Last month Rachel and I started a 30-day gardening challenge. We filmed thirty videos over thirty days, chronicling roughly thirty hours of hard work in the garden. We took a trash and brush-filled lot and built some good gardening space from nothing in order to demonstrate the difference you can make with concerted effort over time.

This morning I gathered the entire series into one playlist, which you can watch here:

Thanks for joining us. I have to dial back on my YouTube production because I need to get some books written, but I’m not disappearing from video production. It just doesn’t make sense to work 3-4 hours per day to make $11-12 per video, so I’m going to do my filming on Saturdays and do a “round-up” video I’ll post on Mondays.

Or I might do short little videos, like the one I posted on Sunday morning when I was gathering weeds for breakfast:

My Galaxy phone has a surprisingly good camera.

I have learned how to write books and I have applied what I’ve learned to many other things, including gardening.

Want to know the secret?

Do a little bit every day until it’s done.

That’s it. I set a goal of how many words I need to write per day, then I write that amount every day until the book is done.

Think about it. If you want to write a 60,000 word book, which is a short, but decent-sized novel, you just need to write 2,000 words per day for thirty days. I’ve done that multiple times now. 2,000 words takes me about 2-4 hours to write.

Maybe that’s too many word for you. What if you just wrote 500 words per day? In four months, you would have your book finished. 120 days, 500 words per day.

What if you only wrote 200 words per day? (For reference, this entire post is 504 words. I wrote it in fifteen minutes).

If you wrote 200 words per day for 300 days, you would have your novel. Less than a year. Why are you putting it off?

Most people have a book they want to write but they’re always planning to do it later, when they have time. Guess what? Later isn’t going to come. You’re not going to write it unless you set a goal and stick to it.

One of my sisters has beaten obesity over the last seven months by avoiding carbs and sugar on a consistent basis, every day. She went from fat to healthy. She didn’t say “later, when I have time to diet!” or “oh, the children are small and it’s too hard right now!” No, she ate better, one meal at a time. And now she looks great.

Concerted effort over time.

I decided to apply that principle to my gardening and it worked like a charm. You can see the progress from video 0 to video 30. Don’t put things off – attack them now, one bite at a time. It’s simple advice, but it will change your life if you put it into practice.

Put it into practice!