I made these calendars that you can download and print out and hang in your office or studio or wherever you do your work. But the best time to get started on something is right now. It can be tempting when you want to start something to wait for the New Year. November is a great month to attempt a 30-day challenge. So don’t practice to get good, practice to suck less ! This is the best way I know to go from nothing to something.Īnother way to think about it: To get good at something, you first have to be willing to be bad. If you write a page a day for a year, you end up with 365 pages. Take writing, for example: It doesn’t seem like that big of a deal to try to write one page per day.īut if you write a page a day for a month, and you have 30 pages. Let us therefore do our best to live but one day at a time.” It is remorse or bitterness for something which happened yesterday or the dread of what tomorrow may bring. It is not the experience of today that drives men mad. “It is only when you and I add the burden of those two awful eternities, yesterday and tomorrow, that we break down. “Any man can fight the battles of just one day,” begins a passage collected in Richmond Walker’s book of meditations for recovering alcoholics, Twenty-Four Hours a Day. I can handle that.Īnd in Keep Going, I quoted the classic AA advice to “take one day at a time”: Seasons change, weeks are completely human-made, but the day has a rhythm. The day is the only unit of time that I can really get my head around. So forget about decades, forget about years, and forget about months. In Show Your Work! I suggested the day as the primary unit of time for the artist:īuilding a substantial body of work takes a long time-a lifetime, really-but thankfully, you don’t need that time all in one big chunk. Your only job next is to not break the chain.” You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. Every day, instead of just getting work done, your goal is to just fill a box. Each day, when you’re finished with your work, make a big fat X in the day’s box. In Steal Like an Artist, I wrote about comedian Jerry Seinfeld’s calendar method of daily joke writing: Someone once asked me to distill all of my books into one piece of advice, and, off the top of my head, I said: “Try sitting down in the same place at the same time for the same amount of time every day and see what happens.” It’s the rare Tuesday that lands on the first day of the month, so I wanted to talk briefly about one of my favorite tools: The 30-day challenge.
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