It's 9AM
I’ve been killing moonshots.
All summer long, maybe longer.
Maybe as long as a couple of years.
All because of missed expectations and voices.
Ghosts that live in my head, whispering all the bad things.
All the worst things.
About me.
About trying.
About why.
The ghosts are good at that.
They know all your inner secrets and like a lover in an argument, can zero in on your own worst fears and highlight them to the world.
Lovers who do that are toxic.
But what do you call the ghosts who whisper it to the man in the mirror?
It is a delicate balance between giving a damn about the world and not giving one for what the world thinks.
And there is an evolutionary component to the ghosts in our minds.
Turns out, our ancestors who listened to the ghosts might have been the ones to live and procreate.
While the Moonshot men crashed and burned.
Or were eaten by short faced bears.
There are stages to success.
Mockery.
Ridicule.
Outright hate and lies.
Then envy.
And if the ghost in your mind knows all this, and knows how to press those buttons and pull those triggers…
How might this change what you try?
What you do?
And if you don’t try, what are you failing?
The rational logical side of me knows we live in a world of plenty.
A world governed by powers that be that want us scared and afraid of trying.
A world where every resource is scarce, where people are self indulgent and selfish and out to take what is yours.
It’s in the news, and on social media and repeated over and over again until the ghosts in our minds connect it to something someone said to us growing up.
And we start to believe it.
Scarcity. Boogie men out to steal food, and children and turn everyone into mindless matrix slaves.
Except…
I watched a guy on Tik Tok talk about being a chef at home, selling his cookbook live for $24.95, and selling out while I watched the orders pop up on his screen.
A thousand of them.
Or a girl who made an Instagram account for her make up brand, and turned it into a real business doing tutorials.
I know authors who make great livings telling stories, and fans flock to them.
Hell, Brandon Sanderson made a ten million dollar Kickstarter earlier just this year from a fantasy series.
A couple of guys took Pooh bear when he went into the public domain and turned him into a serial killer for a low budge horror movie on Youtube and made bank.
And a couple of kids shot horror movies in their backyard, put them on Tik Tok and got a studio deal out of it.
These are just a few examples, but there are hundreds more.
What set them apart?
Belief?
Effort?
Talent?
Was it all those things and just a little more?
A different way of looking at the world?
Taking moonshots and not being afraid to take them?
Was it just asking?
Putting themselves out there and building something and then asking people to support it?
I know a guy who went to work full time for someone else just to get insurance for his kids, but tripled his income when he went to work for himself.
He wanted to build a business for his kids to do, if they wanted to.
It was his own moonshot.
Mine is making a living as an author.
Writing books, finding readers who like those books, and writing more books for them to get via the easiest way possible for them.
It was Amazon, until that window closed.
I came up with a plan to kick that door in, but haven’t yet.
The ghost says it won’t work.
Why do I believe it, when I know that failing is just learning?
I’m building a Shopify store so people can reach me directly and bypass all the other shops. Kobo. Barnes and Noble. Amazon.
But the ghost says it won’t work, because of… reasons.
Is being an author a big enough Moonshot?
Expanding it to audio and video series?
Then bootstrapping each of those pillars into something a little larger, a little bigger.
I call it part one.
What about you?
What Moonshot would you make or take?
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