Smashing Keys and BYOB
In two months, I’ve gone from thinking about writing to creating the behaviors to do it every single day. I’ve published 62 posts and written drafts for eight more. I’ve started to frame up another month of posts on how to embrace and become a better reader. I’ve got a plan — oh my god, an honest to goodness plan! — to take what I’ve written and turn it into a book on Becoming the CEO of you.
Before I tell you how I did all this, it is important to step back and see how many times and how many ways I failed to even start writing. For me, writing has always been a dream of mine. Being an only child until I was almost thirteen, I had lots of time to read and even more time to make up stories about the amazing adventures that I or others would go on. I even went so far as to write 150 pages about one of those amazing adventures on our family’s Apple IIe computer. I had the writing bug and I was going to be amazing. But I never finished my book and the writing bug that had kept me company so many times had wandered off to more fertile locations.
For a while that was okay, I was busy with life and all the opportunities it had to offer. It wasn’t long though until I began to think about writing again. Unfortunately this time I had numerous reasons why it wouldn’t work and why I couldn’t possibly become a writer. I didn’t have the time. I didn’t have a place to publish what I wrote. I didn’t have readers. I didn’t have anything to say. There were a lot of reasons, yet the dream wouldn’t die.
I would make the resolution to write. I would start to setup a blog site. I would pick up a book on how to approach writing. And nothing would come of it. Until…
Until I stumbled across a quote and two articles back in June, all focused on just sitting down and writing every day with the goal of doing no more than getting thoughts down to paper and pushing publish.
The first was a quote by Brendon Burchard:
“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.”
The second was an article by Marta Brzosko on crafting a 30-day challenge to overcome writing stagnation and become more creative. While I wasn’t writing yet, the idea of a challenge was intriguing to me and everything in her post spoke to the roadblocks I was having. I was addicted to the idea of external validation. I was constantly doubting myself. I knew I wanted to be a writer, but not what kind. And I couldn’t see around any of these problems to know how to improve.
The guidance of the challenge was simple yet profound: don’t think yet about what others could benefit from or how what you write will be received. Just write about what inspires you on that day.
It was a revelation for me. I didn’t need to have a fully baked idea of what genre I wanted to write in, what niche I was going to fill, or need an elaborate blog to publish on. All I needed was to write and publish what I wrote on Medium. It was freeing and removed so many of the roadblocks that I had put in place for myself. This would become my Smashing Keys challenge.
This was followed a few short weeks later by the Blog Your Own Book challenge by Shaunta Grimes. The plan was to frame up a series of posts on a topic, blog about the themes within that topic for 31 days, and then edit and publish the blogs as a book. Now that I had overcome the challenge of writing something every day, I fell in love with the idea of challenging myself in new ways.
Over the past two months, writing every day has taught me a lot of about myself. I’ve learned that I tend to overthink what I want to write and in the process talk myself out of even getting started. I’ve learned what times of day I am at my most creative. I’ve learned that embracing progress over perfection as a mantra frees me to became a better person.
I’ve also learned to look at writing in a new way. Rather than being a mental barrier to overcome to some ambiguous and unseen goal, writing has become an outlet for exploring topics that interest me and that I have a passion for. In turn, I’ve found others who share my interests.
Most of all, I’ve learned how to show up. Not for anyone else, but for myself and that has made all the difference.
