The right jigsaw

bydavebux

1.5K followers

3 years ago

I started writing a post last weekend and then something happened that stopped me in my tracks, immediately, no messing - STOP. I was part way through writing about a very good friend of mine who died, two years ago this week, from the Big C and as I wrote I wondered how his wife was getting on now, she moved back to “up North” to be closer to her son and daughters.

His wife was an avid jigsaw puzzle fanatic. She has hundreds of jigsaws and as her skill has improved she has taken on more and more challenging jigsaws so that now she has no fear in tackling a 10,000 piece puzzle. And I recalled one day, about four years ago, that she had a circular jigsaw about 3 feet in diameter and it was made up of the same round woodland scene for each of the twelve months. Most of the pieces had eleven almost identical cousins.

“Where do you even start” I asked her that day, and her reply was very enlightening.

“Each month is a puzzle on its own and it is part of the whole puzzle” she said, “but February has to link seamlessly to January and also to March.”

“The whole thing relies on getting every small piece into it’s own place. It can only be in the right place if it’s neighbours are in the right place too. My job is to oversee all these pieces and to arrange them into little groups that will eventually make a bigger group and then the whole jigsaw will be finished. Every time I get one more piece into position, that is one less problem”

Remembering those words were what stopped me dead last weekend. That was when I made a connection to my website, to my videos and to Wealthy Affiliate and to what I was trying to achieve. I had a jigsaw moment.

Here was I, with this massive jigsaw of an on-line business and all the pieces scattered about. The Wordpress and low hanging fruit and SEO and Jaxxy and plug-ins and goodness knows what else. And a bunch of content and jpeg’s and other things to fit in, not forgetting the links to YouTube and Facebook. And then I had my other business that I was putting into hibernation à cause de la Covid 19. I had a mountain to get through this week of all weeks and only me that was going to do it.

I suddenly realised that my whole business plan for the year was just like Pauline’s ten thousand piece jigsaw. Every month shown on her jigsaw was just like every month of my business plan puzzle. I could see it all clearly now, how all the pieces of my life were actually linked and dependent on me being able to put the pieces, the projects, into the right places at the right time. Going on holiday in September really was dependant on January and February being completed correctly. I couldn’t ignore February if I wanted October to be a good month.

So what was I doing, I was doing a little on my own jigsaw and I was doing a little on someone else’s jigsaw by blogging here most days. I added up the posts for my own website and the quantity was dwarfed by the number of blogs I had submitted to this platform. I looked at the list of posts and articles and videos that I have planned for the next few months and it is dozens of items and the list is not going down quickly enough.

I have been working too much on the wrong jigsaw.

So, I immediately made a decision. Make a list, right now, this instant, of what IS going to be achieved during the next week and only work on that list, and keep working on it until it is completed. Then and only then would I write a blog for WA. I have been in and out of WA all week, catching up on training videos, Jaxxy, site support etc. and also having an occasional peek at what you guys have been up to. I had a priority list of what I needed to get done, that is why I dropped off the radar, but guess what, I have now completed everything on this week’s list, EVERYTHING; and I shall do the same again next week. And this is why I am writing now, with everything done for this week I can relax and blog a little.

I had been passing too much time on the wrong jigsaw instead of working on my own puzzle, the one that is bringing in money. For me, YouTube is the Golden Goose; simply because I started the videos many months before I joined WA but now I need to bring other things up to the same level. I still have many thousands of pieces to drop into my jigsaw but my head now knows where the priorities lie.

I have a picture of the Negresco hotel in Nice, the promenade and the beach. The early morning sun is rising behind the palm trees and I am sitting outside the café taking my first coffee of the day; and I won’t be seeing that view again unless I work on the right jigsaw, right now.

Happy jigsaws

Bux