8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions ䷀

Tag: doing it daily

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. 

  • 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.

  • Daily Enough

    As I publish these words on my blog I am marking twenty-five years of dedicated posting online. It has made me neither rich nor famous, but I have done it nonetheless.

    There are a lot of famous blogs out there, but the one that always sticks in my head is Seth’s Blog[1], the uplifting and advice-for-life daily posts of Seth Godin, author and marketing guru to the masses. 

    I couldn’t tell you for sure if Seth himself sits down and writes his own blog posts anymore (though I suspect he’s done well enough for himself lately that he has a team of people who manage the logistics of that sort of thing these days and perhaps his thoughts are merely distilled from conversations or other insights—but then I may be completely wrong about that, too) but every day, no matter what, a new post appears on his blog and offers up even just a few sentences of insight. All for free.

    8 Clicks from Nowhere is unabashedly written in the spirit of Seth’s Blog, not as a copycat but as a spiritual and philosophical guiding light: daily insights for whatever they are worth offered up on a free-to-access website.

    As of this post I’ve been posting routinely for a quarter of a century in this format.

    And again—not rich and not famous for it, but certainly a better writer, a deeper thinker, and often driven to push myself for the sake of having something to write about. That’s just about enough to keep me going.