Tag: personal development

Tomorrow will be the end of my One Year of Blogging Challenge. I’ve been publishing a daily post every day for 364 days, today. So, tomorrow will be my 365th daily blog post in a row.

I will be left with questions: what do I know, now? What can I do, now?

I know more about me, my story and my history, what I think about a lot of things, what I use to think frequently. I know what doesn’t help me: forcing me through a process that became stale. I will be proud, tomorrow, mainly for one thing: I kept my word. This is the most important achievement. I did write and publish a piece every day, no matter what, regardless of life, work and family, and pandemic, and whatever else good or bad life reserved for me. But I did write.

I decided a long time ago to take this goal as the only one to be the mandatory one. I stopped being concerned about the what and the how. That is why, if you have the guts, you will find any type of content in this random collection of writings: random thoughts, speculations, series initiated and never ended, drafts, sparse notes, unrefined transcriptions. Yes, there are some gems but most of it is brain dumping.

I would consider this corpus of knowledge as the first draft of something. It’s a “let’s clean the dirty pipes” step of something bigger. A deliberate practice to test my endurance and my motivation while unleashing a free-flowing river of words, not always meaningful, not always coherent, not always useful.

And that is good. But now what?

What do I do?

While I am not sure about the new roads to take, although I have some hints, I am sure about what I do not want to do.

I won’t publish again something if I didn’t go through a sound process of finding something interesting to write about, research, revise and polish.

At the very least I want to differentiate what will be just a brain dump with no presumptions compared to an article, with a message, for an audience.

I know I don’t want to mix any longer what I wrote out of the need of practicing and freeing up my brain vs what I want to communicate to somebody to produce consequences, actions, or reflections.

That implies that a daily cadence will be very likely kept. I will write every day, for sure. But I will not necessarily publish all of it. Now, I don’t see it worthwhile, unless I can produce something relevant to me and to at least somebody else.

I am terrified of falling back to being who I was three or four years ago. Somebody who didn’t write. It took me thousands of hours of hard work, frustration, humiliation, pain, sacrifice to write what I will be able to write tomorrow. It’s an amorphous, unfinished, uncertain, and shaky achievement, but it’s a giant leap from what I used to do only some time ago. So, stating so clearly that “I am done writing every day” is a huge risk for my habit-forming practice.

What if I stop writing altogether? Is it even possible? Shall I keep the daily public journal as the minimum but indispensable incentive to keep on practicing?

What if I am stuck on this beginner level and I will never make progress to write valuable essays?

I need a new strategy, I need to refine my habit-making practice: maintain the daily writing (the “no matter what”) and work towards the “read, annotate, connect and ideate, draft and revise, share and discuss” cherished level,

What is it going to be?

To you, Future Max.

I am trying to imagine myself, about two weeks from now, when I won’t have the daily commitment to write posts like this. I will reflect on how much I struggled to write and publish every day and how I slowly go from super excitement to dull, flat and boring chore. That’s not what I wanted. I wanted a clear and solid trend of growth. More content, more quality, more interactions, more ideas and more willingness to write. The exact opposite happens. That is the underlining message I am trying to decode. If I had to speak with the language of facts, I can only say one thing: I wrote every single day. What about the rest? What did I learn? What did I build? These are the kind of questions it will interesting to ask myself.

348/365

I am establishing a new habit: journaling and free-flowing writing but privately. I feel very distant from the urge of publishing my thoughts. Weird. That’s the reason why I started this idea of publishing daily for a year. But I am struggling. All of my behaviors hint at me not wanting to do that. I am creating any possible situation and excuses not to post. In the last few weeks I’ve been writing my daily blog post with the same mood of checking my bank account balance before paying taxes. It’s profoundly unsettling. Still, I am managing to do it, every day. I am missing 60 days. And I see this time as what separates me from a new phase of my creative life. But which one? What is going to happen after the 15 of November 2021? It became stupid, shallow and childish, I won’t find much value from these rushed posts. And, maybe, that’s the lesson I was looking for.

Well, sick of this parade, I’m carving back my space for private writing. It’s a different need in a different context. I have nothing to demonstrate to anybody. I can go with the flow, careless of hurting somebody, especially the spell-checker (fuck it!). I have different goals. Or better, I am still looking for the same thing: continuity. But a different kind of it. While here, on the blog, I am striving for keeping the daily streak, rather indifferent to the quality, the outcome, the feedback, again, just to check the boxes, when I write in my journal I can really hear my voice. I can be in a safe space with my thoughts. It’s there, now, that I want to grow a thinking practice. Rather than always vomiting spontaneous and seldomly related thoughts, I want to  extract threads and build upon them. That gives me more sense of purpose and meaning. It’s going to require time, and hard work and I am not sure it might directly impact my public articles soon but I feel more compelled by that kind of creative practice right now.

Until my next flow of conscience.