How to write and publish your first post quickly and easily?
Put some words down on the screen and then hit save & publish.
What? No way! That’s a little too easy! Your first post is supposed to be a big deal, I mean a really big deal. Something that says something important, useful, enriching, and does so in a way that gives benefit to people and gets people desirous to come back for more.
Yes, ideally, a first post or any post for that matter would be all of those things. However it can also just be… a way to just start and get on with it already.
See, I’ve been working on a first post titled “Why Bother Blogging” for about 2 weeks now. I’m at the point where I am no longer able to justify the time and energy cost of that post. So instead of that being my first post, it’s turning out this will now be the first post instead.
This idea came to me just now because being unstuck is better than being stuck even if your unstuck is just slightly less stuck. Even if it is just a tiny micro-movement, it is still a movement. This post was started out and was intended to just be these two written lines:
How to write and publish your first post quickly and easily?
Put some words down on the screen and then hit save & publish.
However, once the commitment was made to that idea, it dawned on me what principle was at work here and it’s a principle worth discussing. It’s about knowing when to stop reaching too high and to just go for the low hanging fruit.
Anyone that knows me well or works with me in therapy has probably heard me suggest, encourage, and bid the low hanging fruit strategy when facing down goals. So here I am taking my own encouragement to task in order to write and publish my first post.
The low hanging fruit strategy targets the easily attainable goal that leads to the quickest result; also it has the highly desirable benefit of being an action that takes almost no effort. That is what makes it so great at getting us unstuck. A little bit of fruit is so much better than no fruit at all.
Yes, I would absolutely love to write an incredibly meaningful, enriching, and useful post, however, I’ve only just begun and to expect that of myself is and will no doubt lead to complete system overload, which in turn leads to avoidance.
Essentially I was reaching too high and getting mired in trying to tackle and solve a potentially attainable, yet just out of my current reach, goal.
Sometimes avoiding a task is unhelpful and at other times it is helpful. The best way to know is to maintain vigilance over your effort-to-output ratio. For “Why Bother Blogging” I was putting in so much effort in terms of time, thought, and emotional energy that I ultimately had to make space for and accept that stepping away from that post was the best strategy. I had to take a moment and stop all the over-reaching and check back in with what my initial goal for this blog post was.
To write and publish my first post.
That’s it.
Nothing else.
After that, writing about the benefits of going for the low hanging fruit just made sense, because it is what made this post possible.
There, it is done.
More to follow.
Just don’t expect anything from high up off the tree, at least not yet.