nothing but a loser the rest of your life”.  Though this is a much more extreme way, it works incredibly well.
  • Reading writer bios- this is more of an uplifting technique, it allows you to relate with a writer and boost your spirits with your progress.  Writing takes a long time to really get the wheels spinning, but if you are impatient like me it never goes fast enough.  Reading these bios and seeing that they all had other odd jobs, all took a similar long amount of time before they were published, can really help put me in a better mood.

When my parents and teachers told me I could be anything in the world that I wanted when I grew up, I never had a definite answer and probably said something like “a firetruck”, or “a monkey butler”.  Now that I am older, and I’ve had many twists and turns in life that lead me to places I never thought, I finally discovered what I want to do with my life, write.  This has allowed me to really narrow my focus on life and start to get things organized.  Now when I scrutinize and nag myself, it’s for a reason.

It all comes down to you asking yourself “what do I want out of life?”  Everything you want to achieve is there for the taking, but how bad do you want to work to take it?  Ask yourself that question the next time you sit down to just kill a day, or catch yourself saying “I’m so bored”, could you be using that time for work?  Or are you too afraid to really go for what you want in life?

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