Consistency is my weakest trait by far.
It’s a theme that reverberates throughout my life.
Working out. Not smoking or drinking. Writing this fucking blog.
The trick is to do it, even if it’s just 1 minute.
Don’t have enough time to workout? Do 1 minute of pushups.
It’s about showing up. Keeping the habit alive and consistent is the most important thing.
This post is the equivalent of 1 minute of pushups. I’m just happy that I showed up.
1 full week since my last post! Tsk tsk, not good.
I went to a wedding out of town last weekend and I think I just finally recovered.
It’s incredible how easily thrown off I get from routine, and the difficult habits (often those with the highest reward) are the ones that get tossed first.
I learned a couple of things from this hiatus:
I got side-tracked with calls this morning and couldn’t pull off this post until 11am.
Not my ideal way to get this done. I didn’t even have a chance to make a coffee until just now, so my brain was mush and I definitely couldn’t ‘write’. But I did want to show up, nonetheless. “Showing up is half the battle”, apparently attributed to both Stephen Hawking and Woody Allen, says the internet.
And in fact when I did sit down to try this post, the coffee hadn’t kicked in yet and I was a sea of anxiety about a million other things. For me, anxiety doesn’t look like worry, as much as ‘monkey mind’ – my mind spinning out in a thousand directions. It’s doing things like creating problems, having future conversations, engaging in arguments for disagreements that haven’t yet occurred.
So instead of attempting this post right away, I journaled. Just a page. Honestly, I’m not sure if it helped or if the coffee finally kicked in, but I was able to sit and attempt to write what’s been produced above.
I thought in my head about that ‘showing up’ aphorism, and couldn’t imagine how much more difficult it would be to show up on less sleep, with children, with cancer…
But apparently that’s what the pros do. They write, or practice, or whatever – even when they don’t feel like it.
If you make it something that you HAVE to get done, I think it’s easier to show up even when you don’t feel like it. You don’t have a choice.
So here was my first public brush with that on this new blogging endeavor. I’m proud I got this out, and hope to extend this ‘showing up’ thing to other areas of my life and professional pursuits.
Second day in a row sitting down to write. That alone is a victory.
I also finally figured out that if you write in the wordpress app – or whatever place you’re actually publishing – you remove one more step required to publish. Remove friction / obstacles to developing your habit, says Atomic Habits. (Boom! another book referenced with potential affiliate link – I really gotta learn how to do that affiliate shit).
Publishing is also the goal, right? The amount of half-baked, unpublished crap I’ve written that’s sitting in Google docs is immense. Actually, I’m not sure why publishing is the goal. Look ma, I’m already thinking better from writing.
Why is publishing the goal? I could continue to write in Google docs and still develop this morning writing practice. Maybe it’s something specific to me. If I’m publishing, I’m more likely to do the task. Something related to external validation is lurking there I think – subject of another post.
But as I made my coffee this morning I thought, “what the hell am I going to write this morning?”. And the ideas did start flowing. My brain forced itself to start thinking about it. I owe this post to “the world”, and my brain needed to deliver.
There’s also something to publishing quickly with minimal editing. I acknowledge that people don’t want to read crap that the writer spent no time/thought creating. Maybe that’s why no one will want to read AI-generated content. But I don’t mind if anyone reads this or not. It’s for me – to think better and practice communicating clearly in longer form, non-email, media.
I’m actually really enjoying this, and I feel like I could go on. But the time is up and I’ve gotta hit publish so I can get to work.
Oh gosh, what to write here! I’ve dabbled in blogging over the years, but never sticking with it. Fred Wilson of Union Square VC blogs every day. Paul Graham says if you can’t write you can’t think – or something to that effect.
Sure this is what the world needs, another white techie guy blogging. Well, fuck all ya’ll. And I promise I’m more multi-dimensional than that. You’ll see.
I intend to write on this blog to help me. Purely for selfish reasons. It’s Aug 17, 2023, Rosh chodesh Elul – the first day of the Hebrew month of Elul. Which is exactly one month before Rosh Hashanah, the first of the new year.
Rosh chodesh, the start of a new moon, is for me a time of renewal. It’s another chance. It’s fitting that today I write my first blog post in years. It was a coincidence.
Just write. Just start. Just put words on the page.That’s the hardest thing.
I’m currently reading The Artist’s Way – some of it is brutally moronic. But on the whole I think it wakes you up to the fact that we all have creativity inside of us. And it is divine to express it.
Don’t nitpick that word divine – call it the universe’s unique expression of atoms that led to me, and only me, who could write this post. Fuck AI.
This blog is for me. It’s to help me become a better writer. A better thinker.
Should it have been a VLOG? Or whatever the fuck they call that these days? Maybe. I have an interesting, wannabe Richard Brandson-type look.
For now, I want to develop this practice and hone this skill.
I honestly thought this would be the “About Me” for the site, but it turned into a Hello World type of post. I managed to link a couple of other blogs, reference some Jewish stuff, and link a book for which I can maybe get some affiliate marketing dollars. Hooray!
Sorry if you come across this – you really don’t have to read it. But I have to write it.
Fin(der)