Have you ever been inspired to start a new project or make a change in your life (like dieting or exercise) only to get burnt out and not make a change long-term?
Well you aren’t the only one.
I have tried dozens of times to start different habits, only to give up and go back to normal a few days or weeks later.
One of my biggest problems was trying to take on too many changes at once, or expecting change to happen in an unrealistically short amount of time.
So when I had the idea to start SmartArtistIncome.com, I knew that something was going to have to be different if I actually wanted to follow through with my commitment.
If you are the kind of person who has a lot of great ideas but struggles to execute on them, then this blog post is for you.
How I Tricked My Brain and Got Myself to Follow Through With a 30 Day Writing Challenge
In this post I’m going to show you exactly how I got myself to take action and write one blog post every day for 30 days.
Now before you get all skeptical, I want you to know that this was the first time I’d ever successfully committed to and followed-through with a 30-day challenge.
I was the guy who would say “I’m going to start exercising every morning”, exercise for like a week, and then by day 10 I would find myself sleeping in and making excuses for why I wasn’t waking up early to exercise any more.
The worst part about starting something and not committing to it was how it hurt my self-confidence. After multiple failed attempts to start a new habit, I started to believe that I was the kind of person who was never going to achieve anything big because I couldn’t discipline myself to do something for more than a week.
So how did I get myself to follow through and write 31 blog posts in March?
Here’s how I got myself to follow through:
I made it as easy and pain-free as possible.
I knew that the only way I would get myself to follow through with a 30-day blogging challenge was by making it really easy for myself to succeed.
Here are some rules I set for myself:
- Write something every day.
- Hit post every day.
- Spend no more than 20 minutes editing.
While these rules don’t seem like anything special or amazing, they were critical to successfully completing the 30-day blogging challenge.
With the help of this framework I was able to commit to writing a blog post every single day in the month of March, and I ended up writing 23,975 words across all of my posts.
Here is why these rules helped me complete the challenge:
Rule #1 is to write something every day. In my head I actually told myself “Write 1 crappy blog post every day”.
This took away the pressure of feeling like I had to write something amazing. I gave myself permission to just focus on following through without worrying about trying to make some amazing piece of writing every day.
Instead of having that “staring at a blank canvas” kind of fear, I was able to sit down and bust out a blog post without feeling like I had to make a masterpiece.
Consistency was more important than quality, because the main goal of the 30-day blogging challenge was to establish a writing habit and to get over my fear of doing something new.
It’s also important to point out that even though I told myself to write “1 Crappy Post” each day, I didn’t end up with 30 crappy blog posts.
I wrote a lot of pretty-good blog posts and even a few remarkable posts that helped me to get hundreds of email signups.
It’s hard to evaluate the quality of my own writing, but I know that my posts were valuable because I had multiple artists message me on Instagram and tell me that my blog posts were really helpful.
Rule #2 is to hit post every day.
This rule was really important because it helped me to commit to shipping the work without getting caught up in analysis paralysis or trying to make the work perfect.
Sometimes I can be such a perfectionist that I will end up spending 4 hours on something that should have taken me 20 minutes.
By setting a rule to post every single day I forced myself to let go of the imperfections and just hit post.
As an artist I am always trying to grow and to push my work to new levels. If I didn’t have rules and deadlines then I would never finish anything, because I would keep trying to add just a little bit more in order to my work perfect.
The problem with this is that I seem to grow on a daily basis. I know that even if I make work that satisfies me today, tomorrow I will only be able to see the mistakes and the room for improvement.
It’s a never-ending cycle of improvement.
So instead of waiting until I made a perfect blog post, I set a rule that forced myself to post something every day. This helped me get my work done without getting caught in the trap of perfectionism.
For this very same reason I decided to include rule #3: spend no more than 20 minutes editing.
Instead of over-thinking the editing and getting caught up in analysis-paralysis, I forced myself to do all of my editing in less than 20 minutes so I could move on a be done with it.
Bottom line?
I set rules that helped me to consistently take action, get results, and overcome analysis paralysis.
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