I Finally Did It
After putting it off, I finally sat down and took action…
Writing has always been a love of mine. Ever since I can remember, I’ve processed things better through writing. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve started writing online. Medium has been my favorite place to do that. But for a long time now, I’ve thought about launching my own website. Each time the thought crossed my mind, I met it with, inevitably, the same response.
Not now.
Part of it was insecurity. Do I really have what it takes? Am I good enough? Will anyone care? Part of it was the general pace of life. Work. Marriage. Volunteer positions. Current blogging efforts. Part of it was a genuine effort to listen to God’s leading.
But here’s the thing: I didn’t have what it took to run a cooking blog when I started Cooking With Sarah with my wife. But we started it anyways, and now it has over 8,000 followers. And as much as I’d wish to the contrary, life isn’t going to slow down any time soon. The listening part is where I was on the right track.
In Jeff Goins’ book The Art of Work, he talks about listening to your life. He describes this as the process of looking back over your life to see what passions and skills show up repeatedly throughout your life. These can be the beginnings of your life’s work.
“Listening is a discipline we have to practice if we want to make sense of our life.” — Jeff Goins
I believe God has given each one of us passions and gifts. The more we lean into them, the more we begin to see our life’s calling come into view. I’m still in the middle of that process right now. But it feels really good. And this week, I took a major step.
I finally took action and launched my own website. I wanted to create a central place where people could connect with my writing online. I also wanted to lean into another passion of mine: movies.
This year, I’ve been focused on going back and watching classic movies that I had never seen before. I’ve unearthed “new” favorites like Apocalypse Now, The Godfather Part II, and The Breakfast Club. Whenever we watch a movie, I always want to talk my wife’s ear off about it afterwards. Instead of blabbing on and on in her ear, I figured I’d do something more constructive with all the analysis rattling around in my brain.
And thus, aarondcharles.com was born!
Here you can find all my writing, join in on the latest movie discussion, and connect with me on my social networks. I’d love to hear from you about what you think of the site. I know many of you are web design pros, so if you have any tips, I’m certainly open to them. I decided to use Squarespace, and I really enjoyed how easy their platform was to use. You don’t need any coding ability to get your site up and running. However, if you want to do your own design work, you can.
More than anything, I simply want to encourage you: when it’s time to take action, you’ll know. And when you know, don’t wait. Move. Take that step. Move out of your comfort zone.
You won’t regret it.
