Consistency

There's a lot to be said about consistency. Something about how many steps make a mile and all that. It's sound advice. If you work at something everyday for a year, you're probably going to get somewhere. You might improve at a skill better if you use an efficient training method, but that groundwork of actually doing the thing needs to be there first.

I started this blog because I stopped worrying about not knowing how exactly to get into online writing. After all, there's nothing to lose by just starting. Better to have some mileage and be able to change course if I need to, than to never start at all.

Some patience is required with this approach, of course.On days where you show up and just do the bare minimum, you wonder if you're even progressing.You might be pressured to get a bit more done in that case. On most days, that's the mental trick that gets you into making a decent amount of progress in the first place. 

But there are days when you must allow yourself to pass with the bare minimum. 

First, if you don't, you will realise the 'bare minimum' is just a lie you're telling yourself, and that resistance will come back when you that voice in the back of your head is telling you that you MUST get through a certain amount reps, words, chapters, sketches, or minutes that is actually too high for you to sustain at the moment. That freedom the bare minimum you set yourself used to give you no longer works, because you never actually use it.

Second, you're never going to meet your expectations most days. In your head, you'll probably imagine yourself giving it your 100%, or 80%, or whatever, when in reality you'll probably only meet half of that. Or even lower. Most days you might not even be able to get around to whatever it is you want to do. But simply sitting down for a minute is better than not doing it at all. Remember, what you want to establish is the routine, and early in your journey of picking up a new habit or skill or whatever, that's way more important than actually mastering the skill or benefiting from the activity. Routine comes first, in most cases.

Considering this blog has only been going for three days, I guess this is going to be a test in seeing if I can apply this principle myself.

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