My DSL is working! Yeah!

Wierd thing about it was, it started working about 2:30-3:00 AM this morning.

My middle son came running into my bedroom (from a trip to the potty) to let me know “four lights are green and solid on the modem!”

I didn’t believe him, so of course I dragged myself out of bed just to go see. <snort> Was the highlight of my day/night. Um, I guess I shouldn’t mention that, huh?

Okay, I promised a more fitting “farewell” post to the “Pebble Theory” challenge when the DSL came back on, so here goes…

The past month was gruelling, and at the same time, it was kind of exhilarating. It took a lot of my time, effort, and yes, it was work – but it was also not as difficult as I thought it might be.

Looking back over the past 30 days, completing this challenge was no harder than writing my last novel.

So … what was the main ingredients needed to get everything together and pull myself through to the end?

Knowledge and Discipline.

First of all, I needed to know “how” to do things, like: putting up web pages, posting on a blog, and using my word processor to create PDF’s. I also needed to know how to “ZIP” files, and create cover graphics. Stuff like that.

Luckily, I already knew how to do these things. If you do not, there are many tutorials on the web that will walk you through these steps. This is the “knowledge” portion of what I needed.

Discipline? Hmmm.

The one thing I had to force myself to do was to make myself do “something” towards the completion of the challenge every single day of the 30 days I made available to myself.

Slacking would have been waaaay too easy if I’d have let myself do it. Don’t fall into the procrastination trap. Take action every day.

Why? Not taking action can seriously cause you to fail.

Now … What did I learn?

I learned, through the doing of this challenge, a much more streamlined way to do the next one.

For example: when I’m creating a product, I will allot enough time to do the product, plus the graphic design, plus the marketing materials (sales pages, blog posts, emails, and tweets) and I will complete all of those things for the product before moving on to the next one.

I didn’t do that with this challenge. Instead, I left the creation of the marketing materials till last. Not fun, and not a very good idea.

It’s better, I’ve discovered, to do it while you still have the product fresh in your mind rather than wait — and have a whole bunch of products to create marketing materials for at the same time.

The things I learned while going through the process once, with this challenge, will help complete do successive challenges much faster, and hopefully eliminate the stress I felt and the resultant “crack up” at the end.

How? Because I’ve rearranged the order of “things to do,” broken some things down into smaller steps, and allowed myself a bit more time to complete each piece of the process.

You can learn from what I’ve done with your projects, too. If you begin to feel overly pressured, to feel things are “too hard” for you to complete within the amount of time you’ve given yourself at any given step in your process, break those steps down into smaller steps, and give yourself a little more time to do each of them.

Just make sure you *do* set a time limit for completing each step you take toward your goals. Otherwise, you may end up putting things off again and again and never getting it done, never getting finished.

Again, don’t fall into the procrastination trap. Take some action, even if it’s a “small” action toward achieving your goals every day.

So … did I really say I’m going to do it all again?

Yes, you read it right. I’m planning to do it again. “X” number of products in 30 Days. Gonna do it more than once, as a matter of fact. But not in the “Internet Marketing” niche.

I think I’ll use what I learned to put some of those many domain names I collect to good (and profitable!) use.

Before I close, there are some people I’d like to mention.

John Reese, thanks for the video with Tony Robbins that gave me the inspiration and the motivation to even try to pull this challenge thing off at this time in my life.

I knew I *could* do it, but in the beginning, I didn’t really think I *would* do it. So I appreciate your being a part of it all, helping me achieve much greater success than I could have, much faster than I might have done if I hadn’t seen that video and become inspired.

Stewart Shaw, thanks for being uber-excited in the beginning of this challenge. Your excitement is what propelled me to take this thing seriously, to really put in the effort to make something worthwhile out of this challenge. I believe I have done so.

Thanks to Tiffany Dow for being so nice and encouraging and for letting me include her autoresponder tutorial as a bonus for one of my newly created products.

Thanks to my very first customer, for pushing momentum forward by sending in that first dollar of the challenge.

I appreciate all of you (and some I haven’t named, but I *do* know you played a part, and I *do* appreciate you – like the folks who retweeted my tweets from time to time).

Finally, I’d like to say a special, over-the-top THANK YOU to my friend Jes. Why? Because:

Jes is the one who stuck with me through every single day of this challenge, patiently listening to my whines and celebrating each of my triumphs and encouraging me either quietly or with a swift kick in the butt when needed to keep on keeping on, no matter what things “looked like” at the time.

Jes reminded me it didn’t matter if anyone else noticed, if anyone else was impressed with my progress or if anyone else even cared what I went through to do what I did in this challenge. She said what mattered was that *I* knew, and that *I* did it.

Jes is the one we all owe a boatload of thanks to. Without her, I might never have proved to myself, if to no one else, that it is possible to start from scratch and create something impressive, something I can be proud of … in just 30 days … outside the romance fiction niche.

Okie dokie, there ya have it, my farewell post to the John Reese inspired “Pebble Theory” Momentum challenge. What’s up next?

We’ll see…