I’ve been doing a lot of contemplating lately. In fact, that’s pretty much all I’ve been doing. Other than working on a few small jobs for clients, I haven’t been doing much of anything for myself.

And that’s a problem. Here’s why:

If you are not building anything for yourself, be it a site, a reputation, a brand, or even just blogging a few times a week, you are dead. Plain and simple.

What happens (not if, but…) when the client work dries up? You have nothing to fall back on.

So from this point on, the work I do for clients will be used to fund a real business. That is all for now.

I’ve always been a firm believer that we create our own reality.

Now, before you go off trying to tell me that we have no control over external influences in our lives, like if I’m walking down the street and a dump truck driver falls asleep at the wheel and runs me over, I already know that. What I’m talking about here is that reality is a matter of perception. How we perceive the external influences around us is our true reality.

Here’s an example – I know people who live in a constant state of negativity. They expect the worse out of everything and everybody, so that when things turn out better than what they expect they’ll get a little enjoyment out of it. These people are around me right now. They are my external influencers and have been for nearly a year and I’ve been letting that negativity get the better of me.

It’s affected my work, my relationships with others both professionally and personally and I’ve actually felt my mental state deteriorating because of it.

Well, I realized something tonight. I can either let those external influencers have a negative effect on me, causing me to fret constantly, be mad all the time, complain and feel sorry for myself, or I can change my perception of the whole situation I’m in and snap the hell out of it as I move forward.

If you read the title of this post, you probably already guessed that I chose the latter.

What does tomorrow have in store for me? I don’t know, but, what I do know is I’ll be consciously making an effort to change my perception of what happens, for the better.

It won’t be easy to change my perception of the world around me after a lifetime of self-defeating thought and behavior, but I’m already living the alternative and it’s time for change.

This is the last time I’ll ever say this to myself – “It can’t get any worse than this.”