7166 Words Streak - A Freestyling Report

What it takes to create on a consistent basis

Writing has been in my mind for as long as I can remember.

I will turn 42 this year and other than a few lyrics for my bands, two short-stories, and journaling every day, I have never written anything over the years, let alone published something.

One week ago, I decided to go from “thinking about writing” to “actually writing”. I challenged myself to write 500 words per day for 90 days straight and see what happens.

That was 8 days and 7166 words ago. So far, so good.

It is not easy to sit down and write on a regular basis. It reminds me of exercising. We deeply desire the outcome of these activities, but when it comes to doing, finding the motivation every day is complicated. Life happens and excuses keep piling up all day long until one always finds a good reason not to do anything.

The problem lies in the very concept of “motivation”.

Any truly meaningful endeavor in our lives will require hard work. As it turns out, motivation is not the best way to get hard work done.

Motivation is - after all - just a feeling, and very volatile at that. To be “motivated” boils down to “feeling like doing”.

I know a category of people who exclusively want to do what they feel like doing : children.

Working out, writing everyday, starting a business or creating anything on a consistent basis requires dedication and effort. It’s hard work. That is true of anything of value.

The only thing that gets it done is discipline.

Discipline is the contrary of motivation. It is doing something even when we don’t feel like doing it. It is showing up everyday against our will and trusting we will see it through.

Trust.

Trust is interesting.

Trust is not earned easily and can be lost very quickly. It is the foundation and primary value against which we measure our dearest relationships. You may invite a friend several times, but if he never shows up, you will soon start to resent him and eventually lose interest in the friendship entirely.

Yet we seldom apply this level of expectation toward ourselves. It is a mistake many of us easily make. We repeatedly break both big and small promises made to ourselves in the privacy of our minds, thinking nobody will hold us accountable. We fail to realize this progressively erodes our capacity to honor even the simplest commitments, like getting out of bed or paying our bills, ultimately causing us to lose trust in ourselves.

Then the snake just keeps biting its tail.

We lack self-confidence so we don’t start anything.

This is called a positive feedback loop - regardless of its negative effect. Positive feedback loops are known to give rise to many psychological pathologies, such as anxiety disorders (agoraphobia for example), depression, addictions and so on.

You do not become confident by shouting affirmations in the mirror, but by having a stack of undeniable proof that you are who you say you are.
Outwork your self-doubt.
(Alex Hormozi)

It is by keeping the promises we make to ourselves that we develop trust in the process.

I find “trust in the process” to be particularly interesting. Listening to Ryan Holiday talk about it the other day, I realized it involves two stages:

In stage one, you have to trust the process blindly, where in sitting down to write and actually writing, you trust that words will get written. I know this sounds very stupid and obvious, but there’s nothing more to it. How have people written anything over the last 5.000 years ? They sat down and put words to paper. Whether you commit to writing one line a day or 10.000 words, there is no secret in how this gets done.

But then something happens quite quickly.

You write one article, one song, a blog post, or a short-story. Then you write a second one. And one more, and one more.

At this point you have entered stage two. Notice it is not far from stage one. Not years or decades of practice and mastery away, but just a few days or weeks of effort. Of course your writing is not perfect - never will it be in your eyes anyway - but you don’t need a masterpiece to convince yourself that you can do it. Just look back.

Each time you did not feel like writing, you sat down and started. Then you got sucked in, you lost track of time. You entered the limbo of self-editing. You suffered over a few lines, you felt ecstatic of a sudden idea, you grinded through a frustrating section, you laughed at your own stupid joke, you wrote a cool ending you really liked.

Then you decided it was good enough and shipped it. You did it once, then a second time, then a handful more.

So next time you want to sit down and write, or do anything that matters and feels hard, recognize each steps of this process you already went through. You now “have a feel for its rhythms”, in Holyday’s words. You know better than anyone you have already faced this challenge before, no matter how loathsome it looked from afar, and emerged successful on the other side.

Now you can just “enjoy the process”.

This is what I realized this week. I was dreading each night sitting down and writing, but each time I got lost in the flow and around 4:30am snapped back to reality, thinking how much fun it all was.

I should have started this a long time ago.

I was waiting for “the perfect idea” but now I realize that the only things that matters at the beginning are quantity and iteration, these are the keys to delivering anything consistently and building “a stack of evidence” that I am a writer after all.

Quality should - hopefully - come as a byproduct of those.

*****

Goals for the next 7 days:

• One post per day, 500 words minimum. No change there.

• Push publishing time to 6pm instead of 6:30am so I can write in the night AND the morning, with actual sleep in between (done since yesterday). This publishing time might also help in being seen by more English speaking people.

• Keep gardening my notes in Obsidian to develop my ideas. This got lost between writing like crazy, shooting stuffs for the YouTube channel, family life, work and projects on our multi-generational household.