I am writing this while driving from France to Switzerland but planning to post this while flying to Indonesia via Istanbul and Hong Kong. Purposely, I will post four automated posts to cover that travel. I may be able to post during this time, but I don't want to have to be forced to. Because building in public and particularly writing every day is a lot harder than I thought it would be.
One hundred days of writing one of these every single day, and this morning I had nothing. No ideas, tired of writing about the same topics.
The hardest part is not the writing itself. It is finding something worth saying every day, and then the next day, and the day after that. The same topics come round again. I have written about the same AI ops work, the same wins and misses, the same charity directory from enough angles that some mornings it feels like I am repeating myself for the sake of writing every day. And for what reason? There are no leads coming from it. No comments, no thanks for doing this.
I imagine the same for a keynote speaker that is touring the country doing a book tour when the room is empty. My room, web traffic, has been close to zero. I would publish, refresh the numbers, and watch single digits. There is a particular feeling to writing carefully for nobody, which I wrote about early on and have felt most days since. The reads came later, slowly, though the leads mostly still have not. If I were doing this for the short-term return I would have stopped around day thirty.
I have thought about breaking the daily. More than once. Drop to three a week, take the weekend, stop forcing a post on the days I have nothing. There is a good case for it. There is one argument against it, and it is the only one that matters to me: the streak represents something I said I was going to do. I know at the other end of twelve months, I'll be happy about the consistency it took to get to 365 days. Showing up every day is the one bit of marketing that compounds when nothing else is working. The morning I let myself skip a hard day is the morning the whole thing becomes optional, and optional things do not survive a year. That is something I've learned through years of building hard-won habits, like meditating daily or going to the gym.
It also helps to keep the size of the problem honest. A daily writing habit is not a hard thing. I know what the hard thing is, and it is not this. Sitting down tired and tapping out a few hundred words is something I can still do. So I do it.
Which is why the next few posts will be short. I am on the move for the summer, and a short post written from the passenger seat of a seven-hour drive, five days before the post date, still counts. The chain does not care how long the link is, only that it is there.
Day one hundred goes up before I board for four days of travel. Tomorrow's goes up from the other side of the world.
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Day 100 of 365.