You should, after all, write every day

Earlier this summer, I announced my departure from Medium. I then changed my mind and continued writing, though the frequency has dropped drastically. In the first couple of years (I started writing about three years ago), I stuck to the rule of writing every day — even when I had zero followers. Good things happened, and I was able to build a meaningful follower base and earn good money in some months. Consistency leads to excellence — or at least striving for it. I’m a terrible mess at many things in life, but I also know the power of consistency — I run every day and have been able to achieve exceptional results in this hobby.

I’m not a fan of cliché self-improvement advice, but here’s the thing: if your endeavor doesn’t become a habit, it fades, and that fading becomes a self-reinforcing process across multiple dimensions. You experience mental or physical dystrophy when you don’t engage daily in your pursuit. If it’s sports, you lose fitness. If it’s writing, you run out of ideas and interest.

With writing, the more you write, the more ideas you generate. The brain is like a muscle. It’s almost a paradox: you’d think it would be harder to come up with ideas when you write too often, but it’s even harder to be creative when you reduce your output.

This has been my experience. Write less frequently, and you have fewer ideas. Then that self-reinforcing mechanism kicks in. Skip a day or a week of writing, and soon you embrace the new norm of not writing. Creativity fades, and so does interest.