I finally started to take my own advice on creating new habits.
Okay, I’ll be more specific. I finally started to take my own advice on creating new habits in order to drive my content creation/publication/freelance writing goals forward.
I started small. Just get something published, every day. It doesn’t have to be particularly good. It doesn’t need intense editing to polish every word and every phrase. It just needs to get written, and published.
Then I added; just get something recorded. It likewise doesn’t have to be great, it just needs to be.
As I’ve continued to enforce these habits on myself, however imperfectly, I’ve noted a change. In the beginning, it required effort and discipline to make sure that something got written. After a while it became more habitual, and I found that I was grabbing the notebook around the same time every evening and getting something written.
Lately I noted yet another change.
I was really tired a few nights ago. I had watched an extra episode of Witcher, I was up past my bedtime, tired, and I needed to get to sleep. Yet the monkey on my back made me pick up that notebook to get something written, after which he made me roll out my yoga matt and do my daily back maintenance.
Then he let me go to bed.
Writing, yoga and meditation are becoming as habitual to me as brushing my teeth. Video recording and publishing are getting there, too. And the process of making them habitual, simply doing it every day, is also having the Troy Broussard “consistent, daily mediocrity” effect of getting a little bit better every day.
It has become so easy to write that I flat out don’t know what I’m going to write until I’m banging away on the keyboard. It has become so easy to record a video that often the only thing I know about a video before I press the start button is the topic. What I’m actually going to say? I find out as I go along, just as with my writing.
When I go back, even a few weeks, I see the mistakes, the rough spots which could have been better planned, edited or polished. Then I look at more my recent work and see it’s noticeably better. Not hugely better. Not masterpieces, but…a bit better, and this is only after a few weeks of application.
I wrote previously about applying this principle for 3 months. About 100 days. Imagine if you improve 1% per day, for 100 days. You’re looking at 100% improvement, i.e. being twice as good. Lather, rinse, repeat for a year and you’re well on the way to mastery.
