Guy Reams (00:01.838)
Today I'm talking about day 184, the impact of daily writing, and this is part one.
This will be the two. So today I wrote the 2286 blog or article that I've written in a row every day since January 7th, 2018. I make a note of this because you know, last night I had to deal with an archiving issue. So the more and more I write, the more the larger the database has gotten of articles that I keep.
And so it just creates some problems here and there. So I had to deal with that last night and it's like, I don't want to deal with it, but I had to. So, so it kind of caused a point of reflection and me asking myself, well, why am I doing this? This is a lot of pressure to add on myself. But honestly, I don't think I'm going to stop or I would stop because, you know, I get a lot of advice. Like people tell me, well, you should write a book.
You should have a course and charge money for it. You should build a growing audience and start advertising. You know, all these things that, you know, these aspirational ideas. And I think those are fine advice. But honestly, the real reason I've been writing every day is it's for myself. I'm basically the audience. I'm essentially writing to myself most of the time. And so even today, like right now,
this is something to encourage and motivate me. I've discovered occasionally that I'll run across somebody where something I write or talk about is beneficial. And hey, that's a great bonus. I think that's great. So I decided I would start cataloging how writing every day has really impacted my life. So the first reason,
Guy Reams (02:02.862)
that it impacts my life. And I broke this up into two parts because it was starting to get kind of long. So I broke it up into two parts. So the first reason, first benefit has been, well, cheap therapy.
So, for the most part in my life, I've had a lot of emotional and mental ups and downs. It hasn't been a smooth ride, let's say. Now, I'm old enough now where I just don't care what people think of that. I used to like hide the fact and always trying to be perfect all the time or trying to be superhuman. But I realize now as I've gotten older that most people go through the same things. Most people have the same emotional ups and downs.
Very few people I've met are on a perfect keel all the time. They're just not. It's just part of being human. So when I'm feeling stressed, when I'm feeling overwhelmed, when I'm feeling exhausted, normally what I would have done back in my past is I would have curled up in a ball or hidden in my cave somewhere. But now what I do is I sit down and I force myself to write.
And sometimes the process of writing initially is very painful, like I don't want to do it. But as I get through it, my mind starts to focus, I gain greater clarity, I feel a sense of singularity. I clear out all of the thoughts in my mind and I focus on the task at hand. I become very mindful of how I'm feeling. This mindful exercise has become a form of therapy to me or meditation. So it's really a...
Killing three birds with one stone, if you want to use that expression. Because on one hand I'm writing, which is helping me, but on the other hand I'm meditating, and on the third I'm refocusing my mind on what's important. So all of those things have formed what I call therapy. So I don't even call it writing anymore, I call it my therapy session. So every day I spend about an hour writing.
Guy Reams (04:15.598)
and what I write is what I output in my article. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's motivating and inspiring, and sometimes it's just stupid. But that's just who I am. So I think this form of therapy has been very beneficial to me. Second, thirst quencher. I think that I have this desire for learning. I love learning. Ever since I was a child, I would pour through anything I could get my hands on.
My father and my grandfather collected National Geographic magazines. And I would just read those things. I think I read every National Geographic magazine since like the early 60s. So I read, pored through them because it was just fascinating to me to be able to read all these different things and topics going all over the world. A lot of times I'll remember something and I'll bring it up in a conversation and people say, how do you know that?
Well, the fact is, is when I was a child, I was reading these magazines. That's how I know that, right? It's like I picked all this stuff up from childhood. So the reason I bring it up though is sometimes my learning desire can lead me down very diverse paths. And sometimes it ends up me creating a business or a new idea or starting a new project that can be very distracting to me. So if I'm not careful,
my desire for learning will send me off in crazy paths all the time. So writing has actually been a form of quenching that thirst for me. So instead of doing a ton of damage to my life by chasing some new thing, I can now spend an hour or so writing about that topic, satisfying the desire to know about it, and then I can move on. So it's been a great way for me to get it out of my system without causing too much damage.
The third thing, the third benefit to writing every day is the eat alive frog concept. So one of my favorite Mark Twain quotes is he said something to the effect of, if you eat a live frog every morning, then the rest of the day will be great. So the idea, so I actually hate writing, or at least that was the case. When I was younger, I hated writing. I could just not get my thoughts out and the self critique was just crippling.
Guy Reams (06:42.797)
So I just could not write very well. And I didn't want to write. I probably could have been a good writer. I just didn't want to write. So by forcing myself to write usually every morning, I have gotten through the hardest thing that I'm gonna do that day. So everything else seems easy. I hate writing like I hate Brussels sprouts. Brussels sprouts are the same way. It's like, I just...
I know they're really good for me, I just don't want to eat them. Well, now I love writing and by the way, I've picked up a, I've acquired a taste for Brussels sprouts, which is kind of interesting. So those are my first three benefits of writing. Tomorrow I'll come up with three more. Thank you.