I'm surprised that I managed to keep posting up until this point.
In order for you to understand exactly why that surprises me, I have to tell you a bit about myself, and my current situation. The short version is this - I am a lazy person. I am curious and I like to imagine myself doing amazing things in the future, but I know that the chance of me quitting anything I try is quite high, simply because I get bored with whatever activity I pick and I go back to other things.
Because of that I get a feeling of surprise whenever I think about how many articles I posted so far and how much time I spent doing this activity overall. I am particularly amazed at the fact that I managed to keep myself consistent for the past six months, despite the fact that for the past two I've been away from home, in a different country, at a seasonal job where I work around 10 hours a day, for 6 days a week.
I come home from work at midday, and at night, almost always exhausted and with very little energy to do anything other than sleep. And yet somehow, despite all that, I gathered whatever energy I had left and used it to write and post every day, even when I could barely keep my eyes open.
How did I do it?
Well, there are many factors that have to be considered here.
First, it's my obsession with progress. I am a lazy person, but I had a taste of what it feels like to succeed, even a little, at something that I tried, to see my progress result in rewards. Since then, I've been stuck with this desire to always move forward, to the point where if I don't, I get quite depressed.
This forces me to always do something that allows me to grow over time. Writing fits that criteria quite well. Not only do I get visibly better at the activity itself, but the amount of articles that I wrote so far fills that hole in my soul that craves for progress. I can see the number of posts going up, and the number of people appreciating them.
Not to mention that I am making a bit of profit on the side with this activity, which adds to that obsession.
Second, it's the amount of time I spent writing. I've been doing it since 2017. I attempted to write before that, and almost succeeded in making a habit out of it a few times, but I always gave up. However, I've been fairly consistent for the past 5 years, which helps a lot.
I managed to develop a style that I'm comfortable with, a style that allows me to write articles with more ease. I became so used to writing that doing it isn't a tedious process anymore in which I have to spend hours and hours pondering over an idea, trying to find the perfect way to approach it. If I can think of something to write about, I can almost immediately begin.
This made writing easier with time. The act of coming up with an article and transforming it into something real isn't a struggle any more - it's almost second nature. I have good days, and bad days, but I can easily write something quick if I need to. This is the advantage of doing one task for a very long time.
Third, I decided to keep my interests diverse. This allows me to write about whatever I want, without being constrained by one niche. Sure, theoretically, having only one subject to write about over and over again can make things quite easy, but it can also make things quite boring. It can become difficult to find something new to write about within that niche after years and years of content creation.
Writing about whatever I want, whenever I want, makes it easy. Today I can write about how to work better. Tomorrow I can write about how to improve as a person. The day after I can talk about my experience with Linux. Then I can talk about my favorite type of music and why I love it.
They say that being a jack of all trades is bad, but I find it quite entertaining. It also keeps me creative.
All these factors and others, combined, transformed writing into one of those things that I just do. I can wake up in the morning, make myself a cup of coffee, assuming I'm at home and not at work somewhere else, sit down in front of my computer and write 2 articles within an hour. I can also do it daily, despite of how exhausted I am. Or I can write 7 articles in a day and not write another sentence for an entire week.
To summarize it, I think that in order to get to a point in which the activity that you do becomes a part of your life, you need at least two things, preferably three:
- to find ways in which to always move forward and make progress with your activity, because if you do the same thing again and again with nothing ever changing, then you will eventually get bored. This might also require you to focus on the small amounts of progress that you make, not only craving the big improvements.
- to be as consistent as possible. This will allow you to create your own style and workflow in time, and you can experiment with those things until you can make the activity that you're interested in as easy and comfortable for you to do as possible.
- to make sure that you allow enough diversity to keep things interesting. It's okay not to spread yourself too thin, because if you do, you might become too lost and not be able to do what you want any more. But making things interesting by diversifying them is just as important. Do one thing for too long, and you'll become so bored and sick of it that you won't even want to think about it.
hiveblocks