8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions ䷀

Category: [26] Iteration & Epics

Iteration and the simple practices of routine that can have with profound compounding effects.

Chapter List

  • Every Day

    Routinely, I drop myself headfirst into a daily challenge.

    There is an art to it.

    There is a goal embedded within.

    There is a entrenched motivation.

    Why? Well…

    As an example, imagine you want to be better at drawing hands. Hands are notoriously difficult to sketch. They are both familiar and complex. They are easy to draw poorly. So, what you opt to do is practice every day: each day, you tell yourself, you will draw hands. They will never be the same hands. The hands will be drawn from different perspectives in different poses and perhaps even in different media or styles.  But you will draw at least one hand every single day. Period.

    You’ve just crafted a simple daily challenge for yourself.

    No spreadsheets. No written reports. No accountability to anyone but yourself. You simply know that sometime each day you need to set aside a small chunk of time to sketch hands.

    And you’ll do this challenge for a month. Or maybe two months. Or, if you’re incredibly dedicated to learning to draw hands, you’ll challenge yourself for a whole year.

    At the end of the challenge what do you think the result will be? Yeah, you’ll be happy to take a few days off from drawing hands, but I can almost guarantee that the daily practice, the grind, the iterative epic learning will have improved your skills by a measurable amount.

    Challenge yourself to do something every day.  And then give yourself a hand.

  • Mile Stone

    Once again I am going to pause and point out one of the core tenets of this blogging project: iteration and incremental work leads to interesting things.

    This post not only marks the end of July and the end of seven months of regular posting here, but the one hundred and fiftieth mini-essay.

    It is all that extra little bit impressive (to me, anyhow) because I also managed to take a week-long vacation where I was almost completely without usable internet for most of the trip and still managed to have set up this project to hum along without human intervention for the duration.

    Blah, blah, blah, whatever—you shrug.

    But here’s my whole point: I do stuff like this all the time. I learn new skills, I build crazy projects. I tackle huge efforts of fitness, art, or creativity. And then people wince and say something like—well, good for you but I could never find the time or energy or motivation.

    Incrementalism. That’s it. One little bit at a time. One piece each day. A few words. Ten minutes of practice. Pulling your attention away from the screen in your hand and putting it onto a keyboard or a pen or a musical instrument or… whatever. 

    Incrementalism. It leads to works of substance and beyond.

    Seven months ago I started typing a few words about the push behind creative life and at the heart of that was this silly example—which is now a blog with one hundred and fifty articles, and no plan to stop.

    Golf clap. Or start something for yourself today. And tomorrow. And the day after ad naseum. 

  • Proper Bookish

    You’ll need to excuse my excitement yet again. I’m going on holiday for most of the front half of July so I’ve been writing these posts nearly three weeks in advance to get a leg up on the schedule and timing… and I’ve just this morning (in early July) looked at the word count on this project.

    It’s now well over fifty thousand. A proper book.

    Fifty thousand words was always the novel-length goal set out at the beginning of November when that infamous[1] novel writing challenge took place and we all rushed to pen fifty thousand words in thirty days.

    I now only point to it as a milestone.

    Oh, and as a reminder about my biggest and most core bit of quasi-advice on this project: the power of iteration and incrementalism.  Again, and again, and probably again I will point to these very words and just say: twenty minutes a day and a couple hundred words. It adds up.

    Heck, I don’t know if some random book publisher is out there trolling around looking for the next project, but hey… this needs some more organization and polish, but I’ve got the guts of something serious here. Don’t you agree?

    Okay, fine. I’ll back off the self-aggrandizing and get back on topic.

    Fifty thousand words of something is definitely not nothing—nor is it everything—but it is worth noting, particularly as a point about putting in the work. 

    I did. I am. I will. You can, too. 

  • Canada Day-ish

    Being Canadian means our annual celebration of national pride falls on the exact-ish half way point of the year. Where New Years Day is the first day of the year, Canada Day, July 1st, is on the first day of the second half of the year.

    This year also happens to be the day when I mark the exact six month anniversary of this writing project. It’s been half a year of daily-ish blog posts.

    What that means for the site is that after six months of working on this project, I have accumulated one hundred and twenty-seven (plus this one) posts on some meandering thoughts on creativity and pursuing a creative-ish life.

    Routine can lead to profoundly interesting things. Iteration of effort, keeping at something through incremental addition and improvements can break through the overwhelming perception of size and complexity and spark a kind of driving force that can make anyone successful-ish.

    Readers may have already noted that I am an evangelist-ish for the the incrementalism of things.  Doing a little bit each day can simply get the work done.

    And on a day like this, when I’ve crossed yet another milestone and keep going, posting the next post and the next and knowing that there are likely a few more in the queue even as you are reading these words, is the best I can do to show by example of what twenty minutes of writing per day can accomplish-ish.

  • Navel Gazing 

    I don’t think I’ll ever stop being fascinated by the simple idea that iterative work can lead to huge accomplishments.

    I was sitting down to write this post, pondering a topic, and I noticed that at some point last week I’d passed the one hundred post milestone on this blog.

    Navel gazing could have easily followed, and maybe that’s all this post is. But I’d like to think that it is a self-referential example of my point, too.

    A few times per week for the last five months I’ve sat down with a hot tea and my keyboard and written out a few words on a topic related to the mission of this blog: to talk about the fun and frustration of creative exploration, to poke at the obvious and pry into the obscure, and to generally reflect on the thousands upon thousands of aspects of what it takes to bootstrap oneself into a creative professional life no matter your career stage—the first person perspective version of that.

    And so I write, and often I’ve preached upon the simplest of simple topics: just putting in the work. Doing it. Actually writing, making, or creating—no matter how small or incremental it might seem.

    By example, one of the things I create incrementally is this blog, writing oft disconnected thoughts about the process itself: navel gazing upon navel gazing.

    One hundred posts later my incremental effort sits around forty thousand words: a short book worth of text and ideas posted here for people to read and enjoy. If that’s not something huge from a hundred little iterative efforts I don’t know what is.