A freelance writer speaks about the secret to success. His message, avoid avoidance.
A journalist and author I know sent me the link to a blog posting yesterday. The subject line to his email was, "Something for both us." He was right.
This succinct and compelling blog posting was written by Dan Baum (pictured to the left). Dan has worked as a staff writer for The New Yorker, as well as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, The Asian Wall Street Journal, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He is the author of Citizen Coors: An American Dynasty and Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure. He has written numerous articles for such national magazines as The New York Times Magazine, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and Wired. In other words, he's a successful freelance writer.
HIs blog posting, Avoid Avoidance, speaks to one of my key messages in this Don't Delay blog - just get started!
Dan gets to the heart of the matter writing "delay is deadly." Here's a quote from his blog where he describes one case of avoidance in his work,
"And then, like one of those cartoons where a light bulb appears above the character’s head, I simply picked up the phone and started making the calls. Once I started, it wasn’t nearly so bad. The whole thing took an hour. There’d been nothing to it. Once I gave up the quest for a way to avoid the task, actually doing it was a snap. Not only that, it made all the other reporting for the story go more smoothly because I didn’t have this great, onerous, guilt-producing ordeal hanging over me" (emphasis added).
I think you'll enjoy it: Read Dan's blog posting here.
