Aspiration and Diligence

A friend mentioned in passing Bill Gates’ blog, and it looks like everything I’ve been looking for in a book blog. Which means I’ve finally found a blog to aspire to emulate. I’ve been trawling the internet looking for book blogs, but none had really inspired me yet. I knew that Gates read a lot, but it hadn’t occurred to me that he might have a blog. I’m really excited to start crawling through it. But it has me thinking about my aspirations more generally. I’ve been pretty derailed in the past, so it’s only recently that I’m starting to sit down and really think about these things again. What I’m seeing in my future kind of comes in two parts; I want to own my own business, and I want to write serious books. I probably want to write computer books, which means it would make sense for my business to be in computers as well, but beyond that I haven’t narrowed it down much. It’s a start though.

And while having aspirations is great, they don’t mean much if you don’t have the diligence to follow through on those goals. I heard a quote by Benjamin Franklin today, “diligence is the mother of good luck.” It’s like that quote about fortune favoring the prepared mind. The people who look to be so lucky, so fortunate, probably didn’t actually just stumble into their good lives. Getting to where you want to be takes a lot of hard work. I try to really apply myself, but sometimes it’s hard to stay focused. I’d been taken a break from reading computer books for the past couple months because I’d just kind of gotten burnt out on them, but I finally picked one up again today, Sams Teach Yourself Swift in 24 hours. We’ll see where that takes me. I have some app ideas that I might try to turn around and build into that business that I want to have, and picking up Swift is the first step towards trying them out.

Well, I let my life get pretty far out of whack there for a while, but I’m slowly crawling back out of the hole I’d dug. Just in time for Christmas, what? Well, it should be a relaxing time. I have family flying out here and then we’re all going up to Mt. Shasta for a few days, which I’ve been meaning to visit since moving back out here. Hope you all have wonderful holidays!

The glass dragons I mentioned in the last post