Are you sure getting pooped on by a pigeon is lucky? 

Would you like me to breakdown the sheer number of steps I had to take this morning to be standing beside a rubbish bin at Robina town Centre in exactly the right place to be pooped – dramatically – on by a pigeon?

I’m always quoting the old Scottish proverb, what is for you won’t go by you so I can only believe that poop was especially for me.

I mean, Einstein always said we have the choice to believe that either nothing in this universe is a miracle or everything is…

All I can think is that pigeon really wants me to buy a house in Tuscany.

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My husband told me about a young comedian YouTube. I won’t share his name or his work here because humour is subjective and some of his material is… definitely subjective, but I will talk about his work ethic.

Put very simply this guy just kept going even when he had no audience. Like pretty much everyone who has ever achieved anything of value in this world he had his own reasons, an intrinsic motivation, for making comedy.

And eventually he found his audience. Some of his videos went viral and he got a Netflix special. Someone pretending to be him even followed me on Substack last week.

You just have to have that inner drive to get anywhere. It can’t be about money or likes or applause if you want it to last and feel good.

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I’ve been listening to the audiobook of where the light gets in by Ben Crowe. It’s very “sporty” and the emphasis on his sporting clients almost made me put the book down.

If I wasn’t listening to the audiobook, I probably would have. I bought the paperback and I’m sure my husband will enjoy it but listening to an audiobook hits differently, especially when the author is narrating.

This book is all about mindset, it’s importance for achievement especially in the sporting arena, and how essential it is to have intrinsic and personal motivation.

Achievement in the sporting world is probably a lot more obvious than achievement in the Arts but goal setting and the subjectivity of what achievement looks like is fairly universal.

Just as “get a book deal“ is largely out of our control other than putting in the Work querying writing a good book building a platform etc.

I listened yesterday to the latest Creative Penn podcast with Anne Lamont and Neal Allen. Anne reiterated what she says in her fantastic and seminal writing craft book Bird by Bird, that you had better care about your writing because really nobody else does.

Here’s Anne Lamott, from the Creative Penn podcast:

“Here’s the thing: nobody cares if you write, if you hate it, or if you’ve given up. It might be that you would find your creative soul, your imaginative, creative life force at ecstatic dancing on Saturdays in the town park, which we offer here in our tiny town. It might be that you’re a painter. My best friend started painting several years ago and she’s incredible.

If you want to write, the horrible thing is that you just have to keep setting aside a pod. I keep using the word pod because that’s how I get any work done at all—an hour. Now, Neal and I can both tell you: you set aside an hour and that will give you maybe 40 minutes of actual writing. And we’ll give the Booker Prize winners 40 minutes of actual writing. You have two hours and that gives you an hour and 15 minutes. That’s how it works.

If you care and if you long to be a writer, to immerse yourself in the writing life—I hate to sound like a Nike ad—but you just do it.

One thing that gets in everybody’s way is this fantasy of getting published and how if they get published, it will be like the world has stamped “validated” on their parking ticket and their self-esteem will now be much, much better and more consistently excellent than it ever was before. We can tell you: we’ve got this book that’s out, brand new, and it makes you much more insecure and much more anxious than you were before it got published.”

Now that’s food for thought…

I haven’t given up the idea of getting a trad. publishing deal but I’m returning to the mindset I came into this thing with. I had just left a job I loved that almost destroyed my mental health and I was adamant that I would never write to market, I’d never again paint to match the drapes. So once again, I am writing what I want to write and if one day, if it is indeed for me, a publisher won’t go by me, just like getting pooped on by a pigeon.