The goal is to help one person

I hold the door for one person, not five hundred. Actually, that's not entirely true. I try to hold the door for one person each time I enter an establishment and there's someone on the same path. If I do this 500 times a year, I will have held the door for five hundred people. But I can only do it for one person at a time.

This is a strategy, broken down by simple, easy to achieve goals.

How many people can I help at a time? Just like opening a door, I believe I can help just one. And that's where I have a renewed focus. Help one person at a time. Over the span of my lifetime, I can help a community the size of a small city if I take on this viewpoint.

Helping others for me is defined by sharing my thoughts, views, insights, and questions.

There are always going to be haters. There will always be people who don't agree with my opinions or offerings. Does it really matter? If I am true to myself, exposing my bare chests, and permitting vulnerability, shouldn't I have thick enough skin to deflect the pointiest daggers of detest?

It's not easy putting myself out there. It's scary. I started writing in a public forum over a year ago. In the beginning, I got a lot of positive feedback. I shared very personal unmentionable thoughts that scared the crap out of me when I published them. Yet, no one mobbed together and ran to my house with pitchforks and shovels demanding my head on a stick. Many people were reading my words and sharing my thoughts with their friends. I may have been making a difference to some of my readers. Then I ran out of stuff to say. More importantly, I stopped writing. I stopped observing. I stopped commenting.

Guess what happened next? People stopped reading. Over the next four months, I inconsistently published a few thoughts, but commentary and readership had dwindled. It was demotivating. Although I had received positive words of encouragement early on, the lack of readers coupled with one negative comment demotivated me to continue.

Then one day, I made a decision that I wasn't creating my art for other people. I would no longer promote my thoughts. But I would keep writing for my own benefit. The art of writing is a skill that I wanted to develop. I wanted to share my thoughts with my future self. I wanted to make a difference in one person's life: my own.

As I started writing more consistently, something magical happened. People started reading my thoughts again. Without any advertising, or sharing, my written thoughts picked up readers on its own. For someone to go out of their way to read my blog meant that they liked my stuff.

Writing for me and thinking that I may provide a single moment of inspiration for someone else has motivated me to share with the world again.  This time it has less to do with the amount of people reading. It has to do with helping/motivating just one single person. If I can do that, then I've done my job.

This new mindset comes from listening to a few cool podcasts and reading Seth Godin's The Icarus Deception for a second time.