Have you noticed that people who talk about doing something are rarely the people who do it?
For example, a friend of mine from many years ago would always talk very enthusiastically about these fantastically promising schemes he had cooked up which would make him rich. None of them ever can more than three feet away from the launch pad, and I'm sure none of them have yet. (One of them was apparently a shop selling door handles...)
But people I know who are successful, are people who just quietly put in a ton of energy and hours on something, it builds up and it works. When they talk, they talk about hobbies or movies or whatever.
Perhaps a very typical example is writing a novel. It's something that many dream about, but it's much harder than they think. And the guy who actually is producing a novel two thousand words per day, day in day out, is not the guy who will fill your ears about the great novel he will write. The guy who does that is the dreamer.
Perhaps it is because talking about something is a peripheral activity. And when you are somehow blocked from the central activity, you'll be pushed out into peripheral activities. For instance, in periods where I'm not very productive photographically, I'm obsessing about cameras. When I'm actually photographing, I'm not very concerned with them, I just use the one I have.
4 comments:
You only have ONE camera? For some reason I expected your floor to be carpeted with old cameras. The place littered with lenses and bodies the way most peoples places are littered with pens and scraps of paper.
You have killed my illusion.
So what do you believe the talker can do to resist his peripheral urge to talk instead of do? It is a valid question. Do you believe that such a person only dreams but in reality has no ability or at least aptitude? Or is it as simple as mental laziness or some other hidden emotional anchor?
"a friend of mine from many years ago would always talk very enthusiastically about these fantastically promising schemes he had cooked up which would make him rich."
I wonder... how many people are there who DON'T know somebody like that around them? A relative of mine was supposed to become a millionaire by selling socks to Saddam Hussein's army. Really.
So I read your post earlier this week and thought "I'll be in Sunnyvale on Thursday, I'll swing by "Weird stuff" and buy a Mac, they're on $25, and I'll get an ITX motherboard from Frys on the way home.
Well, breakfast in the East Bay took me till 11am, so I only just got to Mountain View for lunch at twelve. The 90 minutes I'd allotted for lunch ran to 2.5 hours, and when I dropped someone off at their office where I used to work I poked my nose in to "borrow a cup of sugar" and left there a 5pm, just in time for a dinner date. Dinner turned into a stroll, dinner, stroll coffee, then our significant others finally called our cell phones just before 8pm, and we both had to rush home.
I guess a whole day of talking (except the 2 hours driving) stopped me doing.
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