Why Stupid Small Tiny Habits Will Help You Win

When it comes to building a creative practice for yourself, one of the key things that people usually overlook is consistency in small steps.

Let’s say it’s a new year, and you want to start the blog you’ve always talked about. You’ve been thinking about it for the past 8 months, and now you want to make it part of your new year’s resolutions. 

January 1st, you’ve written your first post and you’ve spent hours on end refining and editing your content.

January 6th, you’re still writing successfully but you’re realizing that this process is taking you much longer than you thought.

January 10th, something comes up and you have to take away your writing time to take care of it. You skip a day of writing. 

January 11th, you feel bad that you skipped one day but you’re still determined to keep going.

January 20th, writing has now been on and off, and you keep allowing other things to grab attention away from your goal.

By February, you’ve given up writing because you’ve decided that it took too long and too much effort to pursue.

The problem here is that the desired change is too drastic. We can’t keep up our habit of blogging because life events get in the way. We overestimate our ability to adopt desired habits, mostly because the change in habit is too much and we feel bad the moment we stop keeping up.

Truth be told, writing an entire blog post a day is a lot of work for someone who isn’t in the habit of writing on a daily basis. The habit isn’t small enough. In this case, a habit that should be adopted instead is writing a single sentence per day. Not an entire post, but a single sentence.  

A single sentence per day is much more doable, and doesn’t seem as daunting to tackle as an entire blog post. 

Once you get into the practice of writing a single sentence per day, you’ll be more much inclined to ramp up production when you want to because you’ll know that you’re capable of it. 

Why I know this works is because this is how I started my blogging project. I’ve now successfully written over 700 consecutive posts for myself as I constantly look for ways to improve. 

If you want to build a creative practice you can feel proud of, start stupid small.