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Prologue: Procrastination

I have a confession to make.

I first decided to start a blog in October 2003. Long time ago, I know. Eighteen months have passed, each day ending like the day before – me going to sleep thinking “Yeah, I should really start my blog tomorrow.” Here's a quick recap of my blog's turtley timeline.

November 2003: I signed up for a Typepad account. Paid $5/month for nothing. Guess I justified it by thinking I was locking up my domain name so no one else could take it. That was a ridiculous waste of money -- how many Ian Ybarras are there? And how many other blogging setups (Blogger, for starters) could I use if someone took ianybarra.typepad.com.

July 2004: Visited one of my heroes, Seth Godin, and talked about my aspiration to be a speaker and author when I grow up. One of his suggestions was to start a blog and write enough real and "unsafe" stuff to start attracting an audience. He warned that it would take a lot of work. I said I was glad to be on the right track with the idea and that I would start soon. And I did. Sort of.

August 2004: The plan was to post some old columns I wrote for MIT’s student newspaper. Then I'd start writing regularly. Did the former but not the latter.

January 2005: The ol’ New Year’s resolution got me to get a Movable Type blog set up and all 9 or 10 of my posts transferred over to this site. Then I fiddled around with this site’s oh-so-very-complicated(whatever) format while procrastinating some more.

March 2005: Finally, around March 15 I set a deadline for myself of April 1. Yes, on April 1 I would begin writing on this thing. I even told my friend Owen about my April 1 deadline and made some corny joke about "no more fooling around" because of April 1 being April Fool's Day when he asked about linking to my writing from his new site. Sure enough, April 1 came and went, just like the 500+ days before it.

Perhaps I’ve finally learned my lesson that, as they say in the book Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, execution is "the missing link between aspirations and results."*

I could have all the ideas and dreams in the world, but they'll be all for naught if I don’t do anything about them.

And, if I do something cool, it will be rewarded. Case in point: My friend Ramit started a personal finance blog (IWillTeachYouToBeRich.com) last summer and it's already been featured in the Wall Street Journal.

I'm not doing this to get in the Wall Street Journal. I'm doing it to share my ideas on how people can find and do what they really want to do when they grow up -- work that's fun, rewarding, and remarkable. Hopefully, I'll help a few people along the way. But after 18 months of procrastination, the important thing is that I'm doing it at all.

*If you still prefer procrastination to execution for today, I recommend getting this to hang above your desk. At least you'll get a laugh before feeling crappy about not doing what you know can.

Posted by Ian Ybarra on 13 April 2005

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