It is "take your child to work" day in Finland, and unsurprisingly, Smallsteps didn't want to stay home with me watching TV without pants on, so she went to work with her mother. Though because of this, I can't stay at home without pants on either, because straight after lunch, we will start driving the couple hours to pick up our new puppy. Therefore, I am in a café waiting.
Writing.
The change of a single letter can make a big difference to the meaning. And when it comes to the difference between writing and waiting, it means something to me. Because before I started really writing, I used to do a lot of waiting.
From the moment Smallsteps was born, life changed for us. That is normal for new parents of course and we thought ourselves ready and prepared. But life threw in a lot of health complications that ultimately ripped apart pretty much every part of our life. One of the issues was that I spent a lot of time awake with her throughout the night, so that my wife could sleep.
For a few months I would hold her in my lap, or for the rare moments she was able to sleep in her bed, and watch shows on TV. Hour after hour would go by in the darkness of our apartment, with only the glow of the screen illuminating the room. So many shows, good and bad, to the point that I was able to identify background actors who had appeared in other series.
There must be something else.
Around the same time, again due to health complications, Smallsteps needed to move from breast feeding to some very expensive formula and the savings we had put aside were quickly burned through as we were paying almost twice more for her food than, we were for our mortgage. Someone introduced me to Steem Hive as a possible way to earn something extra.
While I didn't earn anything significant enough to help our finances, I did find something that was far better than waiting for better times. Writing. A lot of people here write to earn, but I think that most would have more success if they learned to write instead. And I don't mean necessarily the quality of the writing itself, but more the process of writing and the reasoning behind each piece.
For many, the "why write" question is answered by I want to earn, without considering what and why it is actually being written. The reason for a piece isn't explained by the payout, it has to be something that resonates with the author at the time, and also with the audience. There has to be some value in the piece itself, because if not, it becomes nearly impossible to maintain consistency. Being consistent can't come through willpower alone, because that ebbs and flows. Instead, consistency is largely driven by purpose. The meaning for why we do things and also how we do things.
Successfully meeting purpose requires building process.
Without building process, new habits do not form and ultimately default behaviour will overpower willpower. This is why so many people struggle to meet many of their desired goals, whether it be write consistently, lose weight, or learn a new skill. Even when they have a good "why" without a good process, it isn't enough.
For most of us, waiting is our default. We are passive unless something compels us to move. We need some kind of impulse, a hunger, a danger, a desire that is strong enough to drive us forward. But without process, the same impetus quickly weakens and our body will regress to the mean, return to its natural, passive state. Waiting for something to make it move again. Motivation.
For me, writing consistently is easy because I have made it part of my daily activity, my common habits. To not write daily feels weird to the point that I notice it. It is similar to if I don't brush my teeth, have a shower or not eat. The routine is there so when it is missing, I feel uncomfortable, hungry, and looking to close the loop of my habit. Having the habit means my natural state is as a writer. Which means that although I wasn't a writer previously, I was able to change my label and become the kind of person who writes daily, by repeating the action often enough.
This is how all habits are formed, right?
The only difference between a writer and a non-writer, is that one writes. It doesn't matter what they write per se, but in order to keep the habit building, it generally requires some kind of positive feedback, some kind of reward for performing the action. Like brushing the teeth rewards with a feeling of clean teeth, which is why they added mint into the mix, because it rewarded the brusher. Prior to that, they struggled to get people to brush their teeth with toothpaste, because even though their teeth were clean, they didn't have that rewarding feeling they were clean.
Money is a poor reward.
I write for monetary reward. Well, cryptoary reward. But that is an outcome of my writing, a feedback mechanism, but not the core purpose. If my core purpose was getting rewarded, I would never have maintained consistency, because I can make more money doing something else, like working at McDonald's. But working like that is not rewarding in other ways, so it would be just for the money. Easy to do if money is the only goal, hard to do if the goal is a purpose not provided in the workplace.
My purpose is wellbeing.
Which is why I spend so much time writing about it from various aspects, because wllbeing comes in many forms. And I also think that there are different levels of wellbeing that can conflict with one another. For instance, some people think "feeling good" means having high wellbeing, so they can feel good eating a candy bar in one moment, and feel shit the next as the same candy bar affects their thoughts, emotions and body - so they eat another candy bar. And the habit is built that a candy bar makes them feel good and "saves" them from unwellbeing.
Unwellbeing is not a word. until now.
But unwell-being might be. A lot of us have resigned ourselves to being unwell through life by conditioning and self-inflicted harm from the habits we form. The habits that become our default behaviours that reward us for their performance, but harm us. Like taking a drug that feels good while high, but makes us ultimately ill and feeling depressed, lonely, ashamed or whatever else.
What are you writing for?
And I think that this is what we should be writing at least partially about, because if we don't really explore how we live life though our writing in some way, it means that our writing is impractical and meaningless to ourselves and others. It becomes more filler content that might attract votes and value, but that is never enough to make it worth it in the long-run.
Most who read this will not even consider the implications.
Most will keep waiting.
Taraz
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