Anything you care about, want to get better at, you need to do every day. This goes for music, learning languages, reciting poetry, improving your vocabulary, gaining flexibility in body or mind, mastering any skill. Daily practice is the best way to improve your skill.
More productive than a five hour session, followed by a week of inaction, are seven daily fifteen minute sessions. Constant, regular practice is the way we build better habits, better technique. This kind of daily practice helps us remember and internalize our advances and make steady improvement.
Take your 140 character tweet (I don’t use Twitter myself) and really look at it before you let it fly out into the world. Is there anything you wrote that can be written better? Fix it. Is there a phrase that could be read two ways? Turn it to the way you want it to be read.
You can say it really doesn’t matter if you write well, badly, clearly, muddily, that ignorance and sloppiness clearly rule already so what is the stinking point, Daddy-O? The point is not to lose the notion of craft, pride in your work, the pursuit of excellence, reinforcing the benefits of steady effort to make yourself better at what you love to do.
George Carlin had it right: think of how stupid the average American is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
That does not apply to your efforts, if you are dedicated to self-improvement in any field. It is never stupid to try to do better. Also, don’t forget that half of Americans are also smarter than the average– that’s 150,000,000 people. Also, stupid people deserve the best we have too.
My two cents: put in at least fifteen minutes toward the worthy goal of making yourself better every day. If you miss a day, don’t trouble yourself, just start a new streak the next day. The improvement you will begin to see will motivate you to continue. In your small way, you will be making the world a better place.
Yes! A lot of people think writing is just something whimsical that’ll come to them when the time is right. To quote Ann Patchett: “Why is it that we understand that playing the cello will require work but we relegate writing to the magic of inspiration?”
Thanks for sharing!
Thanks, Stuart. Sorry for the delay, I just saw your comment. Nice quote and so true.