I should probably wait until later.
I mean, Seth Godin says that if I write every day, I'll almost certainly suck day 1, and if I write every day, well, I will still probably suck at day 31, but maybe a little less. And I will almost certainly be better on day 100 than on day 1.
So I'll wait...Why write something today when I know for sure that it will suck? Why not wait until 3 months from now when I'll probably be a marginally better writer? Except that this would likely result in 3 months of no writing.
I heard Allen Gannett on the Jordan Harbinger Show (7/12/2018), and he talked about how the greatest creators are great consumers of content, and that consumption is the fuel for creativity.
At one point he said, "If you want to connect the dots, you have to have a lot of dots to connect."
I have recently begun reading actively - underlining, making notes, following Ryan Holiday's posts about his notecard system and marginalia.
But I've only read a couple of books using that system, so I don't have many dots to connect. More reason to wait.
And then months go by and I've done nothing. Sure, I've written down some thoughts in a journal. I've read more in the past few months than I have in recent memory, being very deliberate in my reading. But there is this nagging feeling that I haven't done enough, haven't found enough dots to connect, haven't developed enough ideas, to warrant writing about them on the blog - sharing with others the things that I have learned.
Then it hit me. As I've discussed previously, this seems to be a manifestation of Stephen Pressfield's Resistance. But, why would I write about some profound life lesson I learned reading Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, when I know full-well that my writing is going to suck? Doesn't this message deserve better than I currently have to offer? I have convinced myself, rather I have allowed resistance to convince me, that I am not qualified to share a given message. But why am I not qualified? Simply because I have not yet put in the work.
The realization I had in the past day or so is that some of these lessons I've learned, particularly from Meditations, are timeless lessons. Why do I treat an idea as though it is something that could be addressed just one time? Instead, I could do my best now, and come back to these thoughts as I get better. I could come back once I have more dots to connect, as I learn more, as I am an improved writer.
So, I will pass on this lesson I took from Meditations 2.7:
Make time for yourself to learn something worthwhile. Stop letting yourself be pulled in all directions...People who labor all their lives but have no purpose to direct every thought and impulse toward are wasting their time - even when hard at work
Like Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote over 1800 years ago - make the time to learn something worthwhile and give yourself purpose. And like Seth Godin would tell us today - take that something and go do the work.