Just @#$%ing do it.

I’m working on business development with a client who has a new blog. It’s been a long time coming. She dragged her feet for more than six months before publishing her first post last month. Back in November, over coffee one afternoon with a mutual friend, I listened to her rattling off excuses and objections. I found myself thinking, Just @#$%ing do it already!

Then I felt like a hypocrite. I thought about all my own half-baked writing projects. I kept my mouth shut.

Last Friday, at our weekly consultation, she still seemed to be struggling to find the time, the motivation, the inspiration—or maybe just the confidence—to write. She’s received kindly feedback on the articles she’s posted. But she didn’t have anything new ready to publish, so we talked about some other projects she’s contemplating. When we’d worked our way through the meeting agenda, she had some time left before her next appointment. I asked her if she’d like to try to write something.

I guess I caught her off guard, because she couldn’t come up with any excuses not to write. I set a timer, and she clacked away on her laptop keyboard for 20 minutes.

If you have something to say, why wait to get your message out there?

At the end of the timed-writing period, we were both delighted to find that she’d written something pretty good. Pretty darned good, in fact. While she browsed her photo collection for an image to decorate the post, I made a handful of very minor edits—punctuation tweaks, a word change here and there for emphasis. We plugged in the photo she’d picked out, gave the piece some tags for the search engines, and posted it to her blog.

As she headed out to her next appointment, I said, “You should think about what you just accomplished.”

I closed the door behind her and thought, YOU should think about what she just accomplished.

Why do I make this so hard? I write thousands of words a day. I speak hundreds of thousands of words per week. People seem to enjoy hearing what I have to say. Why is it so hard to sit down and write a few hundred words that I’m willing to share with the reading public?

I should take my own advice once in a while. And if you have a great message, but you’re struggling to get it out there, so should you: Just @#$%ing do it already.