From the 18th of last month to today, I inadvertently realized the subscription number for 17 consecutive days. Every article is sincere and content is satisfactory. It seemed like a small achievement, but I kept reminding myself:
Don’t raise the bar! Do not pursue the day watch!
I have a vision of continuing to write, but the current standard of action is hardly “writing” : I write randomly every day, and at 1,000 words it is complete, completely unpublishable. It is like a diary, a running account, with random topics, random writing and random length. It covers multiple topics every day, and many topics are less than a hundred words, or just a few short sentences.
Anyone who decides to keep writing and taking action is a person who actively seeks to grow.
It’s good to be ambitious, but to set the bar unrealistically high will accelerate you closer to giving up. Once I moved from the desire to write 1,000 words a day in private to the desire to post publicly every day, I would be under enormous pressure to do even the most basic 1,000 words a day in private.
It’s not anxiety creating, it’s my experience over the last year. At that time, I was determined to voice input 3000 words a day, and today’s random write 1000 words, are messy and trivial, think of what to write what, flash thoughts, inspiration, ideas are all collected. I got off to a good start, and soon I was thinking about how I could improve my writing, and I was hoping to sort out 500 to 1,000 words a day out of 3,000 for publication. As a result, they send out something they don’t like. The pressure to publish messages became so great that even the daily voice input of 3,000 words failed.
Whether you are satisfied with your published articles is a very important measuring stick. Whether it is well written, whether it is opaque, whether it makes sense, whether it is different from others — we are more knowledgeable about reading than we are about writing, and we have the ability to judge our own writing. We always have quality requirements for what we deliver to our readers. If you set a goal for the daily watch and publish a few articles that you are not satisfied with in order to achieve the “daily watch”, self-doubt will grow – we can’t fool ourselves, which will shake the basis of the daily watch.
Calmly maintain a long-term performance standard, and then really do the long-term action. This is not depravity or low standards, it is the adaptation of human nature to make long-term actions less energy efficient, and thus really do the stupid work solid. This is also the philosophy of “micro habits”. Set a simple and easy small goal for yourself, so that you can generate action inertia. Once you have the energy to do more, you can easily achieve the bottom.
If you don’t believe in this evil, you should search for those individuals who are crying for more. How does the quality of the articles compare with your own original articles? How long has the other person been doing the daily watch? The few people who actually do more than a year of high quality daily improvement go through a long upfront period that you probably don’t see?
It is in this long prophase that we form habits and accumulate materials. Honestly set a “daily action” that you have no chance of failing, and do it literally for 100 or 1,000 days with little effort.
When materials are accumulated to a certain extent, they can be used to write articles. For example, I often look through the random writing I have accumulated over the past few years, and I can always find some topic recurring, some kind of dilemma repeatedly bothering me. Gather the pieces you wrote down into a file and try to outline, organize, and write the entire essay. Even if you look through the last week, you can see that there are certain topics that you are interested in, that you have a strong desire to think about, search for, or comb through, and that you can eventually expand and publish.
Because of the long-term enforceability of the standard of action, we spend almost no energy on “writing”, so we always have the energy to look through the debris saved by stupid efforts, these ugly soil, nourish us to write more satisfying articles. This is the beauty of pressure free action. In stark contrast, every time you want to deliver an article to the public, you sit down at your computer with an empty head and no library of materials and start typing. Where do the words come from?
The truth is well understood, but the practice is difficult. You’re bound to find yourself constantly wavering from your “standard of action” and wondering if you should take it up a notch, like Posting at least one post a week, or if you should pick a topic and devote at least 500 words a day to it. If you do it for a long time, in terms of results, nature is a fierce person. Don’t beat yourself up if you don’t. It’s just a little bit of carelessness and a little bit of a higher standard of action. Have the courage to start over, still a hero.
After all, writing consistently, if it’s worth doing, must be worth doing for a long time. If it’s worth doing for a long time, it can be done slowly.