Purpose: Already Yours

Last Sunday, I heard an encouraging, reassuring message that I had heard before but couldn’t help but grin and listen attentively for a refresher course. The topic was “Creating Multiple Revenue Streams” – a valuable topic that no one can’t afford to pay attention to, regardless of social status. The points presented were simple and practical for anyone to understand. However, those points mean nothing if one simply believes that some unnatural occurrence is going to suddenly bring about thousands of dollars in their life. The fact of life is this: We all, at one point or another, struggle with taking control of our in-born purpose.

IsShouKenMei Blog: 100K Visitors

There have been so many transformations within myself, this blog’s appearance, and the content I produce that people continue to be drawn to that it seems almost impossible to pinpoint them all. However, despite all of those facts, the truth is that this blog, in and of itself, is a physical example of what it means to exist according to “a heartfelt, relentless effort” or, as it means in Japanese, isshoukenmei. So, instead of just bragging about the present, I will share past entries that I have written over the years that will hopefully reflect why the ISKM blog has a reason to be celebrated.

Behind the smile lies…

There’s nothing like someone working harder and being more progressive-minded than you to realize how far off course you’ve strayed from your own big goals. It’s been pretty difficult to retain my focus as of late, but that’s really nothing new. However, it’s when I do that I feel more inclined to write about what I have been doing and doing about it.

Aiming to become a professional voice actor still is firmly engrained in my mind. Though at the beginning of this month, I had to cancel my paid account at Voices.com to minutely offset my dwindling savings and loss of my full-time status on my job that happened around two months ago. Paying the bills is priority, and that $30 I was putting out had to take a back seat. Wasn’t able to do much with it anyway. Despite that, my amateur voice work continues on, and the non-amateur work I’m involved in moves forward. It’s just not time yet I guess.

EtherFuture remains a static entity – the worse possible state a website could be in – with only periodic blog entries by me projected to no one. If nothing else, it’s a diary of sorts to keep track of where we are. There are projects in progress, but the site has yet to be completed. It’s no surprise to a web producer like me that we haven’t received not one e-mail. If nothing else, I’m looking forward to Thanksgiving & Christmas, as those are prime points where I can quit being worked & do my own thing. I want to at least give EF a chance to prosper.

Thanks to my boss assigning me the task of starting a WordPress blog for a client, I’ve finally been pushed into learning MySQL while being forced to overcome my irrational my fear of developing a WordPress template. By doing so, I can now test out everything I’ve wanted to do with EF’s rushed blog launch in order to make a client’s final product the best it can be. Basically, it’s three birds with one stone, as everything I learn I can apply to mine and I have three more skill sets to add on as I experiment beyond that.

Dance of Heart has been going well. I have gradually started feeling guilty about Murat busting his butt just to put out one issue a week. The only thing that is not making me lose sleep over it is that he is enjoying working on it. I didn’t want it to end up in a position like this, but I know he’s doing the best he can. As the writer, I tend to feel quite worthless to the whole process even if his art is guided by my script.

Personally, it’s been tough trying to get my resume in order and decide just what the next move should be. It’s not that I’m not confident, but with so many directions and priorities, disorientation to some degree is almost a certainty. Financial stability is also something that has taken a lot of willpower and prayer to not break under. I’m glad I can be encouraged by the actions of a select few to keep moving forward, even when my feet start to drag.

No dream can be realized without “four hands” after all. Who else will be willing to journey with me? Who knows. All I know is that I have something I need to make a reality. I’m not stopping for anyone, no matter how distant I have to become because when one of my dreams explode into reality, many people are going to be impacted in some way by it. To me, that’s worth the pain I feel for a time now…

Are You Trying Too Hard?

Many of us, including myself, find ourselves trying too hard to be good. Not just being “good people,” but doing good deeds, doing good work, etc. Often times, it’s the people who don’t think about the good they are doing that wind up doing the most good. So maybe, many of us should quit trying too hard to rise up to something that we already know we can achieve in time.

Trying too hard to meet expectations that I have set for myself is one thing that I struggle with. I’m always striving towards something, hoping that I can see myself take another proverbial step towards attaining it. Though I am happy to say that I no longer am driven by the expectations of others, the saying that “we are our own worst critic” comes to mind every time. As an overambitious perfectionist who comes from a slightly below average family, I clearly had to change much of myself to overcome circumstances to get to where I am now.

How do you know you’re trying too hard? For me personally it’s when:

• I am telling myself that something needs to get done.
• I’m stressing over the fact that nothing was accomplished instead of taking proper note of what was.
• I am easily distracted (a very big one for me.)
• I realize I am too paralyzed to make progress.

While it’s not easy to relax and become one with the flow of time and progress, placing too much emphasis on any one thing is just as deterrent to one’s aspirations towards a lofty goal. Though my isshoukenmei lifestyle demands that I put a heartfelt effort into everything that I do, there is a point where we all just need to take a step back, assess ourselves and the tasks before us, and just quit trying to force our way through the door.

With a gradual, controlled effort on our part, we could very well discover that the door may have already been unlocked. We just had to not assume we had to try so hard to open it.

I certainly want to master the art of opening more doors to my destiny without so much stress. What about you?