I had me an epiphany

I tweeted this today:

Quit obsessing about the skills you don’t have and focus on the ones you do have.

I’ve been giving myself a really hard time lately because I can’t do all the things I’d like to. I’m a great piano player – I used to teach it – but I suck butt at playing guitar even though I’d love to play better.

I love to mess around with code on my websites and there are certain aspects of it that I’m pretty good at, but I can’t design a whole website from scratch even though I’d like to.

I love to cook and bake, and making dishes with fresh ingredients is something that makes me really happy, but I couldn’t grow an herb garden if my life depended on it.

So what does this crap have to do with blogging or running a website?

Well, if you’ve been at it for any length of time, you’ll know that it requires an insane amount of work to be even a little bit successful. There are so many aspects to it that it’s impossible for one single person to do all of them well. (Yay for virtual assistants!)

I got to thinking today – which can be a dangerous thing – and wondered why I’m so worried about all the things I can’t do well and decided to focus more on the things that I do very well and will now spend more time doing them even better.

Worrying about the things we can’t do is a colossal waste of time.

If you can’t do something, you have a few options:

• You can hire someone else to do it, or trade services with them.
• Just don’t do it and leave it unfinished. I’m great at that.
• Learn how to do it.

Each solution poses its own problem.

1. Hiring someone can be expensive. Trading services with someone can take up a lot of time.
2. Leaving a task unfinished means loose ends that should be tied up. In a business, this could mean bad things.
3. Learning how to do it yourself can be extremely stressful and time consuming.

I bet you are expecting the perfect workaround at this point. Guess what. I don’t have one. I’m going to cop out and say that you have to choose which solution is the best for you. Ha!

I personally like to do a healthy balance of all three. I’ll get someone else to do the really difficult stuff that I just don’t have the skills/time for. I’ll leave the tasks that aren’t really important or beneficial to my blogs. I’ll figure out how to do the little things that I should probably know how to do anyway which usually saves me time, frustration, and money down the road.

The main thing here is not to have unreasonable expectations. Don’t assume you can do everything by yourself. Don’t feel bad that you can’t do something that others are naturally gifted at.

Instead, pinpoint your strengths and the things you’re great at and use that to your advantage.

RT @cassiegermsheid: "I had me an epiphany"