Instead, I simply made it a single chapter, and—you may have noticed—I talk about it with a bit of bias and abundance.

Oddly enough as this explanation post (I’ve been writing one, in order, for each of my topics on every Monday for the last twenty-some weeks) came up in the queue, this project is simultaneously approaching it’s two hundredth post. In fact, this may very well be it.  And now well into my tenth month of writing an article for every weekday of this year so far, I’m approaching eighty thousand words of content on this site.

Eighty thousand words is a book. Printed, you’d pick it up, hold it in your hand and think “Jeeze, this guy’s got something to get off his chest. This is a thick book.”

I’ve made that. I’ve written it. I’ve posted it. I’ve refined it, tweaked it, supplemented it with citations and definitions. I’ve sent it out into the world for the better part of a year for anyone to read. And I’ve done it all a few hundred words at a time, each and every weekday, iteratively and in increments.

If that doesn’t hammer home the point I’m trying to make I don’t know what else does. Either way, under the category of Iteration & Epics I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

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 collection of writing 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. 

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. 

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 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.

Start small.

Start with the achievable and work your way up.

I have been planning this novel-length audio production, writing words, making scripts, composing music, mixing sounds, and—nothing firm has been done yet.

The big project is simply too overwhelming.

Oh sure, I see the forest, but I can’t seem to plant the trees. It all feels like I’m jumping into a new plan, a new skill, a new concept without knowing if any of it will even work—and more importantly if something critical will fail. And the result is paralysis incarnate.  

Something smaller has to come first.

In my case, maybe instead of trying to make a novel, I record some audio blogs first. Then maybe after I do that, I work on making a few one-pager short stories into encapsulated one-off samples of what I’m hoping to create on a larger scale. And then, maybe something else, and something else after that, and maybe… eventually, the real thing will fall into place.

I’m sure many great people have achieved great things in one fell swoop… but the rest of us may need to build up our stamina first.

Oh, right. I didn’t mention it before today.

Thing is, I haven’t really been promoting or sharing this blog yet as I built up something of both a back-catalogue of posts and some project momentum, but I thought it worth calling out that after one month of posting every weekday I have… tada! One month worth of posts!

If you keep reading, you will learn one big theme from me: I am a big proponent of a common idea called incrementalism, the notion that big things don’t happen all at once, but rather by chipping away at a problem with steadfast effort and persistence.

Writing a little bit each day.

Mastering a new talent by honing one new skill at a time. 

Practice, repetition, and patience. 

Incrementally, bit by bit, line by line, word by word, anything can be done. Well, probably anything… within reason, y’know.

The steady drip of water can wear away a stone after a long enough time. A person can wear away at a problem with the same incremental effort and patience. 

And if nothing else, writing every day can build a pretty solid collection of blog posts, even after just one month. Check. Mate.

I am just starting out on this project and I have not only accepted that every new post is not going to be a gem of enlightenment and a spark of insight. 

I have decades of writing experience, but even so, the idea of generating something interesting to say five times a week is daunting and seems as though an endless mountain is rising in front of me.

Yet.

The climb is the point. 

I may never reach that impossible summit.

And anyone who creates needs to be okay with that idea.

Nothing here is meant to be a final, salable product held up for judgement because most of it is just for myself, yes, shared with the world but nothing more than that.

I broke out a fresh sketch book, I gave myself a few basic constraints, and I drew one sketch for each day in October.

Can you guess how many of those sketches were amazing?

Basically none.

Sure, there were a few solid works and I even shared a half dozen of them. But if I was seeking perfectionism—or worse, waiting for it to even get started on my artist journey—I would have drawn one thing on October first …and then very likely given up.

Instead, I embraced it as an incremental effort of modest improvement.  The goal wasn’t to create thirty-one great sketches, no, the goal was to sketch thirty-one times.

The goal wasn’t fame or a viral drawing or something I could sell. The goal was creating on a routine.

It’s easy to aim too high. It’s easy to think that anything and everything we create should be a final, salable product to hold up to the whole world for judgement.

It’s actually pretty tough to recognize that almost everything we make should start off as something just for our own selves and maybe never become more than that.