I failed again to stick to my plan to write and post every day. I thought all day about what to write. I had a few ideas but couldn’t bring myself to sit down and write. The issue is the same today as yesterday. I don’t have a full idea to write about, just fleeting thoughts. Then I need to research the subject I had a fleeting thought about. That spirals into a “what if?” thought pattern. Then I lose interest because it feels like too much effort for a daily post. I could spend all day researching something and still end up with only a few loosely connected sentences.
Then other days, things seem to click. I can see an idea form into a coherent argument. At least it seems that way to me. As far as I know, nobody reads my posts.
If I were to create a detailed plan from Milkman’s “How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be,” I would first need to know what obstacles are blocking me from engaging in the activity. Writing every day the way I do now would require me to have all the research done already. That is impossible. But I see other people write multiple well-thought-out pieces a week. How do they do it?
I see three possibilities. They are experts in something, are making incremental improvements to their knowledge base daily, and can write about it endlessly. The second are generalists who focus on one topic for a period of time, improve their knowledge like experts, but aggregate what experts have already found through more targeted research. Or the third, who do just enough to answer some question and leave it at that. But without any research on this, these are just three guesses.
I’m not the first or the second. I don’t want to be the third. But I think I am doing the third in this experiment, and it’s causing cognitive dissonance. So how do I become the second without losing interest? I tried that, and here we are. I also don’t think posting every day is possible in that scenario. So what do you write about in a daily post? I’ll have to think more about that.