All you need are a few small wins every day

I can't believe I haven't had any of Ryan Holiday's ideas covered here so far. He's the author of two books that I love, 'The Obstacle is The Way' and 'Ego is the Enemy' and has had a big influence on my philosophy of life overall.

In his most recent article we are covering here, he starts with:

Success, like the proverbial sausage, is much less pretty when you see how it’s made.

Meaning that the process of writing a best-seller book, creating a successful business, crafting an award-winning work of art, product or anything else really, is a lot less glamorous than the end result might suggest.

If you look at it from the outside though, this is counter-intuitive. You might think that there is some magical-genius-process going on that is akin to the final product. But if you really think about the best stuff you've put out there yourself, how did you arrive there? Wasn't it messy and chaos at the outset, and sprinkled with desperation and self-doubt throughout?

Ryan makes the link to writing:

Hemingway once said that “the first draft of anything is shit,” and he’s right.

The first draft of anything is shit. Exactly. How could it be any other way?

So what's the remedy?

The single best rule I’ve heard as a writer is that the way to write a book is by producing “two crappy pages a day.” It’s by carving out a small win each and every day—getting words on the page—that a book is created.

Creating anything of consequence or magnitude requires deliberate, incremental and consistent work. At the beginning, these efforts might not look like they are amounting to much. But with time, they accumulate and then compound on each other. Whether it’s a book or a business or an anthill, from humble beginnings come impressive outcomes.

Isn't that an insanely liberating thought? Great work is accessible to each one of us. Sitting down every day and doing the work is something that is under our control. It's not as sexy as big risky bets, or instant transformations, but "it's dependable and it works".

Because it adds up. Because it determines what you’ll accomplish, and what you won’t. Most important, it determines who you are.

Even this newsletter is an example of this at work. Is it the best thing ever written? Definitely not. But in the process of creating it, I have practiced my writing skills and proven to myself that I show up every Friday and do the work. This continually builds confidence and makes every next piece of work a tiny bit better still.

Small wins every day. That’s it.