Starting Again (Again)

It was about the same time last year that I decided to change something. I hadn’t written and published as many posts on my site as I had wished to get done. And it was nagging me. If this site was meant to be a place of reflection and experimentation, if it was supposed to be my personal home on the web, why didn’t I put in the effort and write more often? Why didn’t I share my struggles, my experiences, and little insights and inspirational bits that might help someone out there on their way? So I decided to start a 100 days of writing challenge. After 64 increasingly not-so-daily posts, I declared the experiment a failure. But one from which I learned a whole lot.

Well, here we go again. It is July 2021 and I haven’t published a post on this site since April. And once again, it bugs me. Yes, I had a lot of client work to do and prioritizing work – unless it is over family – is still not the worst of choices, especially in a pandemic. But it’s also far too easy to hide behind all the daily work instead of creating and writing. Isn’t it telling that I somehow still “found” the time to scroll Twitter’s timeline every day and watched more videos on tech and camera gear than I probably should?

It is incredibly hard to form a habit but it is even harder to sustain it. If you ever started your own thing – like publishing on your own website, just to come up with the most obvious example here –, you might know what I mean. One of the keys to writing regularly is to remember that you don’t need to write the perfectly elaborate piece all the time. If you care for something, even if it’s only the smallest nugget of insight, it is worth sharing it in whatever form the idea takes on. The posts that have the most positive impact are always standing on the shoulders of giant piles of bad writing and unfinished ideas. So it really doesn’t matter if you don’t bring it home all the time.

Results are always the outcome of a process. And it is this process that we should focus on. It is this process that we should own and that should bring us joy and fulfillment. So I will remember my own words back from when I started this notes section: I wanted to publish notes that are “quick, raw, unpolished, short, sometimes also a bit longer. Sometimes only an image, a hasty sketch, or a drawing. But always without the need to finalize anything.”

There is so much to write about every single day. Let’s get back to work.

(Well, maybe I’ll polish some of the posts. Just a little, tiny bit…)

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Matthias Ott

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