This month, I tried weekday blogging for the first time. I set myself a goal of writing an observational blog post Monday through Thursday, with link round-up posts on Fridays. I put this goal in my bullet journal and on Asana, and today (the last Thursday of the month), I get to check it off both places. Two major hits of dopamine! A job well done!
I’m flagging this now because I know that once I click that checkbox, there’ll be a huge part of me that feels like I’m off the hook. Cool, we did it! We accomplished the goal of weekday blogging, so we’re done now, right? I can feel how badly I want to give myself a pat on the back and call it a day. And while I probably should give myself a pat on the back (daily writing is hard!), I definitely don’t want to call it a day.
I think I’m in a version of Seth Godin’s The Dip: the bump in the road where I feel very much at risk of falling off the wagon. Where it would be so easy to forget why I started in the first place and just move on to something else. Because I don’t want that to happen, I need to remind myself of why I started in the first place.
The whole point of this goal was to establish a new habit for myself, a habit that ideally continues hereafter whether or not there’s a finish line, or a checkbox or an external prize. No, the prizes are all internal: a feeling of attunement with my life. A consistent writing practice. More awareness and a deeper integration of my lessons.
So I’m leaving myself with these words from Seth: “If you can get through the Dip, if you can keep going when the system is expecting you to stop, you will achieve extraordinary results.”
