How to Get Busy by Living Lightly
I began to write an article about using Reddit for ideas, and as I began, I realised that ideas aren’t the problem. If you’re a freelance writer, your phone is teeming with half-baked article ideas and unfinished projects. New ideas aren’t the problem, the problem is taking the first step - sitting down and doing something. Here, I explain how I overcame indecision and started taking steps towards completing the things I needed to do.
How to avoid self-sabotage and perfectionism
It feels like it’s hard to say anything new on this subject without veering into tired self-help shtick. I’m a long-time meditator – I’ve found it helps to control my ADHD tendencies and stops me from wasting as much time. On days when I’ve meditated, I feel calmer and more goal-focussed, and the science bears this out. Anyway, the point is not that you should meditate (although you should), but a side effect of meditation is that it helps me to listen to my own inner voice, or ‘intuition’ if you want to use that nebulous term. What I mean is, I can hear what I am telling myself, and then decipher whether it’s real, or whether it’s coming from somewhere negative. We can think of it as an extreme self-awareness, one that I didn’t used to have.
Let’s apply this self-awareness to the topic at hand. When I sit down to start writing something new, I have a tendency towards perfectionism, ie that everything has to be perfect before I get started. Am I sitting comfortably, is the room tidy? Have I showered today? Do I have a fresh coffee next to me? Does that picture on the wall need straightening? Unless the answer to all these questions is yes, I will use it as a reason to do something else, to make things perfect, before I can begin. Sound familiar? Of course it does.
Many professional writers are vulnerable to this, but getting to the why is the tricky part. I suspect it’s because the process of sitting down and writing something is scary. It’s scary to start because then we might have to actually think, struggle, and fail at our project. Thinking is hard, and failing is worse. It’s much easier to faff around with irrelevancies than to sit down and commit to something that might go bad, that might not turn out to be perfect.
The good news is, you can cut through this mental noise, and you can teach yourself to do it. How? By just doing it. Your new habit is, you just start. Just Start. Whatever you’re doing now, just sit down and write the first sentence of that idea that you know you have. Don’t think too much or your brain will sabotage you. Sit down now, in your pyjamas, without having cleaned your teeth, and get something down on the screen. Just write the first sentence, and then write the next one and the ones after that. Once you’ve started, you’ve already broken through the mental block, and you’re away.
Start taking steps towards rejection
As we’ve touched upon, rejection is at the heart of these kinds of problems. Not just your rejection of your niche SEO blog writing services, or that feeling when you write something mediocre and then hate yourself for a while, but actual rejection at the hands of an editor or a client who gives you bad feedback, or just outright blanks you.
But guess what, the only cure for rejection is to experience it more than you do currently. This isn’t anything new. We’ve all heard the misappropriation of Samuel Beckett's ‘Worstward Ho’: Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better. No, he wasn’t writing about motivation or starting a self-help group, but regardless the words are powerfully relevant for this purpose. You need to fail more.
But where to begin? The trick is very much the same as avoiding self-sabotage and perfectionism, you just need to do it. Just before writing this, I sent an article to an editor who had rejected the last thing I wrote. It was an article I’d spent hours on, loved, and was some of my best blog writing. Did I want to send it? No. But his magazine was the best place for it, and so I just did it. I emailed it, without thinking too much, and before I could stop myself. Now it’s in his hands. Am I scared about the outcome? Of course. But if he says no, it doesn’t mean the article wasn’t good, just that it wasn’t right for his publication. [EDIT: He rejected it. Sad face.] I will use it in my portfolio as an example of good writing and I will still be proud of it. The key is to do everything more quickly and with a lightness of touch.
Being light and consistent to get things done
For those who haven’t come across this idea, it might change your life. In Island, by Aldous Huxley, Susila talks to her friend about doing everything lightly. Think lightly, act lightly, feel lightly… even though you're feeling deeply. The idea captures a beautiful essence of what it is to be both productive and go about your tasks with good humour and lightness. Lightness in everything – new ideas, treat them lightly, and get them written. New Don’t think too much until you need to. Lightness with pitches for your SEO blog writing – just fire your pitch off quickly (albeit with quality and care) and don’t think about it too much until you need to. Lightness with rejection in all aspects of your life, always ready to move on to the next thing. Lightly, always lightly:
"Lightly, child, lightly. You've got to learn to do everything lightly. Think lightly, act lightly, feel lightly. Yes, feel lightly, even though you're feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humourless little prig. Lightly, lightly—it was the best advice ever given me. Well, now I'm going to say the same thing to you. . . Lightly, my darling, lightly."
If I could follow these ideas perfectly, I’d be more successful than I am as a content writer. Even writing this is a therapy session for me – reminding myself of what I already know and embodying it by writing the article. I am showing myself that I don’t need things to be perfect. I just sat down and started bashing away at the keys. I don’t need this to get views – I will treat it with lightness and move on to the next article. Writing can be informative and instructive, but it’s always therapeutic.
Even if you offer the best blog writing service around, there’s a chance no one reads your creations. Guess what? No one has to. Writing these words has still benefitted me a great deal, and that is where their value lies.
Enjoy the post? Check out some others below. Think I’m wrong? Let me know, and we can argue about it in the comment section until one of us gets bored.
