30-Day Persistence Challenge: Passion + persistence = success

"Flaming enthusiasm, backed by horse-sense and persistence, is the quality that most frequently makes for success." - Dale Carnegie

Last week, I came across a great blog post that talked about the power of persistence in bringing your dream to life. The key, it seemed to say, was that you needed both components: Passion and also persistence.

The implication, the so-called Mrs. Micah seems to be saying, is that one without the other is like wood without flint: No fire.

"In an ordinary job, you can survive on inertia," she says wisely. "As a freelancer, you can’t."

Passion

The passion part seems to be getting back to the idea of what motivates you. She writes:

Passion is what keeps you going when you’ve just come off a project that made you feel like a sellout. Passion is what keeps you going when a client stalls on paying or turns out to be difficult to work with. Passion is what keeps you going when a project takes longer than expected and you have to stay up late or give up something fun.

If you can’t find a passion somewhere in your work, then you won’t be able to keep going when you hit the wall. And you will hit the wall. No matter how good you are at what you do, no matter how easy it is, you will always run into things that make you think, if just for a minute, that you don’t want to keep going with your work.

Persistence

The persistence, she says, is how you put your passion into action. It's the marriage of the motivation and the to-do list. It makes sense: Most of us know a freelancer who's brimming with ideas but seems oddly averse to putting those ideas out in the world. Heck: Look in the mirror. Sometimes, that's me. We all go in and out of being able to act on our passions.

Mrs. Micah says:

Persistence is what makes you go out there and find the next project. Persistence is what you need when you keep losing jobs to other bidders. Persistence is the tool that unlocks your freelancing future.

And:

Persistence is what keeps you checking job postings, it’s what helps you network with others in the field when you’d rather just wait for the next person to approach you. I think my biggest failing…or learning opportunity…as a freelancer was not being persistent enough between jobs. I probably could have done more, had less downtime, earned more, and even developed better skills.

I was persistent enough to find new clients and I always made ends meet on the financial side. But if there’s one thing I’d advise freelancers to learn from my experience, it’s to be more persistent.

How do you put your passion into action? The way I do it is with a little prompt a creative coaching friend is always reminding me:

• Ask yourself: What's the smallest step I can take today to move toward that goal?
• Put it on your to-do list.
• Bookend the action by calling a support pal.

How about you? Where does your passion meet your persistence?

Photo by Kecko.

30-Day Marketing Challenge: Should you care about money?

You're a writer. You love words. You might walk around saying "kumquat" because you like the way it pops from your mouth. Or you might look for a way to use "shacking up" in a sentence because it's such a fun and evocative phrase.

But then you think about marketing. The words dry up. The sentences, chalky and anemic, sputter from your fingertips.

Ugh. You hate thinking about money. You hate asking for it worst of all.

Sisters and brothers, I feel your pain. For real.

I spent almost 10 years at newspapers, where I thought advertising, to put a spin on the phrase, was the enemy of the good. Sponsors pulled ads because of articles I wrote. I saw it as a badge of honor. My colleagues and I bragged about it, whispering conspiratorially between assignments.

And now I'm running a challenge to encourage you to market your work and your ideas? What gives?

It wasn't an easy transition for me, from idealistic journalist to freewheeling query queen. But it's amazing how quickly you can grow to love marketing when you have no savings, no prospects and the rent is due. And then I discovered something surprising: Marketing offered its own creative pleasures.

For instance: How to write short. How to grab a reader. How to, simply, get attention.

These are all things I've always loved about writing. I'm a big fan of the cartridge lede. And I might just cop to the fact that I am, as my j-school professor once said about the whole of the journalist race, a "shy egomaniac."

And admit it: There are some stories that get you so jazzed, so giddy, that you can't wait to tell your friends, your editors, and--dare I say it--your clients. That's all a query is.

It's bragging about your great story ideas for fun and profit.

The profit part is no small incentive. I have come to think of it this way:

There's one story idea I've had for two years now. Two years! It's brilliant. I love it. It's compelling and heart-rending and inspiring, and I can't wait to write it. I could probably write it tomorrow for a very small publication that pays 10 cents a word on publication.

I could even write it for free.

But what I want for this story, this creative baby of mine, is a wide audience. I want it to make a difference in as many people's lives as possible. It's not going to do that for 10 cents a word on publication. There's a reason that the big-name publications pay $3 and $4 a word. They have a broad reach and clout. They matter.

So does this story. I want the best for it. It deserves to shine in a bright light. It gets there through me pitching it to a place that's going to pay me well, also.

Here's another fact: The places that pay well? They also tend to have good editors. They care about your copy. They want it to be just as good as you do. You can learn something from them.

The higher-paying clients--that's where the action's at.

That's not to say there aren't some phenomenal editors at smaller publications. And that's not to say that some lower-paying publications don't have a wide reach, especially for niche markets. Aside from all the hard-headed business reasons in the world to market your work, the reason you should care about money is because it's good for your work and your craft.

Money, it turns out, isn't the enemy of the creative after all. Money in freelance writing is a barometer of how much some publications value writing and journalism, and a measure of their capacity to back it up. That's where I want my work and my career to go.

What about you? Does the thought of trying to sell your work mortify you? How do you deal with that?

30-Day Self-Care Challenge: Day 7

Today's surprising self-care goal: Foster my passion.

Here's a shock: My passion is writing, words, journalism and storytelling. The proof is documented as far back as my baby book, in which my mother wrote of my 4- or 5-year-old self, "Little Heather is following me around complaining that what she's writing 'doesn't sound right.'"

In college, I joined the school paper and sank into the comfort of listening to other writers share their favorite word. Who knew other people had favorite words? I had come home.

I became a journalist because I wanted to write every day, but I didn't realize that would often mean covering planning commission meetings, procedural turns of the screw and, in the parlance of the newsroom, "reax" to the State of the Union Address. There's no music there, but hey, it's a living.

So is freelancing. Often I write stories I love, full of real people's lives and how they address the big challenges facing them. But just as often, I write fun, interesting and educational front-of-the-book shorts or service pieces. They aren't why I got into writing, and I know several freelancers who have burned out because they only write those pieces.

Who would have guessed the shot in the arm I needed to get excited about my business again would come from my iPod? I subscribe to literally dozens of podcasts on personal finance, self-improvement, entertainment, cooking and journalism.

Last night, as I was going from friend's house to meeting to home, during the long waits between buses, I found myself captivated.

Do yourself a favor and subscribe to Poynter's Writing/Editing and Writing Tools podcasts.

In Poynter's most recent Writing/Editing podcast, Cleveland Plain Dealer Columnist Connie Schultz described how she found her stories, how she incorporates video and blogging into her work and where she gets her inspiration. It made me want to look for those stories I know I'm missing now. It filled me up with a passion that pushed out the panic about the economy that had overwhelmed me the day before. It helped me focus on what I can control: the stories I seek out, my connection with the brave and articulate sources that are the heart of what I do and the hope that my work can improve people's lives in some small way.

Then I listened to several of several of Roy Peter Clark's Writing Tools podcasts, also available in his book of the same name.

Here are some of my favorites:

* Climb up and down the ladder of abstraction
At the top of the ladder is lofty ideas like "democracy" and "compassion." At the bottom is the utterly concrete, like "pop tops" and "red-and-black sneakers covered in a fine film of city dirt."

In the middle is the dregs of bureaucratic language--"single-family mixed use development," for instance. Or "full-time equivalent."

* Choose the number of elements in a list.
This fascinated me: Use one to emphasize what you have, two to compare and contrast and three to imply a sense of wholeness and completion. Four and more is just a list. In this way, he says, the mathmatics of language make three greater than four. Dig that, people! Now you know why writers are bad at math.

* Know when to back off and when to show off
When you're writing about something where the drama is already built in--say, writing about a person dealing with a life-threatening illness or the death of a family member--let your writing be understated. Let the story shine. If you're writing about something frivolous, let the writing shine.

There's an implied symmetry there, a balance that appeals to me.

What's your passion and how can it feed your soul today?