Tag: writing

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Good Stuff Builds On Good Stuff – Growth Principle

Writing every day is a chore.

As much fun as it is to get this out of my head, some days I sit down, and I can’t get this blog post going. There is a fear associated with this. Every time I write an excellent post, one that people like, there is always another one that doesn’t get the love I want it to or sits there hanging in the wind.

This uncertainty builds fear that follows me writing this stuff. Sometimes it isn’t fun, and sometimes, it even gets scary.

But I know that through writing every post, I get the chance to write again tomorrow, and each post helps me do better than I did before.

The momentum helps

Every time I write, I feel like I am working out.  And like working out, going to the gym, whether it is a lucky day or not, at least keeps you in shape. There is no downside to cranking out a blog post every day. I get better with showing up.

This place helps me define my thinking. This has spread to other parts of my life, like my social networks. If you look at my Instagram, book reviews. Those were born from writing about books here, in a small way, not a big way. My LinkedIn has leadership posts, that came from the blog, and gave me the confidence to tell better stories to connect. My YouTube is a video blog. I didn’t know how to shoot video, but writing here gave them ability to synthesize ideas to put them on video.

Growth matter

Your brain isn’t a thing that grows based on what school you went to or who your parents are. It becomes better, like any other muscle, by using it. You use it by doing things or thinking deeply about the world around you. Neither of these things is passive, and both, when applied, take a ton of brain muscle to do.

Every day I post here, its growth. The material, good and bad, allow me to work longer and do better. It gives me a scratch pad, a place to learn something different.  Good content builds on good content. It’s the gym, and it gives me the opportunity to turn in better and better work.

 

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Three Quick Thoughts

Three quick week-end thoughts to close the week on the weekend :-).

  1. Learn how to do a simple task well – Learning how to do something very simple very well is a boost of confidence. Great example – making your bed well. If you make your bed well every morning, not only do you get something done, the bed becomes a place of calm. I have taken this up recently and nothing is better than knowing when I get home if nothing else, my bed looks great.
  2. Silent Walks – Cut out the music when walking. It’s easy to get distracted by beauty outside – but our best ideas are inside. Giving your brain some latitude by not listening to anything when you walk or drive gives your brain some time to tackle some harder problems. Awkward at first, combining silence with movement has generated some great ideas.
  3. Writing It Down – Take a moment – write it down. Always have a tiny notebook and a pen. The brain is fickle.
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6 MONTHS! Writing Everyday for 6 months!

One of the reasons why I reignited this blog was to recommit to consistency. I have achieved that with my latest streak of writing. I have written everyday in this blog for six months (please hold the confetti).

Before I started this streak, I wanted to write. I have been a writer for a while, so I had an air of confidence that I could do the job.  However, when I sat down, all I could think of was expectation. I had no readers, but the minute I sat down I already imagined the complaints that I would get.  By the time I went down the list of worries in my head I turned a simple blog post into a peer-reviewed article that needed top-secret clearance. In short, I catastopized and it made me paralyzed.

 

That’s constantly hovering over me, and it is one of the reasons why I am not known for my consistency. As a matter of fact, if you asked anyone who knows me well,me writing something consistently for 6 months would sound strange.This blog didn’t happen all at once(it took me more than 4 years to start writing regularly) and it was a defined process. If I have learned anything it is that by leaning on willpower you end up with a quick recipe for disaster.Staring at these posts is a reminder of the strength behind the power or habit, and just showing up to do work everyday.

This month’s theme has been habits. I have written consistently for six months. This is the habit I am most proud of, so I can think of no better subject to break down when it comes to keeping a habit up.I have distilled it to three main ideas and when I implemented them.

  1. Starting Small – This was the biggest barrier of entry. I finally started small, forcing myself to write 3 sentences a day, and started to worry about just getting the 3 sentences down. The streak started that day (February 4,2015)
  2. Accountability – I put my blog in my email, it is on every card that I hand out, and in every guest post that I do. I made it impossible for me to not write anything without embarrassment. I make it a point to write that I say something everyday, and that became the next expectation. Every new person I meet will get a post in the email I send. Knowing this, I can’t afford to not have something new up everyday, unless I put my honor on the line (my twitter name is TheHonorableAT – as you could guess, my honor means a lot to me)  (March 15th,2015)
  3. Constantly Learning – When I let go of the big posts, and I stopped letting myself off the hook, I recognized that if I am here everyday, I could experiment often. I have tried video posts, audio posts, music reviews, how to’s, personal journaling, contests and more. Each day is an opportunity to try something new. If I fail I fail, but with this blog I can work out the kinks. I switched over to a growth mindset, and everyday I feel more and more confident with each experiment.  ( April 20th, 2015)

Every day is a chance to get better. I have really enjoyed writing here 6 months in a row, and I can’t wait to connect in another 6 months to see the things I learned in a year.

 

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How You Can Write Everyday Through Games

I love video games, word games, and board games.

As a matter of fact, I like anything attached to the word “game.” I don’t love habits change. When I change a habit, it gets frustrating quickly, especially when I got serious about practices in 2013. When I would try to start doing push-ups in the morning and writing in a journal at night, if I weren’t in the spirit, I just wouldn’t do it. I recognized my need for tools, and eventually, I discovered gamification for habits.  I noticed my “hit rate” go up, and I realized that when you change habits, you need a tool, such as gamification or accountability to keep your attention.  My “gamify-ing” left me having more fun to get me started on a habit and kept me accountable to help me keep it consistent.

A new practice or getting rid of an old one is a scary process. It is changing the routine and doing something new. We love to say that we like to explore, but subconsciously feel a lot of comforts when we lock in.

That’s what makes habit hard to change. Pattern change, by itself, just isn’t fun and comfortable.

If you are a smoker, you may want to quit, but there is comfort in the ritual of taking our the cigarette d it up at 2:15 every day. I used just to jump in bed without reading every night, and it was easy because I could say yes or no without any consequence.

That changed the day I made reading fun with gamification, creating a good reads account and making a game of clearing my book-case. The rules are simple by the end of the year; I want to read most of my book shelf.  I get points for reading a book thoroughly, giving away a book I don’t find interesting, and stopping something that seems to waste my time. The game doesn’t need complication, but challenging enough to get your engine going.  , Before I started that I was lucky if I read once a week.  If I don’t read every night of the week, then I lose points

I get a little more excited when there is some juice on the game or activity I find myself engaging in.  The accountability, or knowing that someone is taking note,  creates stakes. It was the reason that I got this blog going on a daily basis.I used to write, and I spent years doing it on and off (Look at the archives for this blog – they go back to 2012). Every day I would “check my pulse” to see if I cared to write. When I added the accountability, that changed from once every few weeks to every day.

I have done this for the last six months.

My secret for accountability?

I put that I write every day at the bottom of every email, and invite the person to read the first post. I can’t let that person down, because if they check and don’t see a new post or check the next day and don’t see a post, I lose credibility. My credibility is paramount to me, so I have an impulse to write every day, and the result is this blog.

By gamifying the habits we want to do or get out of, we are more likely to do them.  Getting started with anything is easier when engaged. Accountability keeps everything consistent. If I want to compare my work to someone else or even myself, the right accountability systems help. Soon the habit isn’t something I have to make energy to do, but I become compelled to engage. Things change in every moment, and by engaging practices, it’s easier to take advantage of each moment, and enjoy them as they pass.  It’s also nice to sneak in a game every once in a while.

 

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Creative Endurance

My endurance is horrible.

I don’t mean physically, although that could stand to use a lot of work, I am talking about my creative endurance. I sued to believe that your creative juices were like a well, use too much and then you would be out of it. After you rested, the well would fill back up, and you can them you can go back to the well.

What I have come to realize is, thanks to a recent Ryan Holiday post, is that creativity is more like a muscle. Each time I spend myself by writing something, playing something, performing something – I get more out of myself for next time.

Every day I write on this blog it is no more than a creative gym visit. Each post is a rep. Going to the gym is great, and it helps you create the body that you want, but if you want to maximize your activity, you have to go out and do in the world.

In order to try that, I have instructed myself to comment on every single blog post I read. Hopefully this forces me to do two things.

1) Concentrate on the articles in front of me, make a concise point, along with my point of view, to leave a lasting impression

2) Put my point to the test, defending it when rational, and learning from the experience.

Each time I do this, I feel like it would be like going to the gym to play hoop, also working on my endurance, but putting the stuff I do in the gym to the test in a (hopefully) fun way.

This is my new experiment, and I am curious to see what the results will be.

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Write It Down

It takes a lot of balls to write things down.

It means you can fail. It means that it’s in stone. It means you can’t change the stakes.

Even if you lie to someone else, what you wrote is still on that piece of paper, on that word processor, on that blog, and it is there forever. Even if you burn it, delete it, crash it – there is a change in your mind the moment you write it, you turn it into something, you make it into a reality.

Moving the goal posts on anything is so seductive. It doesn’t take any work, and your mind has enough processor power to change the story while you do something else. It is easy, one errant thought, one loose memory, and all of a sudden the entire memory is different, and you are the winner (maybe the loser if you subconsciously want that).

If you don’t put it somewhere, where you stand when you shoot the shot can change. It is a lot easier to let that happen, but the best improvement that I, or anyone else can make, is to hold ourselves to that spot, live with the consequences, and decide our next move.

If not, the processing power that could be deciding the pain points is constantly changing the story, and you will just find yourself at step one, perpetually.

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Shame Is The Great Dererrant

Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly is a great book on vulnerability. The chapter I read last night on shame has been illuminating in showing how much that emotion can hold us back.

We shouldn’t be ashamed, we all engage in it. Negative self talk brings us to a place where men shut down and women feel like they aren’t heard. Through this, we can’t do much work. It is hard enough to work through mundane tasks when we feel the weight of the world on our shoulders, much less anything interesting that requires our strength.

The most interesting thing to me about this is that internal factors slows us down a lot more  than the world around us. This begins to make sense when you realize just how powerful the brain is. The last part of us to die is our rationalization, meaning even when we stop breathing we are looking for an angle.

Don’t discount how powerful the brain is. When we are younger, we create the monsters under the bed. We have our parents come and show us that they aren’t there. The biggest mistake we make is to believe we grow up and stop creating them. We do it all the time, and they take different forms. We complain, scratch, kick, quit, sleep, play games, or anything else to get away from what we can carry out due to the monsters that we create.

The great thing about this is we are not trapped by what we are. We don’t need to fear our brain. We can control it.  Admitting the shame is the first step to breaking out of that spiral. Simply saying it makes us better. My greatest shame with this blog has been not trusting myself to write enough. Three sentences was a way to cheat – I don’t need to give too much by just doing three sentences. Telling myself who wants to read this anyway, and making short posts kept my skin out of the game.

I want in.

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Building Standards

Building standards for yourself is difficult.

As they come into my life, whether it be comedy, writing, or even just thinking, its hard to keep to the standard.

That difficulty doesn’t come from the standards matching the public perception – it comes from the opposite. Fighting against the wave of people congratulating or booing you.

I feel like eventually that is the path you have to take to get to your eternal truth.

It is not a easy or short road. It requires a lot of thought, blood, sweat and tears. Those who can bare the walk eventually find themselves on the side of righteousness – which is something I don’t think anyone should take lightly.

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Writing Essays

I find myself writing more essays in my free time this week. There is no rhyme or reason to this quite yet, but it is happening.

Who knows if they will ever go public. Just stuff that has to be “gotten off my chest.”

Hopefully they just come off honest. They are the first essays since my school days, so by no means are they publishable, but it is work that reworks my old journalism muscles.

Where this gets me, or what I can even do with them is a mystery. But, I wonder what will come from my desk if this continues as a habit.

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Chilly.

Got the AC on. My apartment feels like an apartment should feel. After a day of sitting around in a sweat-box, I feel like we have some central air going. I don’t think I am going to turn it off either. I want it constantly cold in here so I don’t ever have to wait.

I tell myself that every summer, and I wonder why I hardly ever follow it. There has got to be something there, why I always turn off the AC, anytime I feel like it is getting even slightly chilly. Honestly, if I just suffered for a little bit, I won’t have to worry about much after that.

I have the next 6 days off. This should be fun, considering I did all of my errands Monday and Tuesday. I used to be able to just go somewhere, and try to hang around friends, but lately, I don’t feel like doing that. I feel like working on my comedy career, doing a few creative things, and focusing on making these habits stick.

6 Days alone, with no one telling me I need to go anywhere, feels like the perfect opportunity to get stuck in my habits, so when work begins later next week, I can just follow through, and use less brain power as a whole getting anything done.

Are you improving? Today I read a post on The Mistake Bank that asked that very question. I constantly get lost in other metrics, in everything I do. Its easy to ask yourself, what did _____ get, and how did he get that.

Logically, I know that is the quickest way to bad emotion. What I mean by bad emotion, is unjust depression. Jealousy fuels you into making mistakes. I don’t need to make any mistakes when it comes to anything, whether it be comedy, design, or writing. If I only focus on my own metrics – just getting myself better, making the race about me, I feel like I could get a lot farther.

Truth is though, that is a lot harder than it sounds. People push thier success around and my depression makes it a lot easier to listen to, and to feel defended by. I think one of the main things i want to work on this year, besides habits, is to build a relationship with my depression, in order to help mitigate those feelings.

I want to be focused on me, and I think that means guiding my depression into another direction.

Going to make some comedy stops today. I figure with the time off, I can make some connections, shake some hands and kiss some babies. I want to audition at a bunch of clubs before the end of the summer, and this campaign helps.

I really want to get into some of the more, shall we say, obscure comedy clubs in the city. A lot of people want to get in at the Comic Strip, and Stand Up NY, but I would like to see if I can get into the rotation at places like Tribeca Comedy, LOL, HA, and Laughing Devil.

I want to build some more confidence in my material, and get used to working longer sets when I can. I also want to get into more bar show rotations, and get some of my skill up that way. I think that is the way to get me going, and to improve the fastest.

Those clubs make me nervous, but I have to realize, that I have to start getting myself out there, and a no just means come back in a few months. I have to start taking more chances, and I need to actually get out there to start taking them. If I can, there is a lot more stage time in my future.

Get that stage time.

Deciding on output is the hardest thing to do. I want to make the best move in terms of getting something out there, but I have to say that in doing that, I am freezing myself out of making any real potential progress.

I have this fear, that people will laugh, just by speaking up. Logically, I know going through this will only make me stronger, speaking out, asking dumb questions, and getting the ideas to work again next time. Getting a hundred thumbs down is bad, but at least you have a bar to begin with.

Logically I know that. Emotionally, I don’t. I keep myself shielded from failure because I don’t want to experience someone calling me stupid, or telling me that you can never try again.

In the modern world, that just doesn’t make sense anymore, because there are a million venues to try, and a million ways to get what you want. The road always goes somewhere. Just have to make that work.

New 99u Book is out. I plan on reading it, and reading it a lot. Hopefully that can be done by the end of this weekend.

Done: 3 Things Wrap Up Push Ups
Not Done: Meditation To-do 16/8 Water Thank You Vegetable Juice CPAP

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