Today we’re going to be talking about trusting the process, something that I’ve been failing to do over the last couple of weeks. I was reminded the other day about how important it is to just trust that the process is going to work.
I’ve often thought about my life as sort of a map. If you were to imagine my life as a map, you would find a bunch of different paths traced out on it. In the center of the map is me. It’s a regular old circle, and then you can see paths stretching away from me in every direction. Every time I take action, every time I move, I’m moving down some path.
You might say that at the end of my life, the map that I’ve created will look a bit like the spokes of a wheel, though they won’t be uniform. Some will be longer and some will be shorter. Hopefully, that’s not too confusing of a mental picture, but I think it’s important to understand.
When I’m not trusting the process, I don’t stay on the same path. I keep changing. I keep making adjustments. I keep trying to make progress in a new direction. This will increase the number of spokes that show up. The problem is that all of them will be really short, right? It’s like I’m only taking a couple of steps down one path before I’m abandoning it to move to a different path.
This is my natural tendency to try something for a little bit and then get frustrated that it’s not working as well as I wanted it to and just abandon it and go into something else. At the end of the day, that’s just not a good way to achieve anything.
Writing, especially, rewards consistency like very few other things do. I mean, don’t get me wrong. Everything we do in life rewards consistency. The longer we do something, the better at it we become, the better our result. But writing truly requires consistency. The difference between a novice writer and an expert writer is the number of words that they have put on a page. That’s it. That’s what it comes down to.
Putting more words down and then critically examining them and trying to put better words down the next time is how you improve. And so the person who has written more or has written longer typically is going to be a better writer. Now, there are some people who are just sort of naturally gifted with putting words together, but I’m not one of them.
Anything that I’ve managed to achieve has been through just sort of this consistent grinding. I have videos on my process and on deliberate practice, which is how I approach writing. But the point is that my results are the best when I am sticking to my path, when I’m sticking to the process.
But I woke up the other day and I realized, man, I have just abandoned my process. It’s no wonder that I’m feeling disgruntled or it’s no wonder that I feel like my creativity is ebbing. It’s no wonder that I don’t feel like I’m making the progress I want to make. I keep changing things. I’m not currently giving things enough time to work.
Instead of just keeping my head down and continuing to walk forward, I’m saying, well, this is uncomfortable, so I’m going to move and I’m going to do something else. It took me a really long time to come to grips with the fact that art is uncomfortable. That my creativity, when it boils up inside of me and I start to create something new, it brings me into new territory. It brings me into uncharted lands.
Those uncharted lands are not comfortable. It’s comfortable to retread the same path that you’ve taken before. It’s not comfortable to break new ground. And that’s the period of my life that I’m in. I’m in a period of breaking new ground. But because I abandoned the path, because I didn’t stick to the process, I haven’t been making progress. Whose fault is that? Totally mine.
Ultimately, I do need to trust the process. I do need to understand that if I write good books, I will be able to move forward with my career. And so that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to immerse myself back into the process, understand that it’s not always comfortable, that sometimes it just kind of sucks. But as long as I keep going, as long as I don’t give up, as long as I continue to push into new territory, continue to walk forward, I will get where I want to go. It might take time. It might take a long time. It might take longer than I want it to, but I’m going to get there.
YouTube Video Link: https://youtu.be/l2XX9yHHk5k
Thanks for reading and watching.
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