writing practice

Routine is a form of self-hypnosis, a way to imagine ourselves as capable of whatever feat we are attempting. Every time we abide our routine we put a stone in the path to the place we are trying to reach.

Motivation is the fun-but-flaky friend who overpromises and underdelivers. Motivation is unreliable, and it is not going to get most of us through a book or any other long-range project. Octavia Butler: “Without persistence, what remains is an enthusiasm of the moment.”

But this is another thing I love about routine: you can take it with you wherever you go. Routine is a shelter. It gives us someplace to be, regardless of the moment we’re in. It gives us a place to metabolize experience.

We all love the training montage in movies—those brisk two-minute sequences where the protagonist transforms from novice to expert while upbeat music plays. One minute they're struggling to do a single push-up; the next, they're ready for the championship fight.

Real life doesn't work like that. The actual training—the part where you build the found... See more

But this is the beauty of routine, the way it can carry you from one day to the next. You don’t even have to believe in yourself all the time if you can just believe in the process you have committed to. That steadiness of presence.

Routine is a scrap of stability in an unstable world.

Unfortunately, if you want to do new things, you'll face a force more powerful than other people's skepticism: your own skepticism. You too will judge your early work too harshly. How do you avoid that?

Often when people are stuck in life it’s because they’re holding out for the delusional possibility of a costless way of getting what they want, instead of just paying the cost