Procrastination Poem

The Breakfast of Champions

Take a bowl of delayed gratification
sprinkled with the fruits of opportunities
but handle carefully
lest accomplishments spill over
and some early bird gets the worm
in which case just sleep on it, dream on it
and begin eating the biggest frog
first thing next morning
because that is the breakfast of champions.

What follows is a revised version of a post I made on my now defunct career change site, justfiverules.com. This post’s intent is to help those indie-writers determined to make a success of their writing and publishing adventures.

Longtime blog readers may recall that I have been a fan of mindmapping for over thirty years. My non-fiction books refer to them. Heck, I once created an online course (now unavailable) all about creating incredible goals using mind maps. I continue to mind map but now also experiment with a creative process known as ‘clustering.’ (I wrote a post about it here: clustering-and-the-zen-of-writing.)

In my experience, clustering helps to damp down the influence of a part of the psyche that just loves to rain on the parade ground of success and aspirations. You probably know how it goes. For me, its mental mutterings (which can become annoyingly loud in ‘thought-tones’ at times) that take the form of trite put-downs such as: “You can’t.” “No.” “Grow up. You can’t be serious.” And so on.

However, even though both skepticism and realism are an ideal cognitive combination, that aspect of the psyche I alluded to earlier is so concerned about the ‘survival’ risks of ‘screwing up’ that it tends to deliver fantastic ideas and big goals stillborn; or worse, causes them to be naturally aborted at a very early stage.

In plain English, this amounts to dismissing the very idea of a fulltime indie writer career goal as preposterous and unrealistic. Pay attention to that sort of selftalk often enough and it’s no surprise that many indie writers settle for the status quo and hope for the best.

And this is where the breakfast of champions makes a guest appearance today.

Exercise nine in my ‘Just Five Rules’ (career change) book is titled ‘Hypnotic Goal Setting Unleashed’ and asks readers to playfully focus on what they might be eating for a celebratory breakfast on the very (next) day they achieve their goal. It’s both a fun way to practice entering a light trance state (the same type of trance one might be in when engrossed in a good book or watching a movie) and an introduction to the tension that a desired future state (eating that amazing breakfast) can stimulate and continue to trigger each time the exercise is repeated.

Can you begin to imagine how the breakfast of champions and the business of indie writing and publishing are related

Play with this exercise. Have fun with it.