With this post today I have officially reached my goal of publishing a blog post every day for 30 days. Some were better than others, some were longer than others, one was no more than a quote, and a couple were a string of sentences strung together while half asleep or slightly intoxicated. But I was able to push something every day, no matter what.
Reflecting back on it, doing this for 30 days was not easy, but easily manageable. Some days were harder than others–within this 30 days was a trip up north with my high school buddies and several all-day tailgates on football Saturdays. But I found that if you make a sacred deal with yourself your guilt will be enough to get you out of bed when you realize you forgot to write that day. If you make your sacred deal manageable and realistically doable most people will feel like a complete piece of crap when they break it. This is good, I realized the power of this. The power of committing yourself to doable goals.
If you make your sacred deal manageable and realistically doable, most people will feel like a complete piece of crap when they break it. This is good, I realized the power of this. The power of committing yourself to doable goals and not accepting the excuses in your head. I set no length requirement for myself, no topic requirement, no minimum quality requirement. This means that there was no way I could justify to myself not knocking out SOMETHING each day.
Thought 30 days isn’t a terribly long time, it was long enough to teach me some things. I learned how to just sit down and create something. I learned that you don’t need to wait for ideas or inspiration (though that helps) you just need to do work–I just needed to sit down and write. These 30 days made me acutely more aware of what Steven Pressfield calls “Resistance” in his book The War of Art. Resistance is a seemingly malevolent, objective force that stems from within us and seeks at every turn to keep us from doing our work.
I got better at beating Resistance. Just as Pressfield describes in his book, I found that you just need to commit yourself, throw Resistance the middle finger, and get down to work. This realization allowed me write every day and to better understand topics I’m currently learning about. It allowed me to have four of my posts published on third-party publications in the last month (bringing the grand total up to 13 in the last few months). But most of all I now feel more confident that I can actually do the things I tell myself I am going to do. Things that I require of myself–independent of any outside force or person telling me I have to.
But most of all I now feel more confident that I can actually do the things I tell myself I am going to do. Things that I require of myself–independent of any outside force or person telling me I have to. Though Resistance never ceases to show its ugly face, I trust that I can accomplish things when accountable only to myself. And that is a beautiful feeling.
So as I progress into day 31 I think that I owe it to myself to up the ante. My goal now is to reach day 90. I feel like I gained so much from just 30 days and am very excited to see what new things I will discover on my writing journey over the next two months. The real battle against Resistance has begun.