An Update on My Smashing Keys Journey
I’ve engaged in a journey that I’ve termed Smashing Keys to jumpstart myself on my writing journey. The more accurate name would have probably been “Get Off Your Butt, Out of Your Head, and Write”. However, I had just read a post by Brendon Burchard that resonated so deeply with me:
“Here’s what you do. You stop pretending ease or perfection or the perfect attitude or day is required to plop the dang laptop down and open it and smash some keys. Open laptop. Smash keys. Anything else is merely writing a story of distraction. Open laptop. Smash keys.”
It was the a-ha, proverbial kick in the pants that I needed and addressed so many of the barriers that prevented me from writing: “It has to be perfect.” “I am worried people will see me as a fraud.” “What if I state something incorrectly?” “What if it is just rubbish?” The quote made me realize that all of these, while potentially true, were small problems compared to a much bigger problem of getting started.
So I committed to a 31-day challenge of writing each day — without a pre-planned script, without detailed analysis and planning, and without overthinking it. The goal was just to smash keys, write about whatever struck my fancy that day, and worry about details later.
Those details are what would have kept me from writing in the first place. I would have analyzed what I was going to write to the point that writing anything was an almost insurmountable task. Just smashing keys has given me the freedom to write with no excuses for going on now 20 days and I look forward to smashing keys for many more!
