3 reasons why you haven’t started writing

And how to overcome them.

My goal today was to show up and make something. The thing I ended up making is a laundry list of why it is so hard to write sometimes. Writing can be evasive and difficult and vulnerable. It’s hard to show up consistently, especially when you don’t know how or where you’re going.

But, I do think there are simple strategies that can make the process much more doable. Let’s be clear: I’m not going to teach you how to write or what to write. But I’m going to help you at least show up for yourself and give it a real shot.

Self-assuredness

I think one of the hardest parts about independent work (like writing online) is that it requires such a high level of self-assuredness. I used to think that the hardest thing about being successful was being truly great at something. But actually, what I’ve found to be almost harder, is that you have to truly believe you’re great at something. And you have to believe it so hard that you must:

• Show up every day and do it
• Have the balls to tell other people about it
• Have the audacity to think your own work is good that you tell other people to consume it

Maybe that sounds incredibly self-effacing, but I suspect that most people, deep down, understand how daunting of a checklist that is.

Do I have a solution for this? I think you need to drink the koolaid of yourself. How? No idea. We’ve been searching for cures for self-confidence issues since we gained higher cognitive abilities as a species, so I’m not going to take a stab at fixing that myself.

I think my suggestion here may be frowned upon by a therapist: just don’t think about it. As I have no commitment to fixing your brain, just to get you to write, I have no shame in that suggestion. You have to let yourself go on autopilot sometimes and do the things that you know will bring you closer to your goals, even if it creates some cognitive dissonance.

An important thing to remember is: no one wants to read your writing if they don’t think you even like it. There is very little real estate in the public’s attention span. No one is going to use it on something they’re not sold on. So make people believe you believe in yourself, and then don’t think too hard about it. Super simple :)

Inertia

Let me abuse the hell out of a physics term for a second.

I find the concept of inertia very pertinent to the human mental state. Or at least my mental state.

Before I dive too deep here, let me give you an offensively simple definition: inertia is the idea that matter will stay at its current speed (or at rest) until acted on by some external force.

Essentially, it means that, if we’re stuck or sedentary, a requisite amount of external force will be needed to get us moving. For me, the amount required can be prohibitively high. What does external force mean in this beleaguered analogy? I’m not exactly sure. My guess is that it primarily consists of internal motivation.

Overcoming the inertia my brain requires to get moving in any positive direction is very challenging. Mustering up the motivation and focusing it on one defined goal is a herculean task most days. Your brain finds many excuses to stay exactly where it is, even if we’re all aware that there is much more to achieve.

My only antidote to inertia is structure. Schedules. It’s easier to take a monumental task (like writing successfully) and chop it up into digestible pieces (write 3 posts a week with these prompts). That way, you’re not reconvincing yourself to write every day, and then deciding what to write and at what cadence. Instead of reinventing the wheel every day:

(1) Convince yourself once that you’re going to write. And when that’s done, the topic is closed for discussion. Now you are going to write. (this takes some strict mental parenting. your brain is your true first born. get her to her highest potential)

(2) Make at least a short-term plan. Pop psychology has a lot of varying opinions on how long it takes to build a habit, but I would recommend a plan for the next 2 weeks to a month. This plan should have:

• A post schedule: what days are you going to be posting work
• Writing prompts for days you’re struggling for inspiration
• An engagement schedule: scheduled time blocks to interact with other writers + promoting your work
• An evaluation strategy: how are you going to know if this worked at the end of your plan? What metrics are you going to use to determine this (e.g., how many posts you made, how many followers you gained, how much money you made)?

Honestly, for a lot of this planning, I leverage ChatGPT. Have it create a schedule for you based on your goals and have it help you create prompts. While a lot of the output might not be directly applicable, it gives you a good starting point.

No map

The other significant challenge is that you have no idea if you’re going in the right direction until you’ve actually started and made it quite a far ways down the road. Eventually, if you try something and do it for long enough, you’ll know if it worked or not. But there’s no way to know before you start.

Why does that matter? Because, if you’re anything like me, you have this monkey on your shoulder asking if every move you make is actually bringing you closer or farther from your eventual goal. It’s one more bargaining chip your brain can use to not get started: “why try if we don’t even know where to go?”

I don’t have a great counterpoint to that other than: if we don’t try, we’ll never know what could be. What could be, in all likelihood, is nothing. But the possibility of success, quite frankly, needs to be enough. At least at the start. Here’s what I would do:

(1) Test: You don’t necessarily have to commit to a path on day 1. If you have a few ideas on where things could go (e.g., a few different topics, writing styles, mediums), try them out. Put on your science hat and test out a few different things at first, and then follow the route that you enjoy the most and/or is the most successful.

(2) Pivot: At the end of the day, nothing is binding. If you find yourself on a path you don’t enjoy or one that isn’t progressing as you’d like, find a different one. Turn around. There is no sunk cost in this process, because every path you don’t like is one less variable to test in the future.

(3) Appreciate: While it’s easy to find your goals in metrics or certain levels of success, writing will always be good. It’s an inherently good practice, even when the writing produced sucks. Every time you write, you refine that skill. You get better at it, faster at it, grow into your voice, and, ultimately, I think you understand what’s in your head a little bit better. That, in itself, is progress. So even if you write a million times and “fail”, you still wrote. In that sense, no path is the wrong path. Each one is either going to give you experience or results.

That’s all I have for today. These lessons are for me just as much as they are for anyone else — I’m kicking off my journey with you.