The Inertia:
Newton’s 1st Law of Motion applied to blogging – If a blog is not written for more than 2 weeks, it will continue to remain unwritten for as long as possible (2 months in my case, but this could become infinite), unless it is acted upon by a force (Patience + Good Feedback + A sequence of 6 hard hitting nudges that prodded me to write)
It’s almost 2 months since I wrote my previous article. As I started thinking about the various topics to write about I was in many ways my own first obstacle.
- While starting to write the blog I had plans to write a series about personality types after my gratitude series was over.
- Then sometime early this year, I watched Tick Tick Boom which suggested that one should write about stuff one knows, and so I decided to write about my experiences with muscle building
- Then as our baby girl was born in April 2022, I decided to write about our parenting experiences
The Force:
Every weekend I remind myself to sit down to write, create a to do reminder, plan for research, and then either I am overwhelmed by the inertia or something urgent comes up and I end up not writing it. Not this week. So what changed? Multiple things.
- Patience: While all these weeks I wanted to write and didn’t put pen to paper, in spite of the lack of progress, there was an inner voice that kept saying, it’s alright you will get back to it soon. Just continuing to think about it and being patient with myself helped
- Good Feedback: A few good souls reached out to share how my previous articles helped them
- 6 Nudges – Some of the stuff I read and listened in the last few days told me how just continuing to be consistent is more important than anything else. So it was push in the right direction.
- The Boggle, Daily Trip by Jeff Warren (Calm App) – This 10 min audio clip had a simple premise – Instead of fighting with your confusion, can you forgive yourself for it? Once I decided to forgive myself for not writing an article these days, a new idea dawned on me – to write about the confusion in deciding the next article.
- The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz (via Mark Manson) – Again this one came out of the blue while watching a YouTube video I had saved to watch later months back. The key takeaway from this book is to transition from being a maximizer to a satisficer. The more choices (for topics to write I have / deliberate on), the more confused I become, and that ultimately ends up with me not writing anything due to the trouble of choosing something in the first place
- The 3 types of wisdom, Daily Calm, Tamara Levitt – In a wonderful Daily Calm this week, Tamara shares SN Goenka’s (the man who made Vipassana popular) 3 types of wisdom – Received, Intellectual and Experiential. The act of writing or any hobby for that matter is a way of helping one achieve more experiential wisdom while all non creative activities revolve around accumulating received and intellectual wisdom. Having received and subjecting wisdom to all forms of intellectual inquiry these 30 years, it is time for me to move into the experiential realm.
- Light Watkins Daily Dose on Consistency – If at all there is one word to summarize all self help advice it would be “consistency”. Need I say more? This is absolutely bang on target. We are what we do repeatedly!
- Visakan V’s essay Quote – To be good at something, you should first be willing to be bad at it. This spoke to the perfectionist in me and told him to take a step back. It is ok if I write an article that’s not amazing or wonderful, as long as I continue to write an article
- Mom’s Daily Cooking Decision Making – I have always noticed how my mom takes the decision of what to cook the next day. She looks at what’s available in the fridge, decides what she did recently and then comes up with an idea in 5-10 mins. That’s experience and expertise that I can directly translate to plan my blogs
The Process:
Taking cue from these nuggets of wisdom, I plan to follow the below protocol to consistently write every weekend:
- Be more observant of things that deeply influence me during the week (3-5 work, family, events, articles, books, movies etc.,) Take the time to introspect about these top 3 to 5 events.
- See how these are all connected to each other and/or synthesize the bigger picture in a way that’s useful for my self first so that I can look back one day to the enduring lessons this week’s events had for me. (Just be a weekly journalist who covers the ebbs and flows of my own life)
- Pull together a story that’s both fun-filled and insightful for folks who would want to / already read my blog.
Bottomline
The more choices I have, I end up not writing about anything and spend all my time being confused. I just keep reading, watching, listening and intellectualizing stuff. As a good friend recently suggested, whenever you read and observe more, you have to either speak it out and write it out. There’s no other way to express how all this flood of knowledge, information and emotion impacts you.
