Is it hard to blog every day? Not really. At least the hard part is probably not what you would expect it to be. I’ll let you in on the secret: the hardest part is not letting your self-critic win. Every day is a constant battle with perfectionism and you need to win every day. That means you need to relax your self-critic and let your ideas into the world before they feel fully formed.
Once you get over that part, things get fun.
When you’re on the hook for a new idea, story or observation every day, your perspective shifts. You know you have to comment on something, so you start to notice more. You take more notes, share more ideas and think about meaning in a new way.
My writing process doesn’t include sitting at a desk and staring at a screen typing until an article arrives. The right way is somewhere in between staunch discipline and divine inspiration. At the beginning of starting my daily blog, I wrote “CREATIVITY” in the middle of a paper and made a mind-map of all the different things that came up when I thought about the word. In ten minutes I had 50 different words written. Every single one of those words could be the subject of a blog post. After doing that exercise, I knew I would never run out of topics.
The most important part of my writing process doesn’t happen at a screen. It happens in the spaces. It happens when my mind has room to wander. Oftentimes, ideas come in the shower. I walk out, dry off, and jot down a few notes on my phone. When I’m back to my laptop, I tie it together. That’s how a blog post is made.
I don’t think it’s important how it happens, but I share this because there’s nothing special going on. The hardest part is getting over the fact that you probably don’t like your writing. You probably don’t think your piece is good enough. It’s not true. If you keep waiting for the perfect article to come, you’re going to wait forever.
Seth Godin once said, “I have a friend from business school who said he was waiting for the right time to start a business. That was 26 years ago. He never started one.”
The time is never quite right. Your article is never as good as it could be. Those things don’t matter. What matters is that you cared enough to share an insight with the world. What matters is that you were brave enough to hit “publish” before it felt perfect.
Go ahead. You can do it.
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