I love Nantucket in September. The weather is perfect, the crowds are gone, and the Nantucket Project comes to town. This is a conference that happens every year with the “goal to exchange challenging ideas, build strong relationships and share ground-breaking insights that build a better tomorrow and unlock the power of human potential”. AKA a lot of extremely talented, successful, and passionate people come to share their story. This year was another huge success and while there were so many amazing presenters I was most excited to see Seth Godin.
In college, I remember having to read a number of his books and watch some of his recorded talks. I always loved how he spoke and clearly delivered a message. The talk he gave was brief but he gave a lot of people some unique ideas to consider. After listening to him speak I felt that I should share some of his ideas with you.
The first topic he brought up was the idea that there is no such thing as writers block. WHAT! As a blog writer I am so familiar with sitting down looking at a blank page and having no clue where to start. His point was that there is no such thing as writers block only bad habits and the inability to deal with fear. The idea being that the only thing keeping someone from writing was the fear that it wouldn’t be good and the habit of only writing what we consider to be good. He encourage the best way to become good at anything is to simply do it and do it repeatedly.
Going along with this topic was the idea that we need to “anchor up”. We often see an anchor as something that holds us down but Mr Godin encouraged that audience to flip their view point of an anchor. When he says to “anchor up” he means to make commitments that will force us to work and eventually help reach our goal. For example, If you want to start running and be really consistent with it, sign up for a 5k so it will force you to follow through.
Towards the end of his talk, he brought up Nike and their slogan “Just Do It”. Mr. Godin said that Nike got it wrong. Its not Just Do It. It is Merely Do It. Merely try every single day to reach your goal. Merely try to write a blog post, make a video, dry a picture. You cannot be expected to create something great your first time, but if you wake up every day and merely make the effort to do better than you did the day before you can become successful.
After a weekend of huge success stories and brilliant ideas and people, this was a refreshing and encouraging talk. It brought it down to earth and reinforced the idea that you don’t have to be great you just merely need to try consistently and aim to do better.
I’ll leave you with the last bit of advice that he gave us.
You are successful, but will you chose to matter?
xx Kathryn
Positively Kathryn 