26 March 2025
The mistake you can easily make, whether writing a book for the first time, or trying to start a business, or trying to get out of bed earlier each day, or following a diet or a fitness schedule, is finding a strategy that’s worked for someone, attempting to apply it to your own life, then getting annoyed when it doesn’t work.
It can easily lead to self-loathing, frustration & bashing your head against the wall trying to force it to work when that strategy was never meant for you in the first place.
This isn’t just inefficient, It’s harmful.
When you fail at someone else’s system, you don’t question the system; you question yourself.
In elite sports, training programs are intensely personalized.
No coach would give identical regimens to different athletes.
Yet in work & personal development, we act as if one-size-fits-all is reasonable.
Like we can just grab what’s worked for someone off the shelf and it’ll solve all our problems.
I have wrestled with this myself.
For years, I berated myself for not maintaining the steady, consistent writing schedule that supposedly marks a “real writer.”
Or trying to maintain a ‘To Do list’ and following it diligently and accomplishing all the tasks as per schedule.
I can maintain this for brief stretches, but my best work emerges from manic sprints—like when I wrote two books during the Covid period.
For a long time, I viewed this as a character flaw.
I thought I needed to become more disciplined, more consistent.
But I think now my creative metabolism simply runs differently –
Explosive bursts rather than steady output.
The revelation wasn’t that I needed to change my process to conform to some Platonic ideal.
Rather, that I need to embrace what works for me and figure out how to make it work better.
Self-improvement isn’t about becoming someone else, It’s about becoming a better version of yourself.
I consistently do my best work when I’m pressed against some uncomfortable deadline. It’s not ideal to always be under the gun, but if it consistently creates better work, then occasionally it’s worth lining up these deadlines to try to force it out of myself.
I often let myself procrastinate on things because I know there’s some part of my brain that feels like the time pressure isn’t strong enough yet.
When the pressure gets strong enough, the motivation to work will appear & it does and the task gets done.
Set your own routine, do what works for you & stay blessed forever.