What would my future self say when they look back and see that I am not a success, not reaching my goals?
What if my successful future self sees this and thinks, “It may feel like a failure now, but you learned many lessons which led to your success. Keep going.”
The goal I’ve been working on is to build a writing habit. And I didn’t even come close to my goal of writing consistently for 30 days.
It sounds easy, but my mind is my own enemy. I want to learn why my mind is like this and learn from the mistakes I made.
The first lesson I learned was…
Don’t Major in the Minor.
Since my goal was to write, I focused on learning how to write. More theory means more learning, right?
Well, after reading many books and articles on writing, I was actually doing the opposite: I was not really ‘learning’ writing, but I was delaying the ‘act’ of writing.
Stephen King even said in his book, On Writing, “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.”
I was only doing one of the two things he listed. I gotta get to work on the ‘write a lot’ part. I will write even if it’s horrible.
Now that I know what to major in, I will…
Do more.
After I stopped lying to myself that I was learning by reading, and instead started doing what I was reading, I planned to focus on what I needed to do if I wanted to start writing: learn to write by writing.
And there’s nothing left to do but WRITE!
And that’s exactly what I didn’t do!
So, here’s what I’m going do:
For the next 30 days, I will write on Twitter/X a thread/essay about things I want to talk about.
So, doing more will give the necessary feedback to know what is working and what is not.
And from the wise words of almost any writer or author who teaches writing, at first, you have to get over the fact that…
Nobody really cares.
It’s true. I’m struggling with this concept.
You’ll probably be writing to the void.
And that’s going to hurt a lot of people who aspire to write or do anything creative. It’s the same process if you want to start a YouTube channel, start Instagram, or TikTok.
You have to get over that fact. Get over your self-centered thinking that once you produce something, the world will flock to see it and congratulate you.
It won’t happen.
Unless you’re already a celebrity or a person of interest already, and that’s not who I am.
I have to learn to accept that.
So, now I will continue to write to the void.
I learned those lessons because I was becoming more aware of why I do the things I do.
The more I become self-aware, the more lessons I uncover.
And I can’t wait to write more.
