Chain Reaction

Mr. 'Million Things' is quite busy and has been working 25 hours a day, 8 days a week on a product soon to be released. But he also has a very active social life and other activities that include traveling, photography and writing blogs. Since, unfortunately, a day is limited to only 24 hours and that Mr. 'Million Things' is already squeezing out an extra one hour of it, sharing his knowledge (though very limited) and experiences with others took a big blow. Then came to his rescue, a spark from the cosmos. I'm this Mr. 'Million Things' and the spark is SpongeFish.

I have been quite busy at my work for more than a year now as our company is planning to launch a product sometime soon. If one leaves a computer running for weeks and months without reboot, chances are very high that it needs a reset before it completely crashes. Similar was the case with me and I managed to steal a week off from work for my cross-country road trip. It was a total reset and I was back into action after returning from the trip. Now I wanted to share my experience on this virtual rendezvous of Internet but could not manage until one day I saw a comment to one of my blog's asking if I would be interested in putting my travelogue on SpongeFish and that there was a contest ending on the 12th of Oct. This comment was made on the 4th and that grabbed my attention only on the 7th. Just 5 days to share the entire trip? Not an easy task. I took a look at the website and decided to give it a shot. But as the saying goes "procrastination is like a credit card. You enjoy it till you get the bill", I kept delaying it and on the 10th realized I didn't have enough time, especially with my given work schedule and also that I was heading for Chicago on the 12th by 8:00 PM flight.

This was the time when I took a couple of moments to myself and thought about the situation. I have been putting things on the back burner forever. I wanted to change this, at least for once. This made me even more determined to participate in the contest, not with an anticipation of winning a prize but with a hope of winning over my "let me do it later" attitude. Here is the chain of events that followed.

1. I canceled my tickets to Chicago
2. Started to write
    - while having breakfast
    - during lunch
    - midnight to the moment I crashed into bed
3. Just about an hour before midnight PST (2 AM for me), I stopped, after putting as much as I could on the paper
4. Hit the "publish" button on SpongeFish
5. I saw instantly people started to like it. I was very glad
6. The SpongeFish community picked it up as one of the best
7. I won the cool little iPod Touch. Thanks to SpongeFish :-)
8. I started to find more time to contribute the little I know and learn a lot from others

My road trip was not a canonball run but this write-up absolutely was. It is wonderful how this all happened. I feel as if I started to create time out of thin air. The fact is that I started just to manage it better. Trying to get the priorities right.

Now imagine I went ahead and traveled to Chicago giving up on my narrative and chickening out. I wouldn't have shared my experience here, it would have got washed away in the waves of my memory. The motivation I got when I realized so many people liked it wouldn't have existed. I wouldn't have won anything and hence there wouldn't have existed the element of success that acted as fuel to the next event. This chain reaction would have continued and left me in disapproval with myself. But now, I ended up as a winner of both the prize and aslo the procrastination factor.