Limitless…Or How to Overcome Burnout and Become Successful Blogger
Limitless – that was the movie I was watching last night. Extremely engaging, interesting, deep, fresh… I recommend everybody to watch it, if you haven’t seen it so far. I have been blogging for almost two years now and there are still moments where I find myself staring at the computer, unable to concentrate on a new post. That was the state of the main hero, Eddie Morra, a writer, in the beginning of the movie. He couldn’t find even a couple of words to start his book, for which he already signed a contract. Then appears his brother-in-law, a druggie, and offers him a new, revolutionary pills which stimulate the mind to work at 100 percent…
Now he is not anymore a looser. Finished his book in five days, he is ready to conquer new heights and becomes a number one figure on Wall Street, earning every day millions of dollars. But…. as always in this life you have to pay for what you get. Eddie has paid his own price for the success in the form of horrible side effects, which eventually led him to murder.
Why in fact I am talking about this movie right now? The thing is that lately, I feel absolutely overwhelmed with things, which previously brought me only joy and satisfaction. I blog now almost every day, trying to promote my posts here and there, juggling with Facbook, Pinterest, Google+ like with balls, looking at my statistics and expecting a sudden and rapid growth. Then I look at other successful blogs, see how many comments and likes they have and amount of people visiting their sites every day and get even more depressed. There are multiple questions flying in my mind : “Am I good enough?”, “Is anybody reading my blog?”, “Does anybody, in fact, needs what I am writing about?”. And despite my statistics shows that there are thousands of people visiting my blog every month, self dissatisfaction is still there. Instead of posting twice a week, I started to write 3 and then 4 and then 5 articles, wanting my blog to grow faster and faster and faster. Now I feel really demotivated, tired and depressed. Know the feeling? Come on board – this is called “Blogger Burnout”.
Recently, I’ve thought about it a lot and came to the conclusion that the problem is not only in me. The roots are much more deeper. All our generation Y, to whom I belong has extremely high expectations. We want everything and right now. We don’t want to crawl on our knees on the staircase to success – we want to run gallop on it! We believe that we are so exceptional, so clever, so talented that all we need to do is just open a shop, run a website, start a blog and we will get millions of customers and fans all over the world. And then comes the truth – there is only one Mark Zuckerberg in our generation and unfortunately he was already born. All others have to sweat, yen and work hard to achieve something in this life.
More fuel to the fire adds… Social Media, in fact. This is the real scourge for all people, as instead of concentrating on developing our own talents and skills, we are loosing time looking at someone else’s life, and getting jealous for what John, Charlie, Oliver, with whom we studied, were able to achieve and we are still there where we are. The big truth is that Social Media is a BIG LIE… I haven’t seen a person who would say about his failures on Facebook – looking at my friends’ updates I get an impression is that their life is a sequence of promotions, new jobs, achievements, vacations on luxury resorts and fantastic parties. And then I start to run even faster to at least have them in a field of view… Finally, I believe several years or perhaps decades will pass and I will understand that in this race of life I forgot to actually live.
My husband told me today that I completely lost my mind because of my blog – I am always working on it and when I am not working, I am always talking about it. He said that he is scared that he might lose me in this virtual world. His words were like a red alarm light for me. And I decided that I really DO need to change something about my life and approach to my work.
My big conclusion today was that we are not limitless (unless we take a magic drug). Everything – our body, our health, our mind has a limit. And instead of overwhelming me every day in order to meet my own high expectations, I should rather think on how to actually enjoy what I do…
That’s why I am planning to take vacation at the end of the week. I am going to a countryside, where there will be no Internet, Facebook, WordPress and even my laptop. I will be going to the river, forest, gardens, I will be sunbathing and reading fiction, I will be relaxing and doing nothing. When I return, completely relaxed and rejuvenated, I will start crawling again on my ladder to success…
