I don’t feel like doing the work today.
F*ck this.
I’m tired, I’ve had a big day, I just want to go to bed.
Oh, woe is me.
Instead, I sit here at my desk bashing away at my little keyboard, hoping the muse will come and grace me with her almighty presence.
Now, because I’m feeling a bit down in the dumps and have little-to-no desire to ship the work this evening, I think it’s fitting to explore the reason why a time like this might be the goldilocks hour that’ll get you over that next hump.
*If I was more prepared I’d have gathered some relevant quotes from Seth Godin’s ‘[The Practice](https://www.tobysinclair.com/post/book-summary-the-practice-by-seth-godin#:~:text=In a nutshell%2C The Practice,to improve your practice daily.)’, or Stephen Pressfield’s ‘The War Of Art’… but I’m not, so the hyperlinks will take you to a decent summary, and the full ebook respectively.
Seth has a great principle about shipping the work, especially for people that are perfectionists, or a little heavier on the self-doubting side.
I butchered this explanation to someone in person today, but it goes a little something like this:
You think you’re a terrible writer? Show me 50,000 words worth of dogshit and then I’ll tell you whether you’re a terrible writer.
I’d like to think many writers experience the ebb and flow of self-confidence and doubt just like myself, but as amateurs, most of us probably don’t even have 50,000 words to show for it.
There’s a simple principle to deal with this, and it’s the one that’s gotten me to write a blog for a few days now.
Write some shit. Write some shit often.
Write some absolute turd and press publish.
Nobody’s listening, chances are you’re not even remotely famous, and you’ve got all of the wriggle room in the world to try new things and fail spectacularly and consistently.
Once you start taking the time out every day to publish some thoughts, I suspect you’ll eventually get fed up with resisting the process and begin writing something that might even be worth reading.
This is what separates us, amateurs, from professionals.
As Pressfield explains well, the amateur shows up on the occasion and works on something that tickles his or her fancy.
The professional though? They show up every day, every week, every month, and they ship the work.
Not because each piece is life-changing. Not because each piece has been blessed by the muse. But because that’s what they have promised to do, and it’s the consistency in their service that divides the two.
I’m currently in a training block for an event that I’m too scared to tell anyone about for fear of failure, and that’s a story for another day, but I resonated with Pressfield drawing parallels to all different types of creatives.
Writers, musicians, athletes, business owners, painters, you name it. We all experience that resistance, that push-back against doing the work, the flood of excuses that tell you to hit snooze in the morning.
And look, I’m certainly guilty of the odd snooze-marathon in the early hours, I mean I got up this morning at 6 to train and it was dark, wet, and cold… You’d be stupid not to question your sanity.
However, there’s one (paraphrased) line that stuck with me.
The Athlete knows she will never be fully rested.
The time is never right it seems, so go do something, anything, and do it consistently.
You’d have to wonder what you might actually be able to achieve?
60 minutes 01/08/22