Day One of an Experiment

Follow me on this experiment. Or don’t. It’s up to you.

So here’s the deal.

Covid has given me a whole lot of free time lately and I’ve been trying to figure out the best possible way to use it. In all my reading, podcast listening and YouTube watching I’ve stumbled across multiple entrepreneurs, motivational speakers and writers, and long story short, I’ve learnt a lot.

A few days ago I finished reading Atomic Habits by James Clear. I could write a post or series with all my notable takeaways, but that’s not what I’m here to do. Instead I’m going to implement my biggest takeaway of all, and that is to do something consistently and watch it grow.

I’m going to write and publish an article every weekday. No matter what. Not for a week, not for a month, just for as long as I can until it becomes a habit, and then I’ll keep going some more. Why? Because I want to become a better writer. I want to stop spending hours overthinking and overanalysing and pulling apart every little sentence. I want to focus on producing quantity as well as quality.

To give you a sneak-peek into my brain during my writing process, I’m normally an utter perfectionist; I’m self-critical to a fault. It’s my achilles’ heel and it’s the reason I have seven articles saved in drafts right now that I’m too afraid to publish.

As much as I wish I was one of those people who could sit and pump out several articles in any given week, I’m definitely not. The words flow but then I’ll sit and tantalise myself by rearranging every sentence until the whole thing becomes a messy, wordy blur. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s the same feeling you get when you repeat a word so many times that it starts to sound alien. And it’s torture.

So my aim is this. I’m not valuing quantity over quality, but in focusing a little more on quantity my hope is that I will automatically improve my writing’s quality. As James Clear puts it, “Whenever you put in consistent work and learn from your mistakes, incredible progress is the result”.

Clear tells the story of a photography class whose professor assigns half the students the task of producing one perfect photograph, and instructs the other half to produce one hundred photographs. Both groups are given the same amount of time. To the professor’s surprise, the photographs produced by the latter group were far more impressive than the single ‘perfect’ photographs submitted by the first group.

By writing and publishing every day, I’m no longer giving myself a chance to over-edit and overthink to the point of anxiety. Instead I’m giving myself a limited window of time each day before presenting my imperfect paragraphs to the world.

Whether anyone will read, I don’t know. But that’s not the purpose. Like training for a marathon or learning an instrument, the idea is improve my skills little by little, and to fully embrace the process while I’m at it.

So enjoy. Or don’t. I’ll just be here, thinking, typing, proofreading and hitting that green publish button every day. Flaws and all.