The question I’ve most often been asked since I began writing daily entries here in October 2009 has been, “How do you think of something to write every day?”
The truth is that it’s actually not that hard. Pretty much anyone can do it in two easy steps.
1. Write about something you know.
We all have a deep knowledge of something, whether it’s coaching hockey, cooking vegetarian food or raising kids. I’ve been doing college admissions in some form or another for almost 20 years, and running a business for 14 of them. If I’d written about anything else, I’d have run out of entries a long time ago. But these subjects have given me plenty of material.
If you’re a pitcher on your high school softball team, you could probably talk for hours about pitching. How to throw your best pitches, what you like in a good catcher, the best ways to strike out power hitters, how to get your juice back when you’ve lost your control, what you learned at pitching camp, pitchers you idolize and why, the worst times to throw a change-up, etc. What if instead of talking about it, you wrote about it? You’ve got at least 50 blog entries waiting to be written.
2. Make a specific commitment.
If I had simply promised myself that I would blog “more often,” it would have been too easy to make excuses and blow it off. “I’m too busy.” “This entry is no good.” “People won’t like it, they’ll post mean comments, and I’ll die of embarrassment.”
But when I committed to blogging once a day every day, the commitment regularly beat down the excuses.
If you’d like to try this yourself, here’s a suggestion—start a blog and make the commitment to write at least one entry every day for 30
days. If you just can’t bear the thought of sharing your writing with the world, set your blog to “private” so that you can control who sees it. Don’t worry about whether the entries are perfect—they won’t be. Don’t worry about whether or not you’ll make money from it—you probably won’t. Just do it because it’s a good exercise to spend a little time every day thinking and writing about things that matter to you.
My guess is that you’ll enjoy it. And after thirty consecutive days, it might be hard to stop.