Content Creation Ain't For Me: Moving Into My Oprah Era.
I found my purpose while walking backwards on a Crush Fitness treadmill.
One of the tenets that I’ve been trying to live my life by, this year, was inspired by my favorite author of all time: the late, great Octavia Estelle Butler. Considered one of the leading voices of Afro-Futurism genre, Ms. Butler was also a stickler for persistence.
Kwanzaa 2023 found me in the mountains of Asheville, North Carolina. I left the friendly confines of Charleston, South Carolina in an attempt to figure out who I wanted to be and what I wanted to do in the upcoming year. Between pages of Lilith’s Brood, I got the bright idea to start Googling random Octavia Butler quotes and happened across this doozy (via Goodreads.com):
“First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice. You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That’s why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.”
I shortened her full quote into a bite-sized phrase for easy remembrance and recall: HABIT > INSPIRATION. Even now, that phrase has sustained many of my personal outputs (I.E. - ya boy is losing weight and feeling great!). But the quote hasn’t had the same impact on my work with BlackFoodFridays. And for the longest, I couldn’t figure out what the issue was. That was until a few days ago when fate found me, in heavy concentration, walking backwards on Crunch Fitness treadmill [NOTE: I’m trying to work on improving my core strength and overall balance and read that doing this for 30 minutes a few times a week can help. I’ll report back in a month]. It was on that treadmill, while belting out the last verse of “Best One” by NxWorries, that I realized what the issue was:
What I “do” is no longer fulfilling.
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