Atomic Habits: Start Your Journey Today
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
Henry David Thoreau
Or as pre-woke Nike said in their 1980s commercials: Just do it.
In early 2016, I felt the urge to write, to start capturing the thoughts swirling inside me during the last couple of years. I began to journal several times a week at night on my laptop, combining my daily thoughts with some memories. My main goal was to pass down some lessons to my two children that would help them as they went through life.
I started slowly, only writing 38 pages in that first year. In year two, I only wrote 35 pages, but I read several books about writing, including Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style,” William Zinsser’s “On Writing Well,” and Stephen King’s “On Writing.” I bought a writing desk for my bedroom where I could work at night after bedtime with the kids. I brainstormed about writing a story or short book about the incredible Mayo Clinic, still blown away by how well they cared for my wife and our family during the roughest time of our lives.
In the spring of 2018, I bought an online writing workshop course from the Hay House publishing company. It was not a small purchase or time commitment, but I wanted to continue moving forward. I watched videos from multiple Hay House authors, and the common theme was that anything you write should be your story. Even though others had similar experiences, no one had gone through life exactly as you had.
I adjusted my schedule so I had more time at night and started gaining real momentum toward the end of that third year, writing almost every day for three months. I finished the year with 233 journal pages, three times more than I had written in the first two years combined. As I learned more about the craft, I realized that clear writing aligns with clear thinking. My nightly journaling led to better decisions at work and home.
I read James Clear’s “Atomic Habits,” which encouraged me to continue. Clear wrote, “Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does evidence of your new identity.” So, as a writer, I purchased a subscription to Grammarly and started using that to analyze/correct my journal entries.
I picked up the pace in 2019, writing 329 pages. After kicking around in my head for a couple of years, my Mayo Clinic story finally came together. I came up with a goal to get it published in the Mayo Clinic quarterly magazine.
I finished my Mayo Clinic story and submitted it in February 2020. Rather than sit around and wait to hear back on that, I came up with a new goal of writing a short story for “Guideposts,” the magazine that Norman Vince Peale founded years ago. I watched the videos on the Guideposts site to get tips on what their editors wanted to see.
But all of that quickly became an afterthought as covid hit. My now-established writing habit would soon become more important than ever as I journaled to try and make sense of a world gone mad. I wrote a record 441 pages that year.
I didn’t write as much in 2021, dropping to 149 pages. But in August of that year, I came up with the idea of starting a personal blog from author/speaker Tom Woods. Woods had a special deal on a hosting package and promised to promote anyone’s blog who signed up through his site. I started going through my journal to organize content for blog entries.
During that summer, I became inspired when I saw my 7-year-old son hand out baseball cards to the kids on his team and came up with a loose idea for a children’s book about baseball. I found a book called “Save the Cat” about writing novels/screenplays and read that to help me flesh out a storyline. This effort eventually lost steam, but I still think something is there.
I had a similar journaling output (167 pages) last year as the year before. But 2022 was a breakthrough in that I finally started regularly publishing blog entries – 16 months after buying the WordPress site. The turning point was my decision to wake up earlier and adjust my workout schedule, so I only lifted two times per week instead of three. This change gave me an extra morning every week when I had two straight hours to write.
Along with more quiet time to write, the other thing that helped me was my decision to create a presentation for my men’s church group about my life and how I came to know God and Jesus. This exercise made me reflect on the critical moments in my life and led to several ideas for blog postings that hadn’t previously occurred to me.
These changes led to 15 consecutive weekly blog postings these past few months. I only realized it after I started blogging, but this format served my original goal of writing for my children better than the straight journaling I began in 2016. It forced me to write more focused stories that are way more readable than the rambling 1400 pages I had written over the past seven years.
My new writing goal is to have one of my articles published alongside Jeff Minick or Annie Holmquist in the “Life & Tradition” section of “The Epoch Times.” But even if I never get there, I am grateful for all the gifts I have received during my writing journey – lessons/memories for my kids; clearer thinking; and reflections on my actions that lead to me being a better dad, a better person.
And all those blessings came from the most crucial writing decision I ever made, back seven years ago – the decision to start.
Links:
Atomic Habits – James Clear
The Tim Ferriss Show – #648: James Clear, Atomic Habits (podcast) – January 4, 2023
Life.Church with Craig Groeschel – You Don’t Win By Trying (podcast) – March 5, 2023 (tip from my sister-in-law)
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