Passion!

I hadn't heard of Malcolm Gladwell until Monday, and now it seems the guy is everywhere - OK he was on 'The One Show' - and the one thing that everyone seems to know is his theory that to be 'great' at something you need to have spent 10,000 hours doing it. Which I think he said equates to doing it for around 4 hours a day for 10 years. I am sure there is more to it than that, and I'm not entirely sure I buy into it - some people are innately good at something, surely - but by his theory at least I should be a great children's writer as I've been doing it for over 10 years now. I just think I'm 'quite good' at it.

I know that when I walk into a bookshop and I see all those other books I think 'Crikey, my stuff has to compete with all this! Am I good enough?'. There are people, I know, who look at other books in their genre and think 'My book is so much better than all these other ones I don't know why the bookshop bothers selling them as well.' But that, I think, is a) not usually true and b) very arrogant. But at the same time I wish I shared some of that supreme confidence.

With 'Extremely Very...' I swing from being wildly excited to being butterflies-in-the-stomach panicky - what if no-one buys it at all.

But for me passion is the most important thing there is. If you don't have it you won't succeed and maybe you don't deserve to succeed. In anything. I am passionate about 'Flipside' - I can bore people forever (and I quite often do) about what I love about teenagers and how fantastic Zambia is. But I am so passionate too about those little Schnoops. And I want everyone else to be as well.

So buy the book for goodness sake (and shut me up)! http://www.theschnoops.com/

Oh and I know that I'm truly great when it comes to footwear and the buying thereof!