habits – Harrison Hansford

Writing Better: Why I choose to write in public

I have been writing a blog post every day up until the end of the year with the goal of improving my writing skills. The reason I started doing this was because I realised that I was not a very ‘correct’ writer; my writing had a lot of grammatical errors, and didn’t flow very nicely. I am very bullish on the value of being able to communicate well, it is one of the most characteristics that almost all successful people share. I am a natural talker (although this definitely needs work as well), but writing was letting me down, so I decided to practice it. I didn’t just want to write something for myself every day because I knew I wouldn’t do it, I wanted to practice in public. I got the idea of this from David Perell and it was a game changer for me. The pressure of knowing (hoping) that other people would read my writing naturally made me be more thoughtful about what I wrote, and put more effort into it.

When I started I was following the thought process which has been promoted by many people who are in the business of creating content, be it books, youtube videos, blogs, etc. That is, the mindset of “your first 100 pieces of writing are not going to be good anyway, so don’t try to perfect each blog post, just write, and accept that it won’t be good.” This was great in helping me form a habit of writing every day, which is arguably one of the hardest things about writing. I also think it helped me think more creatively in general; I had to write something, so I had to have an idea, not the other way around. If I had waited for an idea to come to be so I could write about it spontaneously, I would have written a grand total of 3-4 blog posts, and none of them would have been great.

I know that I haven’t written any blog posts that have been amazing, some are definitely more interesting than others, and some are flat out boring, but throughout the process, I have felt writing come easier and easier, which is conducive to writing more, which will result in improvements. Or will it?

One of my friends raised the point that he had some issues with the “just produce a lot of content” idea of improvement, because it means you become comfortable with producing bad work, rather than aiming for higher quality work. I realised I didn’t have a comeback remark to this, and it made me think whether my writing has actually improved. I just looked back at my first blog post of the 50 days and was expecting to be embarrassed by it, but it was actually quite good, and incidentally, my most liked blog post. I compared it to a recent blog post explaining cryptocurrency and I struggle to see where I have improved. This is a bit disheartening but I think it’s important to always try assess yourself to see if your efforts are actually paying off, and simply putting up a blog every day without too much regard for quality doesn’t seem to be working for me. So whats the plan?

I still want to improve my writing ability, so what I plan on doing is upping the level of ‘public’ I go. Currently I just upload every blog to my website, and share the occasional one to LinkedIn where I have a few friends and other people in the area of exercise physiology. I don’t have any of my supervisors or other people I would want to impress on there. So to help me improve my writing, I’m going to add all of those people I look up to on LinkedIn, as well as begin sharing my posts to Twitter, or even write tweet-storms about thoughts I’m having. I’ve told myself a million times I should not be worried about what other people think about my work, or me in general. Beginning to post more to these channels will be one way to achieve both goals, improving my writing, and getting out of my comfort zone.

Do we really need deadlines?

At the end of a brutal interval running session I was thinking, “I should set myself some deadlines for getting X done.” I thought to myself, why, if doing X is something I enjoy, should I set myself a deadline if there is no external reason it needs to be done at a certain time. This whole idea goes against my whole notion of productivity and I thought I’d challenge myself to write a blog post essentially playing the devils advocate against myself.

There are a few assumptions I’m going to spell out first, I’m assuming that the task you’re doing is not an assignment or any other task which is ‘due’ at a certain date. This automatically disqualifies a lot of scenarios, this post is about work we tell ourselves we ‘want’ to be doing. If we want to do something, it should get done in our free time, it should be something we enjoy doing, therefore, doesn’t need a deadline.

What does having a deadline do to something we enjoy? First of all, I think deadlines create pressure on ourselves, which can be a very good thing, challenging us to get things done more efficiently, so we have more time to do other things we enjoy blah blah blah, you’ve heard the spiel a thousand times. Deadlines create pressure which can turn things we genuinely enjoy, into tasks we have to do and I’ve never met anyone who loves to HAVE to do something. Furthermore, if it is a creative task we are doing, deadlines create a very end-product focussed lens at which colours the way we see our work. Anything that we enjoy doing, creative or otherwise, should be enjoyed for the love of undertaking the task, not completing it. The endpoint is not the goal, the endpoint is merely a consequence of the goal, enjoy doing the task. Simply having a deadline inevitably makes the endpoint the goal.

Deadlines can mean ironically nothing gets finished. Many times I’m sure we’ve all not done something because it wasn’t quite right in the end and we weren’t happy with it, or that we didn’t think we would be able to produce something perfect, so we produce nothing at all. This is so common, especially when we are attempting new things, we must learn by trial and error. Our first 100 of anything will be bad, it is only after that we begin to get good at whatever it is we’re doing. This is precisely the reason why I’ve challenged myself to post a blog every day, because it forces me to get the first 100 out of the way without trying to make each post perfect. It’s an unreasonable expectation to be able to produce something perfect without practicing. Imagine you’re in a pottery class and there are two groups of people, one group who get told they have a month to work on one pot, and they can spend as much time as they want on it, the other group is forced to make many pots, at least a pot each day, who do you think will produce a better pot in the end? I know I would learn so much by making many many pots, much more than if I were to make one ‘perfect’ pot. The same applies to any skill, by setting deadlines, you create the internal expectation that something needs to be perfected by a certain time, lending itself to group one, spending a lot of time on one pot, not learning through trial and error.

So what is the solution? I believe rather than setting deadlines, you should simply set time goals for doing the thing. This shouldn’t be too much of a shift, rather than saying, “I want to have written an essay on X in 2 weeks time”, tell yourself you want to spend 20mins writing, every day. You can always spend more time if you’re in the zone, but 20 minutes is something we can all find somewhere in our days.

Writing this was an interesting experience and I’m sure that reading this back you can see me convincing myself that this was the right way to be, and I came out with a conclusion of what I actually do, even though at the start I thought this was going against my beliefs. It is interesting to pick a counterpoint to a belief or set of beliefs you hold closely and try to fight for it, it solidifies your understanding of where you really stand on the view. Give it a try, I really enjoyed doing it.

The Two Day Rule

Yesterday I was lying in bed and realised I hadn’t done a blog post for the day. I lay there for a minute, tossing up whether I should jump out of bed and quickly write something up. I was exhausted and obviously that is a bad idea. I’ve got another busy day today and my first instinct was to just leave the post for the evening. This is a recipe for disaster and I remembered a rule from Matt D’Avella called the two day rule. This rule simply states that if we want to make something a habit, don’t miss two days in a row.

We all lapse sometimes and get busy and any habit realistically isn’t going to be done every day without fail. Often the sense of failure when we miss a day of something can lead to another missed day, and another, until we stop all together. This is why the two day rule is so useful, it’s a subconscious get out of jail free card when we lapse, preventing a complete meltdown.

This seems so simple, and it is, but often it’s these small shifts in mindset which have an outsized impact of our productivity and lives. I’m back on the horse, posting another blog and hopefully continue to do so!