Compelled to Create
When you can no longer escape the urge, and the excuses won’t work
On Dec 5th, 2019, I made a commitment to publish a post every day as a part of my long-term success strategy.
It lasted 26 days. I failed to publish a post on Dec 31st. A fitting finale to the teen years. I am not going to say the decade, as the second decade of the 21st century has another year to go.
The new year isn’t faring well either. I have posted a grand total of three stories in six days, and have one that will come out on the 9th.
Yesterday, I didn’t even get on my computer. I had plenty of excuses, er, reasons for not being able to do that. I can list them all, but I don’t want to lose you in the process. Suffice it to say that I can live with my otherwise useful day.
I woke up later than usual and decided to rearrange my schedule so I can write, and publish at least one story, hopefully, more.
As I fired up my Medium app, the first thing I encountered was the five daily recommended stories. There was one from Helen Cassidy Page; I have to read that. She talked about her struggle to keep up with her story-a-day commitment. That was the license I was looking for to slack off on my writing.
Get breakfast, fire up the computer, work on the weekly budget, balance the books, get on Medium and check the stats, feel good about an accepted story on The Ascent, check out the profiles of people who followed while asleep, bookmark their stories, get another cup of coffee, start reading the stories,
stop right there! Enough of this bull already.
When your purpose is to communicate and to write, and you are committed to doing so, the Inner Voice will eventually find a way to get your attention, and when it does, you better surrender — now! Or face the consequences. I know it from personal experience of when I did and when I didn’t.
I have several stories in the draft folder calling my name. Some of them contextually timely, others just a spark of an idea waiting for kindling to set them ablaze. It’s time to get busy.
The 31 stories that I published in the 26 days of the story-a-day experiment/commitment taught me that I produce better content when I am relaxed and in the flow, as opposed to the ones I wrote because of a sense of obligation.
What about you? What has been your experience? When or how do you create your best work?
For January, I have decided to publish a minimum of 20 stories, and launch a publication with an idea I have been pondering. It will be set up in a way so that every writer is also an editor and doesn’t have to wait for someone else to approve and publish it. I belong to a couple of publications like that and find them very useful. It enables you to have your work in small but growing pubs to fill the gap between the stories scheduled in more popular ones.
When you focus your energies on the efforts that create activities that you have 100% control over, your stress levels will drop considerably while your satisfaction will rise significantly.
The income you generate on Medium depends on the amount of time people spend reading your work, an activity over which you have zero direct control. However, you have 100% control over the quantity and quality of the stories you write. Make the most of what you can control, and release that which is out of your hands, and you will find that there is no reason why you cannot see both personal and financial satisfaction.
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Rasheed Hooda is a published author and a regular contributor to ILLUMINATION, a writers’ community on Medium where writers support each other.
He is a self-proclaimed weirdo who lives a Freedom Lifestyle and writes about related topics — Travel (a top writer), Personal Growth, Freedom, and entrepreneurship. (Get the Newsletter)
“You can let others tell you what it means to be successful, or you can decide it for yourself.”
