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Study Hacks Blog

“Write Every Day” is Bad Advice: Hacking the Psychology of Big Projects

writing-engraving

A Flawed Axiom

Write every day.

If you’ve ever considered professional writing, you’ve heard this advice. Stephen King recommends it in his instructional memoir, On Writing (he follows a strict diet of 1,000 words a day, six days a week). Anne Lamott proposes something similar in her guide, Bird by Bird (she recommends sitting down to write at roughly the same time every day).

Having published four books myself, here’s my opinion: If you’re not a full time writer (like King and Lamott), this is terrible advice. This strategy will, in fact, reduce the probability that you finish your writing project.

In this post, I want to explain why this is true — as this explanation provides insight into the psychology of accomplishing big projects in any field.

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Does Luck Matter More Than Skill?

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Luck Over Skill?

The most provocative business title I’ve read recently is Frans Johansson’s The Click Moment. In this book, Johansson argues the following:

  • For activities with clear fixed rules — such as sports, chess, and music — the only way to succeed is to put in more deliberate practice than your peers. Johansson uses Serena Williams as a key example: her dad started her practicing tennis absurdly hard at an absurdly young age.
  • For activities with rapidly evolving rules — such as business start-ups or book writing — success comes when you change the rules to a new configuration that catches the zeitgeist just right. Johansson uses Stephanie Meyers, author of the Twilight series, as a key example. Meyers, in Johansson’s estimation, is not a good writer. Her first Twilight book reads more like fan fiction than a professionally-scribed genre novel. She had not, in other words, spent much time in a state of deliberate practice. But this didn’t matter. Something about her new take on vampire tales hit the cultural moment just right and earned her extraordinary renown. The lesson, according to Johansson, is that luck plays the central role in success for these activities. If you want to do something remarkable,therefore, you have to keep trying new things — placing, what he calls, purposeful bets — hoping to stumble into an idea that catches on.

Here’s the obvious follow-up question for Study Hacks readers: how do these ideas square with my skill-driven philosophy of building a remarkable life?

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Getting (Unremarkable) Things Done: The Problem With David Allen’s Universalism

Getting Beyond Getting Things Done

I first read David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) in 2003. I was a junior at Dartmouth and Allen’s ideas resonated at a time when my obligations were starting to overwhelm me. I committed to his system.

After a few years, by which time I was at MIT for graduate school, I found myself frustrated with the whole GTD canon and was ready to abandon it altogether.

My issue was simple: it wasn’t helping me become better.

I was good at full capture and regular review, and, accordingly, was quite organized. This was a good time in my life to ask me to submit a form or tackle a complicated logistical process. You could be confident that I would capture, process, and then accomplish it.

But I was missing the intense and obsessive wrangling with the hard problems of my field — the type of habit that made people in my line of work exceptional. My commitment to GTD had me instead systematically executing tasks, one by one, like an assembly line worker “cranking widgets” (to use a popular Allen aphorism).

I didn’t need to be cranking widgets. I needed to instead be crazily focused.

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Einstein’s Rubber Ball

Detecting Deep Work An interesting nugget from Robert Greene’s new book, Mastery: when Einstein was working on the theory of relativity, he held a rubber … Read more