Write Like You’re Obese

Unless you want to kill your writing muscle.

It’s workout time!

Actually, it’s way past due workout time. It’s been three months of sitting in my basement while having Taco Bell for dinner and Starbucks for breakfast.

My stomach always felt like one huge flab and I was on the verge of throwing up my dinner every night because I stuffed my face like a bloated balloon. So what do I do in these situations? Especially when the gym is closed?

I go to the old abandoned parking lot near my house and start running in circles. Bam. Now it feels like I’ve lost over ten pounds after one day of doing this.

That’s exactly how you should treat writing your articles. Here’s why.

Writing is a muscle that needs to be worked out every day.

Every time I came back from a two-week hiatus of writing, well, it’s hard af to get back into the writing spirit.

It’s just like running a marathon. You already know the winner of the marathon when it comes to the person who has been running laps nonstop preparing or the person who rested for five days and thought they could pull a win out of their ass.

I mean, take it from a successful basketball player like Lebron James who trains during offseason. Makes sense right?

Whether it’s writing for twenty minutes or an hour straight, practicing your writing as much as possible is essential for becoming a better writer. If you don’t practice, don’t waste your time with marketing and all that other good stuff. For me, I write at least 500 words every night. Anything over that is offseason work for my craft (especially on days where I don’t feel like writing).

The more you train offseason, the steeper your learning curve becomes, and the more you’ll surpass your teammates.

You’ll get the discipline you need.

One of the biggest benefits for the people who show up every day is the stonecold (hold the Steve Austin) discipline.

You’ll eventually get used to showing up daily and you’ll build a strong writing habit to the point where you don’t need motivation to write. You don’t need to watch countless motivational Gary Vee videos to help you stay on your grind. Once you build a writing habit — you don’t have a choice but to write.

When I started waking up daily to work out at 6 am in college, I didn’t have a choice. It was either lose weight or die.

So far I’ve been writing every day for about two months and I can confidently say that I’m building a strong writing habit. So strong to the point where not writing daily feels weird.

And having that same do-or-die mindset when it comes to writing is what you need to succeed in the long run.

You have to push yourself hard every day.

One thing about weight loss is that working hard every day and meeting your requirement isn’t enough sometimes.

It almost makes me want to hurl a water bottle at my weight balance because it’s so annoying and almost not fair at times to sweat and heave up the Stairmaster in the gym only to be the same weight you were before. Or worse — you gained back some.

You’re never going to get good at writing unless you experiment as much as possible with new formats, topics, voices, etc.

Finding your own style is such a huge part of being a great blogger that if you skip the experimentation part, it’s very easy to fall into a repetitive cycle.

Always try new things whenever you write to push yourself into the direction you want to go, without getting complacent.

Final Thoughts

Writing is a muscle that needs extensive practice overtime.

It’s not enough to write a couple of articles a week and hope that makes the cut. Just like it’s not enough to work out a couple times a week and hope you lose extra weight.

Once you set a daily benchmark and you keep pushing yourself to new extremes, it’s atrocious what your writing muscle can do.

Seriously. It’s scary.