Less Than 100%

It’s now been 60 days since I started writing daily blog posts. I actually did a pretty shitty job of sticking to the “daily” routine: I skipped 24 days, which puts me at a conversion rate of 60%. I initially predicted that I would feel a kind of exponential progress in my writing ability, similar to the improvement I saw in my physical strength when first starting to exercise consistently. Despite my inconsistency, I still experienced dramatic progress.

It turns out that perfection is not a necessary condition for progress. In fact, usually the opposite is true. If I did force myself to write every single day, no matter what, I may have burnt myself out or even grown to hate writing. Instead, I chose to write when I felt like it, specifically when I thought of an interesting idea I wanted to verbalize concretely. This led to a less-than-perfect daily log, and maybe not as flashy as a measure of progress than saying “I wrote every single day!”. But I experienced progress nonetheless. Recently I was writing some research papers to submit to an academic conference, and it was the best academic writing I have produced by far. I also noticed that my collaborators and advisors thought much more highly of my first drafts than they did in the past. This new habit of mine worked because I preserved the joy of writing. That has nothing to do with how often I end up really writing, or even how good each individual post is.

When I look back at my previous daily posts, a lot of them sound very mediocre to me. But there is no timeline in which I improve as a writer and don’t feel this sense of mediocrity. My posts from two months ago resemble my writing capabilty back then. By definition, becoming a better writer means that I will now look back on my older writing in disgust. I could have avoided this feeling by not having written anything at all, but then I wouldn’t have improved. In fact, having this negative feedback is especially useful to me. I now know what I don’t want to sound like, and this provides much more value than having a perfect string of posts as a reference.

My progress as a writer has been very shaky. I can quantiatively measure that I wrote daily posts only 60% of the time, and if I were to make a heuristic guess regarding quality, each post received maybe 70% of my effort compared to my best writing. But the point of comparison here is writing 0% of the time with 0% effort, which is what I was doing before. I didn’t need to be perfect to improve, I just needed to do something as opposed to nothing. Maybe I’m not as great of a writer as I could’ve been if I executed my daily routine to perfection. But I am unarguably a better writer than I was 2 months ago, and that was the goal anyway.