daily-ish notes…

I ran into a friend in the grocery store today as I was rushing around on my lunch break, running errands, restocking my coffee, living a hectic life between meetings.

She was wandering. Shopping. Waiting for news from her doctor. I probably don’t need to mention there was a good chance it would be bad news.

Life is short.

Life is too short to overthink.

Life is too short to hesitate to say and do the things you want to do.

Life is too short to second guess yourself.

Life is too short to stuff your soul in a box and wait for permission to let it out.

Short. Too short.

Your personal brand is a culmination of everything you put out into the world under the banner of your name. It’s not a logo or a style or a website or a social media follower count. Or rather, it’s not just any one of those things, but all of them mushed together into the perception of someone who stumbles upon you and catches a glimpse of the piece that happens to zoom by as you pass through time and space and the universe. Imagine yourself as a stranger who opens a single page of your website, sees a single painting, reads a single paragraph of your writing or scrolls by a single post. Just one of those things. Not all. Not a cross-section. Not even the one you choose for them to experience. Randomly just one piece of creative output that you have shared with the universe. That’s how you will be experienced and understood by that person, through a single image, sentence, or dabble of paint on a page.

Does it say everything you want it to say? Does it say anything about you at all? If you put your true self into it, and create for the right reason, there’s no reason it would not be anything but what you want it to be.

I read a lot of science fiction when I was a kid, and in the eighties and nineties that meant I read a lot of Isaac Asimov. You could say that he was a bit of a creative inspiration for me.

Asimov wrote constantly. The mythos that surrounds him suggests that he got up early, wrote as much as five thousand words until he could write no more, and then got on with his day.

Writing five thousand words per day is a lot. Daily is a lot. But it showed in his work that he was able to produce so much, and a lot of it of great quality to the point that you can still buy fresh printings of his books today.

Infinitely monkeys with infinite typewriters will eventually, by sheer chance, produce Shakespeare, but one guy with dedication and a single typewriter can produce something just as great by force of willpower and effort.

Daily practice isn’t about volume, nor output, nor streaks, and neither is it about simply filling a calendar.

Daily practice is about doing something on repeat, routinely, no matter the mood or state of mind you happen to be in or the place you are at physically, mentally, emotionally, or whatever.

Daily practice is about building a creative muscle that performs whenever you need it, not just when you feel like it. It’s about controlling the creative process and being able to call upon it at leisure, and not merely building a skill that requires an external factor to be present and available and in control of you.