I’ve been thinking a lot lately about challenging myself to write every day.
(I’m self conscious to write about writing and blogging once again but I guess I haven’t done it in a while…)
It started with a tweet from VividVoid:
You can become middling at something with an hour of practice a week. You can become good at something with an hour of practice per day.
— Vivid Void (@VividVoid_) March 14, 2024
Both of these options leave you 6+ hours left over, every day. https://t.co/AjdZMT1nLM
Obviously, this had also been quote tweeted by visakanv, saying that he’s been practicing blogging for an hour every day since he was a kid or something like that.
The thing is, this made me think: what do I want to become really good at?
My answer to this for a long time has been something like “making stuff”. I’ve tweeted about “making pieces of content (pocs)”. The idea is, I want to be good at being prolific publicly.
Why?… that’s a whole can of worms and not something I want to get into right now.
What I do want to get into is that, “making stuff” or “making pocs”, feels way to general once again. That’s funny, because I changed “make 100 threads” to “make 100 pocs” in order to unconstrain myself, and now I feel like I want some constrain again. Am I just making excuses? Very likely.
Back to the main point here: I think I want to challenge myself to write every day. There’s a lot of mediums I want to get good at: tweets, blogposts/essays, youtube videos, painting… It’s always hard to decide one to focus on, so I never do any of them. I tried focusing on all of them, or focusing on just making any of them, but that doesn’t feel like a concrete project that I can just point at in my mind. It has very unclear steps, it’s hard to plan. Thus, I think I want to focus once again.
Therefore, I think the next stage of trying to be more prolific in public for me is just trying to write 100 blog posts. There’s a lot of anxieties that come to me just with that thought, let me try to make a list:
- what if I get bored of blog posts? what if writing isn’t really a medium that excites me that much? I’m afraid of failing, of giving up halfway through.
- what if my blog posts become repetitive? what if I end up just writing about writing all the time?
- what if the only thing I have to write about are my feelings and I don’t want to share things that are that intimate?
- what if I can’t come up with things to write about?
- what if I miss a day? or two? or a whole week?
- what if I don’t have time to write every day?
- what if writing in a blog that no one really reads isn’t public enough?
I think that’s mostly it, although looking at the list I still have this general sense of anxiety that isn’t captured in the list. Actually, writing that last question seems to have nailed most of it. Looking at questions 3 and 7 there’s clearly a tension in me between making the blog too public and not public enough. I think in general, there’s the part of me that is afraid of sharing and the part of me that wants to push myself to share precisely because it’s hard.
Now I’m stressed because I have to go in 3 minutes and I need to get ready, but there’s so much more I wanted to say and I’m afraid if I don’t do it now it will be too hard to do it later. I guess I’ll just try making a list of things I’d like to say and hope that future Cesar still feels like writing about them:
- how can I define a project that addresses each of those anxieties?
- what do I want to do?
- basically I want to define the project more clearly, to write a manifesto of sorts.