I keep thinking about this Stephen King quote I read awhile ago:

Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.

For about as long as I could remember I’ve wanted to do two, potentially related things:

1. Write
2. Create something that impacts the lives of people—be that a product, a book, a service—whatever so long as it was positively impactful.

I’m finally getting to number two with Peapod, slow going though it may be, I am making things that impact the lives of people and that’s an amazing feeling. I could argue that some of the things I’ve done before (operations, process improvement, internal tool development) had similar impacts, but this feels different: people who I’ll never meet or talk to are using something I created (or at least thought up and pushed an engineering team to do).

That last sentence brings to mind the Steve Jobs quote Apple used at its recent iPhone event to christen the theater which bears his name:

There’s lots of ways to be as a person, and some people express their deep appreciation in different ways. But one of the ways that I believe people express their appreciation to the rest of humanity is to make something wonderful and put it out there. But somehow, in the act of making something with a great deal of care and love, something is transmitted there. And it’s a way of expressing to the rest of our species our deep appreciation. So, we need to be true to who we are and remember what’s really important to us. That’s what’s going to keep Apple, Apple, is if we keep us, us.

This post is not putting something out there in sense of the Steve Jobs quote—but I want to get there. It may not be this post, this blog or even this meeting, but waiting around for inspiration to strike isn’t going to get me to that point.

Today, I decide to work on writing and just write. That’s what this is. It doesn’t need to mean anything to anyone other than me.

To me, though, it’s “getting up and going to work” and it’s the first step on a journey.