That second article I promised

I'll get back to food soon, definitely. But this close to Christmas, it hurts even to think of it so I'm avoiding the topic, and pretending that it can be ignored indefinitely. So bear with me for a few days until I've finished sweating out all that turkey and the chocolate coins have all been finished, and I will get back to the topic in hand.

In my previous, slightly apologetic post, I mentioned my dislike for New Years Resolutions and promised two articles that had prompted me to post, both of which were much more inspiring than a change in date.

The second can be found here, and was linked by a friend of mine on Facebook. It's a long read, and is deliberately confrontational at times, but I think that's awfully fun. If I agreed with everything that I saw on the internet, I would probably read it marginally less often, after all, and probably get more stuff done - which is what the article is talking about.

Not that the internet, specifically, stops me from doing things, but it certainly doesn't help. The central idea is summed up in a quote that I probably made up, but I'm sure I heard somewhere: many people talk about being something, but so few people talk about doing something. When I watch things like X Factor (not that I do, obviously, but I do read a number of Facebook posts that reconfirm that it's a Bad Thing), you hear people talking about how they want to be a singer. But you don't become a singer by thinking about being a singer, you become that by singing. A lot. You don't become anything without doing that thing. A lot.

This resonated with me because I'm so guilty of it. I have decided over the last couple of years that I have wanted to be:

• a writer
• a sailing skipper
• a full time musician
• a marketing person
• a live music promoter
• a cooking instructor
• a football coach
• a project manager
• a website designer
• a business man
• a journalist
• an academic

But the important fact is that I haven't done any of those things, I've wanted to be those things. The idea of being a writer is a lovely one, but do you know how many words I have written since this blog was last published in September 2012? 

Not zero, but it might as well have been. I am not a writer because I do not write.

Time to change that? I think so. After all, this post is 445 words long, which is more than my output for the whole of 2013, so that's a start.