Get to work. Make your life.

Waiting at a stoplight to make a left-hand turn, I was stunned at the progress made on the new community college building on the corner. Three weeks ago, I swear it was just a pile of dirt, and now here it was three stories high, with a roof on it and everything.

"Holy Shit," I said to the steering wheel. "That happened fast."

As I drove by though, taking in all the hardhatted workers and machines and tools, I realized that probably the speed with which that building is going up only seems fast to me because it’s taking place in a part of the county I don’t visit often, so the progress is startling. Then again, it has only been a few weeks, so it actually is happening fast, and systematically. And there’s a reason for that.

Those people have a plan.

The building of that particular edifice is no accident. Very little to nothing about it is random or spontaneous. Nobody is sitting around waiting for a muse or for inspiration. Nope. Everything’s timelined, working back from a deadline, with calendared measurable deliverables.

Oh yeah, there’s a plan.

Because that’s how things HAPPEN for the most part. Lots of us have ideas, great ideas some of them, but the ones that come to something, guess what?

There’s a plan.

And then there’s action.

So if I’m really serious about the ebook I want to write over the next 4 months, then I know I’ll be best served to pick a done-date and start working backward, making myself milestones along the way. And then I better announce what I’m doing – this building will be open for classes in Fall 2014, for example – and get to executing.

Accomplishment is not an accident. It’s work. Good work.

This shouldn't have come as any kind of surprise to me, right, with my front-row seat on the industriousness, the purposefulness of bees, always working, always making. But sometimes I forget that I, too, can harness that same drive, that same planny resoluteness to Get Shit Done.

Time to make like a bee.

By the time I drive past that particular corner again a few weeks from now, that building will likely be completely finished, students filing in, taking their places at brand-new desks lit by brand-new lights hung on brand-new ceilings. They’ll be learning inside what was once just a plan, on paper.

If I can devote myself to my own work with the same singularity, in a few month I too will be sitting inside something new, something of my own making, the cozy little building of author.

Idea. Plan. Action. Done.

Whaddya waiting for? #gettowork #makeyourlife

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