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Peanut Buttering

Daily blog

I've lately been doing daily Chinese language study; not a huge time investment, but a little bit each day. And it's been working well! I've been consistent so far, it's fun, and I feel the improvement over time.

So I'm thinking to try extending this to a daily writing practice. I've already been journaling pretty regularly, and while it's been good for generating a record of my thoughts over time, the fact that it's writing without an audience -- and without a definite topic, thesis, or end state -- limits its utility for growing my writing skills.

The idea here is to write a bit each day and publish it as a blog post, of SOME length, for public consumption. This embodies a bunch of commonly espoused values and tactics, such as "just start doing the thing", "do it before you're ready, before you're good", "you'll only improve via practice", "incremental progress and small wins over one long large big result", "best way to avoid delaying forever is to just start now, in some form, any form", etc. etc.

It's along the lines of "12 startups in 12 months", "a thing a week", that sort of thing. The trick to all is that the success criteria are dead simple: did you do it? Doesn't matter how good, or how large the thing is. Just: did you do it?

And this makes compliance easy. Something can always be written in 10 minutes at the end of the day if needed. As much as this is an exercise in writing, it'll also be an exercise in having the courage to say yes fine it's good enough let's publish and move on.

I'm setting the bar even lower by treating this similarly to how I treat my Chinese study, and my running: as a system, rather than a goal. Importantly, it's a system with a lot of built in grace. Writing every day would be wonderful, but I'm treating that as quite aspirational. Writing two or three times a week is still a success; "shoot for the moon, and even if you miss you'll land among the stars." If I don't write that many times in a given week, that's okay too. The important part is brushing myself off and resuming the practice, as best I can, as soon as I'm able.