MY Best vs. THE Best – 523 Ways to Be Awesome

Today is the official release day of 523 Ways to Be Awesome! It’s the second book in the Drops of Awesome series and I’m super excited about it.

I guess you could say that today is the book’s birthday and since I wrote it, David Miles designed it, Stephanie Yan edited it, and Christopher Robbins (not Winnie the Pooh’s homie) masterminded the whole thing, we are all accepting gifts and salutations through midnight tonight.

The book is doing well on Amazon already thanks to you Awesome people and Familius has been working hard to get this book and the last one into some epic retail locations. I’m not naming names, but someone I know has been stalking the book shelves at Whole Foods because… ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!… any minute every Whole Foods in North America will have one of these bad boys.

The whole thing is totally surreal to me.

Free range happy bacon.

$10/ounce soy cheese.

Handbags and leggings fashioned out of Kale and Hemp fibers.

Book
s by Kathryn Thompson.

All things that belong at Whole Foods.

We’re even working on scheduling a Costco book signing! You guys! I may get to hang out at Costco like the Blendtec guy, hawking my wares while people try to avoid eye contact and then eventually succumb to David’s gorgeous design and buy my book.

All of this is thrilling and I’m stoked. However, in some ways it puts me in a place where I desperately need to apply Drops of Awesome thinking.

The truth is… there is always something more I could be doing to send this book out into the world more effectively. In fact, there are so many things I could be doing to spread the word about 523 Ways to Be Awesome that it can be really overwhelming. I slip into focusing on everything I’m not doing, which is ironic, considering the theme and content of the book.

Yesterday I sat looking at the list of marketing tasks I wanted to do before the book was released. The list was vast. And the check marks were… not as vast. And I was a day away from launch. And I didn’t have long to focus on it because I had to make dinner and get my son to baseball so I could go run a softball practice for my daughter.

In situations like this, it’s easy to think, “I’m not doing my best to launch this project.”

But then you have to dig further, “I may not be doing THE Best, but am I currently doing MY Best?” These are not the same thing.

THE Best is a notion that there is one perfect right way. It’s rarely realistic and frequently frustrating. MY Best is an honest assessment of what I am capable of doing based on my current circumstances, knowledge, and abilities.

And maybe My Best isn’t as good as I want it to be. So, what can I realistically do to increase my capacity today without beating myself up about what my capacity looked like yesterday?

To help with this process, I’ve been keeping a weekly to-do list, rather than daily. I write down everything I hope to accomplish for the week. Then, each morning I break my day down into time chunks that work around the flow of my non-negotiables and appointments.

Then I add as many items from my weekly to-do list as I can fit into those time chunks.

This gives me a realistic picture of what I actually have time to accomplish in a given day and I’m not quite as hard on myself when I find that I can’t do EVERYTHING. Time is finite and all I can do is use my time well. Sometimes this means changing my non-negotiables, cutting down on the appointments and commitments, and saying “no” to a few more things so I can say “yes” to different things.

I don’t have all the answers to this because I still get frustrated sometimes when I know there is a better way to do something and I just can’t quite get there. But I do know that I am happier when I focus on what I’m doing right and on realistic positive change.

I wrote a book. Drop of Awesome.

I gathered a team of fabulous friends and supporters to help promote it. Drop of Awesome.

I have been studying and planning and learning how to better execute social media strategy and I become more focused every day. Drop of Awesome.

Thank you so much to everyone who is taking this journey with me! Let the launch day festivities begin.