Breaking the Chain

The strawberries taste like strawberries. The snozberries taste like snozberries. This is the Music Makers podcast where I read things out loud to you and then offer my unqualified opinions on them. What happens when you break a 600 day chain? By Nathan Barry.

It's often hard to make a connection between that blog post you read months ago and the author who is standing in the same conversation circle at a conference. Once people made the connection, I was often referred to as the, quote, thousand word guy. I guess that's one thing that stuck out to people. Back in 2012, I wanted to write a book. More importantly, I wanted to finish a book.

I'd started writing 3 books, none of which made it beyond an outline in the first few pages. This time, I was determined to finish, and an article by Chris Gillebo showed me how. Write a 1,000 words a day, every day. It took me a while to get a streak going. I would get 7 days in a row, miss a day, and have to start over.

But after a while, my streak got longer and longer, and I became more determined not to break it. Each day I wrote, I became determined to continue writing. By the time my first book, the App Design Handbook, had launched, I had written a 1,000 words a day for 70 days in a row. By the end of 2012, I was at over a 150 days in a row, which included another book, Designing Web Applications. Last July, I celebrated 365 days in a row of writing a 1000 words a day.

That included 3 books, nearly a 100 blog posts, and countless other writing, all of which was very profitable. Occasionally, I missed a day, like while on vacation, but I always made it up the next day. I figured it was fine to make the rules loose so long as the writing got done. I continued blogging, released a few new courses, and my writing streak passed over 600 days in a row. Then this last spring, I started to lose it.

I'd get a day behind and catch up trying desperately to keep my streak going. Then I'd not feel inspired to write and respond to 30 or 40 emails and count that as my 1,000 words. One day, I opened up commit on my phone and my streak was 0 days in a row. During the weeks prior, I had a new baby, became quite sick with shingles, worked on remodeling a house, tried to continue growing my software company, and overall became quite stressed. Somewhere in that mess, I missed an unknown number of days in my writing streak.

I could catch up, but it would be rather dishonest since I didn't even know how many days I had missed. Writing a 1,000 words a day is the best career move I've ever made. It's sad to have that streak gone. I thought about not starting it up again, but in the last 2 years, writing has become a core part of who I am. I can't give that up.

It Means I need to start my streak over and build it back up. Here's how I plan to do it. Number 1. Work towards a goal. When writing a book, you may not know exactly what you'll write each day, but you know what project it is for.

For the last few months, I haven't been writing towards a particular goal. My writing has been scattered between projects, and it's been hard to focus. Now I'm working on a new book. It's been an idea for over a year, so it's time I finally sat down to write it. Number 2, set aside time.

The last couple of weeks of my writing streak were spent scrambling to get some writing in when my phone reminded me at 4 PM that my streak would end if I didn't sit down to write. Writing is now a scheduled part of my day. If writing from my home office doesn't work, then I'll drive to my favorite coffee shop, thinking through my writing on the drive there. Step 3, when I plan this essay, I figured there would be 3 steps. After all, what's a process that only has 2 steps?

The more I think about it, working towards a goal and setting aside dedicated time are the only 2 steps needed to make big things happen. There's no need to make this any more complicated. Slow, consistent progress is all it takes. Let's do this. The author of this article is a great example of the truth that with a little bit of progress every day, you can get some really great stuff done.

It doesn't have to be this Herculean eighties montage where you're just working day night and day night. If If you have consistent progress over a long period of time, you're gonna go really far. Nathan wrote several books by writing a 1000 words a day. If you write a 1000 words a day for a 100 days, you've written a 100000 words. There's at at least one book in there.

But, eventually, Nathan's streak came to an end. Things happened in his life, and the writing just stopped for a period of time. And that's happened to me too. For several months now, I've been putting out an episode at least once a week. I think I started back in June or July of 2015, and I had a pretty good streak going.

I think this is episode 41 or 42. And for having never really done a podcast, I feel pretty good about that. When Nathan's streak ended, he looked at writing and thought, you know, this is a kind of a core part of who I am now, and this has been a huge part of my business, and so I'm gonna pick it back up. And I'm not gonna do the same for my streak. This is gonna be the last episode of the music makers, at least for the foreseeable future.

And there are a couple of reasons why. I had a few goals when I started this podcast. One was to stop thinking about things and actually start doing something. Stop having great ideas and never accomplishing anything and just see one through to the end. Do that last hard part of actually finishing it off, polishing it up, and putting it out there in the world.

And I feel like I accomplished that, and I can check that one off. I shipped something. Took it from an idea to its finished state and put it out there, and I feel really good about that. And another reason was I wanted to get over this kind of fear I had of what other people thought. I always had this fear of putting things out there because I thought, oh, people are gonna think stupid or people are gonna think I'm, you know, not qualified, and that fear kept me from ever putting my name on anything.

Always had this idea that everyone out there was gonna look at it and say, that's stupid. You shouldn't have done that. And in reality, that didn't happen at all. People may have fought it, but nobody said that. Not one person came to me and said, hey.

You shouldn't be doing that. That podcast you're doing is bad. You shouldn't do it. And finally, I just had some things I wanted to say. I had all these articles.

I wanted to read them, and I wanted to talk about them. And I still have a lot of articles left, but I'm finding that I'm saying the same things or I'm wanting to say the same things over and over and over. A lot of these articles are pretty similar. So when it comes time to pick a new article for the show, I'll go back and I'll read several and think, oh, that's a great article. What am I gonna say about it?

Well, I already kind of said everything that I would say in a different episode. So from my point of view, the show has reached its natural conclusion. I don't have much left to say right now. If I had one of those big mission accomplished banners, I would unfurl it in my office right now now because I feel like I've said everything I wanna say. At least for now and, you know, maybe next year that'll be different, but for now, I feel like I've I've said it all.

I don't wanna keep going just to keep going. I don't wanna keep going because I have to put out an episode every week no matter what because I don't. That's another great thing about personal projects. You can do whatever you want. I had a lot to say, and it was all stored up in my brain.

And now I've said most of it. So mission accomplished, and the show's over. I am infinitely glad that I did it and very grateful to all of you who listened to it and who gave me reviews and sent me emails, and it was more than I ever expected it would be. It's definitely been hard at sometimes, but most of the time, it's just been fun. I mean, I'm just giving people my opinion in a format where they can't argue back.

So how's that not fun? And, hopefully, some of these articles or some of my ramblings have inspired you to do something or think about something in a different way. And if it has, I'd love if you'd send me an email, aaron@musicmakers.fm, or you can find me on Twitter at aaron d Francis. Reach out. Let me know what you think.

Again, I'm so appreciative of all of y'all's support and kind words and iTunes reviews, and I hope you'll go out and do something too. I hope you'll take one of your dreams off the shelf and actually make some progress toward it. If I can ever do anything to help, please let me know. I'll talk to you soon.