I love to plan. I love to pack for trips. I love to organize ideas and make sense of things. Unfortunately, none of these things matter if I never actually do something. Packing a bag for a trip to an exotic locale is pointless if I never get on the plane. Organizing ideas isn’t particularly helpful if the resulting information doesn’t contribute to something actually happening.

Rekindling this blog has been a stressful, complicated, ugly mess. I’ve scribbled notes all over giant sheets of paper in my office trying to figure out how to make everything fit. I’ve laid waste to pages and pages from my trusty junior legal pads. I’ve had a thousand brilliant ideas at 11PM, stayed up far to late exploring them, and then ditched them as nonsense after waking up the next morning.

Questions have swirled in my brain for weeks. Who is my audience? How will I connect with them? What specifically will I write about? How does the writing intersect with my business, Date-Line Digital? How can I leverage the legitimate intersections to create a win-win for both properties? What will the design look like? But every answer that I came across brought two new questions with it.

And so I had a decision to make: I can continue to plan this thing until I feel like it’s just right, or I can start doing the actual work of sharing meaningful content while I work out the final details.

Like any major project launching a blog can have a thousand moving parts that need to work in concert. Or, it can happen in about 15 minutes when someone sets up an account and just starts sharing. I envy people who can just show up and start telling their story. I’m crippled by a fear of execution that invites me to stay in the planning and organizing stages as long as possible. So I decided this morning that today would be my last day of planning and, come hell or high water, I would start sharing content by tomorrow.

At the end of the day this blog is for doers. People who, somehow, make things happen. I am one of those people, but it’s a discipline for me. I’m going to share more about discipline in an upcoming post, but the short version is that for some of us the doing happens while we drag a part of us along kicking and screaming. And that’s okay. Whether it is a natural tendency, or something we have to choose, changing the world requires that we act. I’m tired of thinking about empowering people with this blog, I want to actually do it.

What about you? What are the things that prevent you from moving forward on ideas you care about?

THIS TINY EMPIRE is presented by Date-Line Digital Printing who specializes making things better by helping you communicate effectively with your audience using print and other technologies.