Channel your inner snail

Hello Dear Reader!

Today I want to share one of my favorite Haiku by the legendary Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa.

蝸牛 / そろそろ登れ / 富士の山
katatsumuri / sorosoro nobore / Fuji no yama
snail / slowly slowly climb / Mt. Fuji

There are some slight variations proposed to the translation, but you get the jist of it. (What I find interesting is that the verb “nobore” is the form you use when you’re telling someone to do something. [You] Climb! or in this case: Snail, climb!)

When I have a huge task ahead of me, I often think of this Hiaku and feel comforted. All you have to do is keep putting one foot in front of the other. Making a tiny bit of progress each day is better than no progress. I’ve probably talked about this before, but if you make 1% progress every day, at the end of a year you’ll have made 365% progress! (Or 366% if it’s a leap year, haha!)

This post seems appropriate after my post about my Kanban Board last week. I’ll admit, after that post I got a little grumpy about how little progress I was making. Here we are in MAY, almost half-way through the year and a lot of my tasks haven’t even been started yet. I needed to get my butt in gear and get working ASAP. So I picked one at random and got going. Offering direct sales through my website was something that seemed do-able in a fairly short time frame and is also something I’m really wanting to offer so people have a choice outside The Zon for buying my books. Then when I thought about all the effort it was going to take to make my books available on my website I got even more grumpy.

This task seems simple on the surface. “Post books on website for sale.” That should just take like an hour or two right? Wrong. (Thanks optimism bias and planning fallacy. You guys are jerks.) (I mean, maybe you can get it set up that quickly, but I could not.)

There are a lot of little steps that go into the larger task. I have to take photos of my books and/or format the pictures appropriately for the website AND I have to set up the ecommerce part of my website AND I need to weigh and measure all my books for shipping according to said ecommerce portion of my website AND I need to connect my banking app or Paypal to the website (finances are not my happy place), AND I need to set up all the tax stuff so Uncle Sam gets his cut AND I have to choose my fulfillment option AND I have to weigh and measure all the packaging and calculate shipping AND I need to go count my inventory AND… well, you get the point.

I say all this not to have a pity party, but simply to demonstrate how easy it can be to get overwhelmed if we let ourselves. So I chose to break down the task “Offer Direct Sales from my Website” into several smaller tasks, write them all down, and make an effort to make progress on one of those things when I can. Last weekend I got set up on IngramSpark. (Shudder) Then one evening during the week I measured and weighed all of my books. Today my plan is get all the pictures formatted correctly. When I think of only doing one thing at a time it’s much easier not to feel overwhelmed and also to feel accomplished when I get something knocked out.

Bob will tell you… it’s all about Baby Steps!

But seriously, just take it slow and do one thing at a time, even if it’s something small. Even one small thing means you’re making progress. I find a lot of comfort in that, and I hope you do too.

A while back I remember looking up how many words a day trad published authors tend to write. We all know there are crazy prolific authors like Brandon Sanderson who write like 3000+ words a day. During my search I read an article about how Holly Black posted her word count on social media as she was writing one of her books. Her word count only averaged about 1000 words a day, which many people felt was a small word count for someone writing full time. But she was consistent and 1000 words a day, consistently, gets books done.

Whatever you’re working on that seems insurmountable, just break it down and take some baby steps. A little bit each day gets you closer to your goal. You’re doing great and I believe in you. It’s ok to channel your inner snail as often as you need. Snails may move a little slow compared to some creatures, and that’s ok. They don’t worry about what everyone else is doing and they keep on moving and they get where they are going in their own time.

Till next time dear reader. <3 Tiff