Leap for Success this Leap Year—2012

Yes, 2012 is a Leap Year when February will finally have 29 days again.  This is particularly special for those born on that day—now they can celebrate their birth on their actual birthday.  Why not make this year special for you, too?  How?  Well, you can start by changing your routine, by doing things differently or doing different things—maybe the things you’ve been putting off for years, even decades.

You may have set New Year resolutions in the past only to have them fizzle out by mid-January.  So this year, start earlier and get a jump on everyone else.  What’s holding you back?  Is it your self-esteem?  Here’s a fun, productive way to raise your self-esteem, and not a bad way to end 2011.  Make a list of your top 25 accomplishments going all the way back to school if you want. Do it chronologically for a nice trip down memory lane.  I first did this in 2006 and then expanded my list to 50, adding in quite a few that I had overlooked in my previous list.

As you complete your own list, you’ll already be thinking about what you can do for 2012!  Here are six ways to make your Leap Year special.  In fact, these six things alone will not only have a profound effect on your 2012, but also your life!

1)      The books you read. What books have you been meaning to read but haven’t gotten around to?  What books will help you in your career?  What books will get you thinking in a new, better way. What books will help you out of a rut?  What books will help you with your finances?  What are the books that others have been strongly recommending?  Set a goal to read a half hour or an hour a day, a book a month.

2) The places you visit. The best way to get out of rut is to go someplace new, even if it's not that far away. Get in your car or hop a bus or take a short flight.  Can even be a day trip, or a weekend get away.  Three day holidays are ideal.  Check your calendar and plan ahead.  Set a goal to visit one new place a month or one new country a year.  Or take a couple of weeks (or a couple of months) for some serious traveling, though that will take more planning and more money.  But if you plan ahead and economize, there are some good deals out there.

3)     The people you meet.  Are you always hanging around the same people, having the same conversations?  Then meet some new people!  How?  Attend a workshop or a seminar, or go to a conference and meet people who may share your same interests. Or take up a new hobby, like photography or flying or scuba diving, or enroll in a course and study a new language or anything else that interests you.

4)      The thoughts you think. Pick up some personal development CD’s and listen to them in your car as you drive back and forth to work.  How many hours are wasted stuck in traffic?  Not any longer!  Pretty soon you’ve be thinking about yourself in a whole new way.  You’ll start to see opportunities that have been there all along.  Why spend the rest of your life complaining about how bad things are?  How is that helping you or your spouse and family?  Instead of focusing on what’s wrong in your life (and the world around you), start appreciating all that is right and start seeing the possibilities! 

5)      The decisions you make. Get in the habit of making decisions, even small decisions.  If you’re forever putting off decisions, well that is your decision—to put them off!  This year, see how many decisions you can make in one week.  Can you make six decisions each day—three in the morning, three in the afternoon? How about six impossible things before breakfast? Deciding on one impossible thing, after really thinking about it, may make that impossible thing, very possible.  Maybe not right away, but you’re stepping in the right direction the moment you start to make some decisions with your life.

6)      The actions you take. We all talk about what we want to do, but do we actually take those steps to do them?   Or are we resigned to the fact that our goals are merely pipe dreams?   Only one way to find out!  Decide on a new course of action for 2012, make a plan how you can accomplish it, then get started while the thought it still there.  Today, do the very first thing that needs to be done.  Often it’s a click away.  Do a little research and find what you’re looking for.  If you need to make a phone call, pick up the phone. Then follow your plan through to the end. If you fail, well at least you tried.  Now you can try it again in a new way and make better decisions!  Put your whole heart into it!

So end 2011 by making a commitment to yourself that 2012 will be like no other year.  This is the year that it will all begin for you.  Already you’re making a list of books you want to read; the ways you can meet new people; the self-development tapes you want to check out (to change the way you always think); the decisions that you've holding off on (aren’t you tired of procrastinating?); and the action steps you plan to take, so you too can leap forward for success in 2012.

In fact, why wait every four years?  Why not try this every year! Or try right now!
          —Borneo Expat Writer

*Get a jump on your New Year Resolutions

Here are links to some of my author-to-author interviews of first novelists:

Ivy Ngeow author of Cry of the Flying Rhino, winner of the 2016 Proverse Prize.

Golda Mowe author of Iban Dream and Iban Journey.

Preeta Samarasan author of Evening is the Whole Day. 

Chuah Guat Eng,  author of Echoes of Silence and Days of Change. 

Plus:

Five part Maugham and Me series

Beheaded on Road to Nationhood: Sarawak Reclaimed—Part I 

Making a Decision to Write

I’ve made three crucial decisions to write.  One was leaving Kinko’s to move to Malaysia to write full time (or until my money ran out).  Another was deciding to go to Maui Writers Conference at a time when I was in between teaching positions and my wife was pregnant (had been planning this for over a year).  And a third was to leave teaching at Unimas last year, without a net, to write full time.

To be successful they say, all you have to do is make a decision and then to back that up with consistent action that will take you in the direction of your goal.  Publishing novels was one of my goals, one of the reasons I decided to move to this tropical island.  But you can’t write in a vacuum; you need to get out in the world to see what the real world is really like, and I thought by going to Maui (I know, hardly the real world) I would get a huge dose of some writing reality--the good news (it’s possible) and the bad (there’s a lot of talented competition).  It was at Maui where I met Graham Brown, who at the time, was just like the rest of us, had a dream to write and publish his books.  Unlike many of us, he kept attending other writing conferences where he eventually met an agent who believed in his talent and then last year his first two novels were published, Black Rain and Black Sun.

Prior to going to Maui, I worked with a pair of novelists in Penang, one of whom this year found an agent and her book went to auction.  (Until the book comes out, for privacy reasons, she wants to maintain a low profile.) So I blogged about another writer, that a friend of mine had met, Amanda Hockings, who the week before had broken out in a huge way.  As I wrote about before, when you meet writers who break out, it expands your own belief system.  Instead of buying into all of the naysayers (even the ones residing inside your head) that the publishing industry is impossible, especially now that it’s in such a state of flux (upheaval by some accounts), so it’s best to avoid altogether until things settle down.  Obviously that’s not true for the people I just mentioned and a whole lot of others.

Then a year ago, I made the decision to walk away from renewing my contract to teach creative writing (and general English) because I felt, in more ways than one, that even though it was paying the bills, it was holding me back from ever achieving my dream to publish my novels.  Or maybe I was just using that teaching position (and marking all those papers) as a handy excuse.  Either way, I knew it was time to leave if I’m ever going to achieve my original dream.  I decided to just go for it.

Two weeks ago, I got a flash of insight to change the title of a third novel (the third novel title I changed this year—one for each of my three novels), and everything seemed to click.  The title change, as with the other two books, made me think of the novel in a whole new light and gave it a new focus.  Suddenly for this 23^rd draft, I thought, this could work, and the title also doubles as a cool metaphor.  (**The Resurrection of Jonathan Brady.  The previous title was The Lonely Affair of Jonathan Brady.)  

I hadn’t worked on this novel in over a year, and I had been holding back from it in favor of the other two novels, each requiring massive rewriting for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. But when the new title idea struck, I knew it was time to act on it that very day.

So once I made the decision to rewrite this third novel for the Faulkner-Wisdom Novel Contest, where it was an almost-finalist for their 2008 contest, I wasn’t sure if I had enough time, other than line-editing it and making those corrections.  Then I got the news that the deadline, which had already been pushed back from 1 April to 1 May, just got pushed back to 15 May! (Is this an example how providence moves for you once you make a decison?)  Thus now I got plenty of time to complete it, so long as I remain focused and cut out all distractions, like the Internet TimeThief.

It all began with a decision.  In this case, it’s a culmination of decisions that I’ve been making draft after draft going back far too many years, but I like to think, that each decision I made with this novel has been a natural progression that will ultimately lead to the goal I set back in the US when I made that first decision to leave a safe, secure position for the life of an expatriate writer, now living in Borneo.
                      --Robert Raymer, Borneo Expat Writer

* By the way, shutting down that Internet when you don't need it has been a life saver this past week.  I was able to crank!

**update:  The Resurrection of Jonathan Brady is short listed for 2011 Faulkner-Wisdom Novel Contest

***Update: The Resurrection of Jonathan Brady just advanced to the Quarterfinals of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award 2012!