Inner Arguments #1: It's Hard.

I am constantly creating original classroom materials for my writing courses and music classes. So when I discovered Teachers Pay Teachers earlier this year, my immediate thought was to reformat some of my documents and share them with other teachers.

And by reformat, I mean to perfect them.

And by perfect, I mean to make them look amazing.

I want them to be so stunning that random math teachers will take one look at my creative writing worksheets and wish they were language arts teachers, just so they could use my materials.

Unfortunately, I'm no graphic artist. So for the time being, my only option is to use copyright-free images.

I began my copyright research with several questions this morning, but I discovered that most of the answers only raised more questions.

• Where can I find the clip-art or photographs that I need, and how will I know it when I do?

• How and where in my document will I recognize creators that have an attribution requirement attached to their work?

• What happens if I accidentally infringe on someone else's rights?

After a while, my mind was reeling, so I got up to do something else -- something easy, that required no thought whatsoever on my part.

I made the bed.

While going through the motions of bed-making, two lazy words popped into my mind: "It's hard."

Something about the simplicity of that complaint awakened the cold-hard-facts instinct in me, making the excuse seem ludicrous even before its echoes vanished from my mind. I answered myself with a no-nonsense pep-talk, which began with these 5 words:

"Successful people do hard things."

I don't know which side of the argument came from the real me, but I do know which side I'm going to respect and follow through with.