The 5 Hardest Parts of Publishing a Daily Blog

Today is the 5 year anniversary of the day I started publishing this blog as a daily blog.

Instead of sharing lessons I’ve learned, I’m going to share the 5 hardest parts of writing and shipping a daily blog.

(1) Writing

Writing is hard. Turning thoughts into words that emerge from you — whether you are speaking them or writing them — requires a lot of neural processes.

As hard as writing is, it’s not the hardest part of this process.

If you knew you weren’t going to share what you wrote with anyone else, you would write with ease.

You know words. You know how to make sentences. Writing is just putting words into sentences on a page.

The hard part of publishing a daily blog is everything else that surrounds writing.

(2) Creating Space

Writing requires creating space, both around you and within you.

Blocking time. Finding the right environment. Getting in the right mindset.

It’s easy to procrastinate writing by doing things like research, organizing your space, organizing your ideas and notes, making lists of ideas, and other “related” tasks.

Procrastination is inevitable because writing is hard.

(3) Knowing What You Want to Say

Often I procrastinate writing because I don’t know what to say. The irony is that the way to figure out what you want to say is by writing.

Thinking about writing doesn’t tell you what you want to write.

Moving fingers on the keyboard or holding a pen to the page and forcing myself to write are the only reliable ways I’ve found to release the blocks and see what I want to say.

This leads to a challenge: staying too busy to create space to write, even as I know that writing will help me figure out what to write.

(4) Saying What You Want to Say, How You Want to Say It

Almost nothing I write comes out the way I wanted to say it.

I hear these great narrations in my head, and the moment I start to capture them they go away.

Living with that incongruence is a challenge.

(5) Publishing

By far the hardest part of this process is hitting publish.

Especially when I feel that it’s not my best work.

Especially when I feel I could have written it better.

Especially when I think of something different that I wanted to say.

This is the practice.

Sometimes the words don’t come.

Sometimes a piece feels like total crap.

Being willing to put it out there anyway — to say this is the best I can do right now, and it needs to be enough for now — this is the practice.

This is the heavy lifting.

This is the hardest part of the process.

Many times it’s a fight within myself to hit publish on a piece that I believe is awful.

Ironically, this is the thing that keeps me on the path.

The only thing that makes it somewhat bearable to hit publish on a piece I believe is crap is my commitment to come back again tomorrow for another shot.

The commitment that this won’t be my final word on this topic.

The commitment I’ve made to shipping daily — to coming back tomorrow — is what allows me to hit publish today.