Regret for wasted time is more wasted time
Charlotte Booth • 13 December 2022
Identify wasted time
We've all done it. Had loads of plans for a Saturday and then realised it was already 4pm and you hadn't achieved any of them - even if you kept saying to yourself, " I must do ..." . Time is a fickle master and can move at different speeds.
All of us use the excuse, "I don't have time", to explain why we haven't done something or worse why we can't do something that we claim is one of our dreams.
I meet lots of people who say, “I want to write a book, but I don’t have time.” However, they are often the same people who will talk about the great show they binge-watched on Netflix or tell me about the day they spent wandering around the shops buying things they don’t really need.
Now don't get me wrong, I do all these things too - claim I am too busy then watch four episodes of Stranger Things. And sometimes that is exactly what we need to do with our time.
But we shouldn't use time - or lack of it - as an excuse.
Everyone has 168 hours a week.
What you achieve in those hours is down to organisation, prioritisation and desire.
You will always find the time to do the things you absolutely want to do.
Take writing a book for example. Many people think you need to be writing for six hours a day to produce a book. But you don't. You can write a book in 10 minutes a day if that is all the time you have. It will just take you longer, of course, to finish it.
If you do want to write a book and believe you don’t have time, look at your day and see where you could carve an hour out – just one hour. This could be your lunch break, or just after dinner instead of watching TV or even getting up an hour earlier. Maybe your partner loves to watch Strictly or Top Gear and you don't so rather than sitting watching it anyway, use that time to write. Or perhaps you can spare three slots of 20 minutes – it all adds up.
There are creative ways to find time and you will always find time to do things you really want to do. If you genuinely can’t find one hour a day or even in a week then you probably don’t really want to write a book.
If, however, you do want to do it, and don’t want to regret it later in life, perhaps I can help you get started. I offer a three-month mentoring programme to help you kickstart your book. In that time we create an extensive plan, a realistic writing schedule and I guide on writing style, formatting and direction. Why not take the first step towards your dream and contact me right now! It will literally take you a minute to drop me an email. Just one little minute.
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There is nothing more amusing than checking out mediaeval artistic renditions of lions and other heraldic creatures. These beasts, grimacing and gurning are a strange juxtaposition of human, animal and demon and as far from the cute image of Alex from the Madagascar franchise or in fact a real lion as you could possibly get. There are three main reasons mediaeval lions are so ‘bad’ and un-representational; The artists were following a very tight brief. Some of the artists may never have seen a lion, and were following the descriptions they were given. These lions were representing heraldic principals of bravery, nobility and authority; all very human characteristics. When viewed through this lens it becomes more understandable why they look the way they do, but they are still ‘not right’ and not a great tool for learning about lions. Generative AI is very similar to an uninformed but talented mediaeval artist. There is a element of intelligence but at the end of the day it is following a brief, with no actual ‘knowledge’ of the thing it is producing. As an example, if you prompt your generative AI (ChatGPT and the like) to produce a blog for your new product or service, aimed at your ideal customer avatar you will in all likelihood get a mediaeval lion out the other end. Sort of recognisable, and sort of not. This is because AI doesn’t know what a customer is (ideal or otherwise), has no idea what your product or service is and does, and has no true understanding of how this service or product will serve your ideal customer and their needs. Of course, AI is pulling all the information available from the internet to help with its answer but there is no understanding there. There is no determining fact from falsehoods or even which websites are trustworthy and which are not. So, it skims the internet and puts together content which suits the brief as it understands it. This is then when the actual work should start as this content shouldn’t be used in the raw. It should be edited and tweaked by a human who DOES understand the brief, has been a customer (ideal or otherwise) and can imagine what your ideal customer will feel when using your product or services. We are in a world now, where we have generative AI promoting products and services to humans, when it has no concept of what a human is and how it thinks, meaning the marketing department are in fact more important than ever for ensuring content and copy is aimed at humans and human emotions. You could argue that the world would be a more entertaining place if there were more mediaeval lions in it, but it wouldn’t be a great environment for learning, or for basing purchasing decisions on. If you want to maintain the human element in your content, then I would love to help . Explain the brief, your CTA and your ideal client and I will know what I need to ask to get a clear idea before writing. Then you can rest assured your content was written by a human for a human and we can leave the mediaeval lions to the museums.
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