Resistance Sucks
Resistance is …
If you don’t know what resistance is I encourage you to go checkout the work of Steven Pressfield the author of a number of fiction and non-fiction books, including at least one NYT Bestseller. In short it’s the thing inside you that stops you from doing your work.
Right now one of the things that I’m trying to improve at is my writing. That’s the whole reason this blog exists. For me to keep practicing writing and practicing publishing. It doesn’t help me to write if no one ever sees it and I never get feedback.
Here’s the thing; I’m actually kinda shy and pushing things out for the world to see and give criticism on is really hard even if I know that doing so will lead to improvement and being a better person. I would much rather go spend an hour at the gym or an hour coding than spend an hour writing and publishing.
I struggle with resistance like anyone trying to improve but, the resistance I have to writing and publishing is particularly insidious in this medium. I write code for a living. I like writing code. Much of the code I write is for web based things so let me tell you what switching over to writing just now looked like.
First I wrote code in a new language that I’ve been working on. That went well. I was on task, starting and stopping when my timer and calendar told me to. Then I switched to my writing system and instead of writing tweaked the home page and wrote a little script to automate the creation of posts (it creates a skeleton of a post).
Now that is useful work and is not exactly a waste of time (it’s not like I jumped over to Facebook during my writing time). That’s what makes it worse. I can avoid the thing that I’m actively trying to get better at for a good 25-30 minutes out of an hour doing things I’m much better at and staying comfortable.
That said…
Today I win
Despite the fact that I ended up spending time at the beginning not doing the “work” I’m still writing something and putting it up for the world to see today (even though it’s short and sucky). Today I win. Any day you do the things that make you uncomfortable is a positive.