Daily writing.
Those two words are threatening. You say them, and people (like me) think, “Daily? Writing? There’s no way I could make that happen. Besides, I don’t want to be an author. Why would I write daily?”
And so the internal conversation goes until we’ve sufficiently reasoned our way out of the value of the habit.
Here’s why you should write daily, regardless of your profession or ambition: it creates value in your life.
Daily writing means you have discipline. You sit down at the computer everyday, regardless of the day, and write. You build a habit and stick to that habit. The practice of building habits is, in and of itself, valuable.
Daily writing keeps you in the mode of creator rather than consumer. There is no room for writer’s block. You have something to say everyday, period.
Daily writing makes you seek out new learning on a regular basis. If you’re not learning, you’ll have nothing to say and then you’ll have the awkward moment where you have to publish a post about what you ate for breakfast, which is only interesting on Instagram (arguable, I know).
When you’re learning, daily writing makes you synthesize your learning and process it enough to put it on paper. The act of teaching what you learn and observe is an art, and it is an art that pays dividends through your ability to notice and act on patterns in the world.
Daily writing helps you build connections between seemingly disparate ideas, creating new paths for creation and new ideas for projects and partnerships.
The more you write, the bigger your body of work. In today’s (and tomorrow’s) world of work, the most important thing you can do is to build a body of work that will stand for what you are capable of. That body of work will become your job security and income guarantee as it grows.
So whether you want to be an author, a scientist, a corporate mover and shaker, or an artist… daily writing will help you accomplish your goals.
I could tell you how, but ultimately the how is not important. It’s the why. It’s the push to get over the fear that you don’t have anything to say. You do.
Thanks to the readers who responded to my post about the difference between you and Seth Godin. You were the inspiration for this post.