Two crappy pages

From a Men’s Health interview with Kobe Bryant in 2007:

MF: Do you have any training tips, aside from Olympic lifts, that you’d recommend to younger basketball players?*

Kobe: The thing that I tell them all the time is consistency. If they watch me train, running on a track, it doesn’t look like I’m over-exerting myself. It’s a consistency with which you do it, in other words, it’s an every-day-thing. You have a program, and a schedule, and you have to abide by that, religiously. You just stick to it, and it’s the consistency that pays off.*

I’ve now found the motivation to sit in a chair and type for an hour.

What

I want to publish one page per day.

Why?

I’ve re-read parts of On Writing a few weeks ago. Stephen King has plenty of good advice about writing, including this succinct tip:

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.

I’ve been reading about one book per week this year. It’s not earth-shattering but it’s a good pace. What I haven’t been doing is writing.

Who

Here are a few people who came to mind as far as inspiring me to write today, this week, and this year.

Today: On this particular day, Tim Ferris posted a podcast episode with Chase Jarvis. I also finished reading Anything You Want by Derek Sivers.

This week: I saw Robert Mion’s 100 Days of Framer, inspired by Sam Lu’s 100 Days of Swift.

I tried doing 30 prototypes in 30 days (mostly with Framer). I did about 22 days before stopping, but still learned a lot. One of the more meta things I learned is that sharing the prototypes daily meant writing about the prototypes daily. The writing itself could double the time commitment.

After seeing Robert and Sam’s prototyping projects, I was thinking of what kind of project I could try out. Then I realized that writing alone might be enough to pursue. So I’m going to try that. 100 Days of Writing. I don’t know about what. I’m not going to decide on what to write beforehand. I think I’ll settle into similar themes.

This year: Earlier this year, I read Julie Zhuo’s *Write in 2016* and decided it’d be good to try writing in 2016. I even sent out a couple posts through my newsletter to get some reps in. Then I stopped. I’m still really inspired reading Julie say that writing changed her life. So I’m going to give it another go, starting now.

I subscribe to Tobias van Schneider’s weekly mailing list and he just finished a year of newsletter issues without missing a week. He knew it wouldn’t be perfect but knew it was important to get started.

Seth Godin still posts daily. There’s value in posting consistently.

Where

Above, I mentioned the Tim Ferris podcast. Tim and Chase talk about optimizing creative output. Chase was one Tim’s first guests, before the podcast unexpectedly became his main creative endeavor.

Early on he made it a point to take the friction out of his podcasts. He mentions a lot of people make three podcasts and then quit. And a lot of times it’s because editing becomes too big an effort. He decided his podcast would be long-form with minimal editing.

People also get overwhelmed with audio quality. Tim thought about the contexts that people listen to podcasts in. The most important things are making sure the audio is loud enough and mono. It’s usually two people talking so there’s no reason to make it harder than than it needs to be?

I’ll be posting things on franciscortez.com for now. I’ve written things on designsprints.com but it always feels odd when I post things that aren’t completely design related. I won’t make it harder than it needs to be, and I feel like there will be less friction posting things on my personal site right now.

When

I’ll try posting daily. Tim Ferris mentions that one of his earlier goals was to write two bad pages each day:

I was told at one point, “Your goal should be two crappy pages per day.” That’s it. If you’ve hit two crappy pages each day, even if you’ve never used them, you’ve succeeded for the day. Alleviating that performance anxiety about putting down ten pages of good material, which inevitably, I think, you’re going to fail two or three times each week, allows you to overshoot that goal. And continually succeed. And sort of build that confidence and momentum.

He references BJ Fogg’s idea of tiny habits like flossing your two front teeth. That’s usually all the momentum you need to floss the rest of your teeth.

How

“Wake up earlier.” — Tim Ferris

Guess which episode that’s from. Yes, I wrote this mostly as a recap of his interview with Chase Jarvis. Things got away from me a bit. They mention Khaled Hosseini, who wrote The Kite Runner while he had a full time job as a doctor. I’m being far less ambitious.

Publishing every day is pretty simple once you have WordPress or some other system set up. Simple in the sense that you can write a couple words and hit ‘Publish’. I’ll try to avoid cop-out single sentence posts saying things like “Posting to keep the streak going.”

I’ll say it now: I won’t post for 100 days straight. I have a lot of travel coming up. Including a trip to Japan. I want to be present during that. How can I take selfies, search for Yelp reviews, and look at the country through the iOS camera if I’m writing?

I’ll do my best to complete 100 posts in 100 days by writing extra posts in longer sessions.

Here’s to day 1.