What’s the freakin’ point! Get to it already! We are vury vury busy these days and we don’t have time to dilly-dally around and spend precious extra seconds to hear what you have to say. I want to get the core guts of the idea right up front. I want to know if I can space out and move on to other things, or lock my focus in for more and more in-depth understanding… and then decide to bail out before the punchline comes anyway…

In this very first paragraph of my blog today, I express something that has been bugging me about my own writing or my own way of being as I have observed it to be, for awhile now. I notice that I spend a lot of words on here each week to unfold my ideas. I eat up several inches of digital real estate every Friday morning, with usually over a thousand words. I do try to have one main clear point in each of these blogs. I wonder why I employ so many letters, spaces and punctuation to do it?

There are three men that I read regularly in my email. Steve Chandler, Seth Godin and Dusan Djukich. All three of these guys send ‘blog’ style email messages that can improve or impact or at least cause some mental intrigue in my life. I get tons of emails, every day, spam mostly, yet I stop to read their words. They tend to write from the heart. They speak clearly and powerfully. They give useful information, that you can employ to author transformation in your own life. They use few words.

In the same amount of text that you have read from me so far today, these three guys might have each made a profound point, with little fuss. I recommend them to you.

For me though, I must enjoy the flowery arrangement of syllables and poetic rhythms. I seem to want to play with the language, and exercise my limited primitive vocabulary. I waste your precious seconds and beat around the bush. Sorry for that.

Truly some days, I don’t know what my point is, until I have written several hundred words. I sometimes need to clear out the mental junk, and let the rusty waters run before something fresh comes through the pipe.

Usually though, I am avoiding and putting off and trying to butter things up. It is weakness. It is excuses. It lacks confidence and clarity. I could just say, exactly what it is that I mean to say, in just a few words. I don’t need all this extra gar-bage in between.

What is my point? What purpose did I intend to convey? How powerfully will I chose to express this message?

You can measure these things by how quickly and deeply these words cut into the juicy idea I am serving up. Usually it’s a bunch of preparation, and very little main course.

The first step to making some changes in my world, are to notice and to be aware of the way things are. Then I can decide if I want to ever so slightly adjust my course of action. The tiniest movements today, can lead to colossal distances in the location of some future arrival.

If I am avoiding the inevitable, it is wasting everyone’s time. Get to it. Let’s get it over with and move on to the next challenge. Placating and being passive aggressive, is a rubbery and challenging existence. Boundaries set firmly, give us strength to exercise against.

Always the best path between point A and B, is a Straight Line, according to the most clear and most concise truth-teller I know, Dusan Djukich.

Maybe next week, you will only have one pair-a-giraffe to read instead of many. Maybe it will be even better yet. Maybe I’ll fail and flail around, making you endure lots of aimless words and not-so-fancy phrasing…

Till then, Take Care 🙂

Sincerely,

Aaron Nichols

In case my blog post today, didn’t help you or jumpstart any creative inner monologues, here are some from the fellas… And they won’t take you long to read 🙂

Steve Chandler:

 The problem with that popular approach is that there is no true maintaining. If you are not going forward, you are going backward. Without learning to grow, you are slipping back down a slippery slope to powerlessness.

 I need to know how to learn….to learn how to expand what you can do. Learn how to get stronger and bolder. Lose face. Suffer humiliation, because that’s where true, true strength grows from. When I try something new.

 “Every act of conscious learning,” noted professor of psychiatry Dr. Thomas Szasz, “requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one’s self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily; and why older persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all.”

 

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