Heads up: This is gonna be a boring ramble. I’ve been publishing a Medium piece a day for about two months now (which, come to think of it, isn’t really that long). I started out full of elan and enthusiasm, and felt a sense of excitement. I looked forward to the writing.
Then there were days where it came harder. And then there were days where it felt like doing homework.
Now I’ve got on and off days.
It’s a bumpy road, and I miss those early days of smooth sailing, when inspiration just hit me, and there was a sense of excitement when I had an empty draft page in front of me, ready to be filled with words.
Even as I’m typing this, I’ve got a voice in my head: “You wrote about this so many times. And so many others on Medium wrote about it so many times. What’s the point? There’s no value for the reader, and you should respect anyone who takes the time to read your things to at least give it your best shot and try to offer something of value.”
(And I think that last part is true — and I’ll get to that in my next post.)
But let’s stay focused on the bumpy road: This is my honest experience. And I believe if more people share their honest experience, it’s of value to others.
There’s an even greater good to sticking to your commitment as long as you believe in it.
And if that means you repeat yourself, that you bump into the same issues again and again, then it’s worth to keep going. Because life is like this too: we don’t just tackle one challenge and move on to the next one. There’s a lot of repetition involved. Many times we fight the same battles again and again, before we make the change within that allows us to transcend this.
This issue I’m wrestling with right now is simply my judgment: I feel like what I’m writing now is neither interesting, nor valuable, not original, nor entertaining enough. I feel like I’m stuck at this level, not making progress. And that’s the main reason I don’t feel enthusiastic about writing.
But life is like this too: Things don’t go as fast as we want. We often have to face the same antagonist again and again, even though we get humbled time after time. It just means there’s still something to learn. Try something different.
And right now, the different thing I’m trying is to write about my personal writing struggle again, even though I myself am bored with it. It’s different, because what I would normally do would be to tell myself: “No, you can’t write about this again. Go through your notebooks and find some interesting thought or bit of knowhow, and turn that into a post.” But this very boring, repetitive writing struggle is the thing that I care about the most at this very moment. And I believe if we stick to the things that we really care about, even in those moments that are hard, rather than the things that we think we should write about, we’ll ultimately learn and grow.
You have to give yourself permission to suck. Give yourself permission to fail. Permission to put in your best effort and accept that whatever comes out of it is the best work you can do at this very moment. And if you genuinely ship your best work every day, then that’s your path to mastery — even if this is going to be an endless path and you’ll never arrive.
Keep stumbling down this bumpy road.
