Another 37

 

I’ve been writing. I really have. Working on a couple of novels that got stuck at the same word count, working on…worldbuilding for those same novels. Okay, mostly I’ve been doing stuff with those novels.

But I find I’m far too stuck inside my own head. Which is true of everyone all the time, I suppose, but there are ways to delude yourself that it’s not the case. Way back when that used to require human contact and sunlight. Thank god those days are over! We’re more sophisticated. We have blogging now.

And I miss blogging. And I miss writing about different things. And I miss the validation that comes from the systemically conveyed unspecified approval of strangers on the internet.

So here we go! Thirty-seven blog posts. I’ve done this before, but this time is going to be a little different. A little less intense, because:

1. I have a full time job now, and I didn’t then, and
2. My stomach hurts.

See. A numbered list. Do I still remember how to blog, or what?

The differences are going to be that I’m not going to do in every day for thirty-seven days. Instead I’m going to give myself up to three days off a week. I won’t necessarily take all three, but I can. The whole thing ends when I’m done with thirty-seven posts. There’s probably going to be a serial novel started in there somewhere, with once a week updates. Because I really want to do that.

So here we actually go! The whole thing (probably) starts tomorrow, with (probably) a micro-fiction post. I’ll see you there. Kind of?

37 Lessons from 37 Days

37, day…thirty seven!

For thirty-seven days, I have been violating the laws of hyphenation. Also, I have been posting in my blog every day. I noticed that I wasn’t posting nearly enough. Worse still, I wasn’t writing nearly enough. This was a serious problem, and like most serious problems it needed a silly solution. I decided to undergo a transformative journey. A hero quest of epic proportions, where upon I would journey into the underworld, fight mighty philosopher-dragons, take tea with weird gods, and return with a profoundly enhanced understanding of myself and my relationship to the expansive and nuanced cosmos.

I didn’t do that. Instead I wrote a bunch of blog posts.

The obvious way to end all of this is to talk about how the experience has changed me, and what I have learned. I had a sense from the start that I was not going to do this. It’s a bit hokey. Plus, I didn’t really feel changed. I didn’t really feel like I had learned anything. Thirty seven days of blog posts isn’t exactly an ambitious or life changing undertaking.

As I was driving home yesterday from a restaurant, I thought about the fact that I hadn’t learned much or changed significantly, and something a bit strange occurred. All of the things I had learned, the ways I had changed, started to pop into my mind. By the time I got home I realized that this thing that I did wasn’t small. Not for me.

It was enormous.

I’ve changed and learned more in these thirty-seven days than in the year before them. Or the year before that. I’ve acquired a few very specific skills that I have wanted, desperately, my whole life. I feel silly and over the top saying it, right here and right now. The word “life changing” is pretentious at all but the best of times. The best of times are supposed to happen in Borneo, helping starving children. They are supposed to happen on the top of mountains, as we reach the peak and look down on the tiny world below in its shrouded majesty. They are not supposed to happen sitting in front of a computer, working on a blog, for a little over a month. But you can climb and mountain be unchanged as a person. You can witness things that are great and magnificent and amazing and emerge little different than you were before.

And you can close your eyes as the light of a single sunrise washes over you, and open them someone else entirely.

Here are the things I have learned, and the ways I have changed:

• I can sit down and write, now.

I have wanted to be a writer my whole life. I wrote stories as soon as I could write anything. Before that, I scribbled stories on notebooks in lines. Circles and shapes represented major characters and events, and the momentum of the plot was the lines between then. My failures in college burned the writer out of me. I went to a school with a lot of writing. Because I was more interested in my budding social life, and because I never found a subject I loved, and because I have a very short attention span when I lack interest in something, I found it very difficult to sit down and write papers. I didn’t do it, and I didn’t pass classes.

I’ve been trying to write fiction and non-fiction off and on in the decade since. I went through spurts of success when an idea particularly inspired me. The phases always passed. Usually when I sat down to write I froze up. Sometimes it led to full-blown panic attacks. I wanted to be able to just sit down and get words down. It didn’t matter if they were good. I knew I had a talented writer in me somewhere. I got good enough grades and won enough writing awards to be sure of that. But I couldn’t write. I just couldn’t do it.

I’ve written more in the last thirty-seven days than in any thirty-seven day period in my life. There was a wall of ice between me and the writer that is also me. It is melted, and evaporated, and I have collected the rainwater. It tastes pure and wonderful It took courage to fight against deep fears that were as powerful as they were stupid and pointless. It took determination. It was so god damned easy I don’t know why it took this long.

• It turns out I do have self-discipline, and self-motivation. I just needed to dig it up.

I left my cook/manager position at the end of October with the intention of never working in a restaurant again. I had another job all lined up, which I did not get. I thought it was a sure thing, but they turned me down. It devastated me. I spent a week trying half-assedly to find another job, but they all sounded terrible. I wanted to do something I was good at, for once.

I sat my wife down and told her I did not want to get a job right away. I had wanted to be a freelance writer for a long time, and now, if she was okay with it, I was going to try it. She would have to support me, and I had a lot of learning and study to do before I even put my toe in the water. One of us left that conversation thinking I was ridiculous and crazy.

It wasn’t her.

I couldn’t even sit down and write without freezing up. I have never been self-disciplined or motivated. I had no reason to think I could do this other than the desire to do it and confidence that there was a writer in here somewhere. Now, months later, I know I can do it. I still have a long way to go, but I can set goals and follow them. If I made a schedule and assign consequences to that schedule, I can follow it. I have never been able to do that. People told me these were things you could learn, but I only half believed them. Now I know it is true.

• Writing fiction is easy.

I do not plan on making a career out of fiction writing. That requires luck as well as talent. But for so long I have been envious of people who could write stories. I come up with ideas all the time. I love to tell stories. I can write dialogue, and plots come naturally. What I could not do was actually write the damn stuff. For years I have desperately longed for the ability to turn an idea into a story. It sounded so easy on paper, but I always froze up. I started my blog with the personal essays and opinions that are the meat of most blogging. Fiction has taken over. I love to write fiction. I knew that my brain was particularly suited for it, if I could find the key to the cabinet where the little fiction-writing leprechaun was tied up with iron thread. It took less than thirty-seven days. I have a long way to go before I am the fiction writer I want to be, but now I can just sit down and spin it out. Seriously. Give me a topic.

• Life moves more slowly when you are doing something you care about.

This has been a very long thirty-seven days. My friend remarked at one point, around day 20, that the time was “flying by.” My response was, “No it isn’t!” I knew this already. Projects keep life full and interesting. But not since my wedding have I had a project that did so as thoroughly as this. It is incredibly satisfying.

• Transformative journeys are transformative.

Eat a whole container of tictacs every day for the next sixty days. Read all of the Hugo winners. Write ninety-nine stories about bananas. Lose forty pounds in the next sixth months. It doesn’t matter. When you do some that is fundamentally different from the way you normally live your life, it changes you. You think differently. Of course you do. It’s in the definition. There’s nothing mystical about it. If you are bored with who you are or how you are living your life, go on a journey. It doesn’t have to be big, or life-changing. Hell, it doesn’t even have to be interesting. It just has to follow a few simple rules:

1. It has to be outside the normal scope of your experience. Playing awesome video games for thirty days might not do it if you already do that most days anyway. Playing sixty straight days first person shooters when you never play FPSs, on the other hand, might.
2. You have to do it every day, without fail. It can’t be something you do just when you feel like it. Otherwise it can’t change you, because it has to have power over you.
3. Keep track of it. Write a blog, or at least a journal if you’re shy. It can be a chart, or a marked-up calendar, if that’s how your brain works. You want to be able to look back at the early stages and see where you were. And you want evidence of progress.

That’s it. And I will tell you, it’s addicting. I am going to take a few days or a week, and then I am sure I will find a new project. I have a few ideas, but we’ll see what grabs my attention. Until then, I think I’m going to write a blog post every-other day, and let inspiration hit me when it hits me.

I think at some point I want to write a novel in 17 days. 17 would look very good in my trophy case.

Motivation and Consequences

37, day twenty one.

I have gotten nothing done today.

I am not worried about it. It happens. I reached this conclusion about 20 minutes ago, when I realized I already had a solution. I have been doing it. This is simply the first time it has been tested.

I spent most of the day beating myself up over the fact that I have not done anything. When I was little, and I got in trouble for not doing my homework, my father used to occasionally pull out the old chestnut that “you put more effort into avoiding work than you would have if you had just done the work.” It’s the sort of thing parents say. It’s the sort of thing type A personalities say to us type F personalities.

It is also wrong.

Doing work is more work than not doing work. Doing work is more stressful than not doing work, at least in the short-term. Sometimes it comes back to bite you. Not always. Part of the reason people avoid work so often despite the potential consequences that they get away with it more often than not. The other reason is that in the moment, as you sit in front of a blank white screen and a mockingly blinking cursor, the consequences don’t matter. Anything seems better than doing the assignment. Even when it does require effort or elaborate scheming to avoid work, there is an intense surge of relief in the moment that you decide to not complete an obligation. It’s a rush.

Say, for example, you wake up one morning and really don’t want to go to work. This happens all the time, but today it is worse than usual. Should I call out, you ask yourself. You ask yourself this frequently, but this time you consider it. You don’t have any projects right now that can’t go ahead without you. There isn’t a flu going around the office that leaves them understaffed. You’ll have to make up some work tomorrow, but right now that does not sound so bad. So you call in, and tell them you have meliginioplastitus syndrome B, and that if you come in you’ll risk infecting everyone on the office and in the subways system and causing a city-wide shutdown of essential services. Then you lay back in bed, smile, and contemplate the panoply of options that just filled up your immediate future.

It’s a rush.

I am not saying you should do this. In truth, I haven’t missed a day of work in four years except for when my father died. At my last job, I couldn’t miss a day. The restaurant could barely run without me. That is not to say I didn’t want to.

Today, I have gotten almost nothing done on my daily goal list. Having a daily goal list is a good idea. People who sell books on making daily goal lists say that all successful people have daily goal lists. So it must be true.

Snarkiness aside –temporarily, I assure you – the daily goal is working for me. It took awhile to figure out how to make it work. I am not a naturally self driven individual. I am too hyperactive and too philosophical for that. My attention span has never been long unless I am obsessed with something. I cannot sit down and tell myself that I am going to be the best that I can be, and that I am going to change the world. I am not built like it. I know that such things can motivate people, and that is fine for them. I am too consequence oriented.

What do I mean by “change the world?” How do I plan on changing it? What are the mathematical chances of success as defined broadly by measurable impact on a statistically significant portion of my target demographic? Don’t I change the world just by existing and communicating and using up resources?

For me, setting and achieving goals is a tangible and realistic way to train myself to be more self-directed and disciplined. It has not been easy, but it is working. It is a slow process, but it is working. For weeks my goals did little more than take up space on my computer. Every day I wrote them, full of vigor and motivation. Every day I achieved one or two, but not the whole list. Every day I shook my head and told myself that the next day I would do better.

I despaired of the whole process of goal-setting. After all, there was no arbiter but myself. The fact that I wrote the goals down did not give me any more incentive to do them than if I didn’t write them down. It provided direction, perhaps, but no consequences.

I need consequences.

Several weeks ago I decided to try an experiment. What if I set some consequences? It might not work. There is no one to enforce them but myself. There was no one to enforce the goals but myself, and that certainly didn’t work. But there’s no harm in trying, right? I decided that each morning I would set goals, and I could not play video games until I achieved every single goal. If I didn’t achieve all of my goals, I was not allowed to play video games that day.

I haven’t missed a single goal on a single day since then.

Some days I really want to do everything on my list. My motivation spikes high on the days that it registers at all. Usually I do all of my goals and more besides On those days, I can play games at the end of the day to relax, and to enjoy the feeling of success. On other days I do not feel so ambitious. I can’t motivated myself to attack five or six separate goals. Recent studies have shown that self-control might be a limited resource . On those days, I don’t give myself five or six goals. I only have one: play video games. Everything else is a way to achieve that goal. It is much, much easier.

Today is the first day since I started that I do not think I will cross off every goal on my list. I don’t think I have it in me today to do any exercise. All day long, I tried to motivate myself. All day long, I berated myself for my lack of achievement. Should I write today off? Should I pretend I never set myself any goals and then start in again tomorrow? I agonized about it. It felt like a huge blow to my self-discipline training.

Until I realized I already had the answer. This is all so new to me, the implications of the very systems I set up for myself are not always clear. I could write today off. I could skip a day or two. I just didn’t get to play any games. I really want to play games. But I won’t. I have just enough self-control on this lazy day to achieve one goal: enforce the system. Tomorrow, if I am feeling lazy again, I will go into the day knowing that I won’t get any stress relief in the form of games. Will that motivate me to achieve what I set out for myself?

I can think of one way to find out.