doing things very poorly

So I haven’t written one of these posts for quite a while. And you might be asking yourself, what happened? Why are you not writing?

I was fortunate to receive a number of messages from you that indeed I have not written anything in this blog. The reality is that I simply didn’t have anything to write, and I had a whole bunch of other things going on in my life.

Years ago, I realized that to be happy in doing something for fun, it needs to stay fun. There’s the famous saying that if you’re a good way to ruin something you enjoy is by making it a profession. And I think even more strongly that if you put pressure on yourself to achieve within something that you’re doing just for fun, that’s a really reliable way of ruining that thing.

One thing in particular, for example, is consistency. If you want to get good at something and if you want to achieve something to a certain degree or level, then being really consistent really, really helps and really pays off. But for things that are just for fun, the freedom to not be consistent about them is what’s going to make them even better. It’s nice just to do things because they’re fun and not feel like you have to do them.

This might seem obvious, but in a world where a lot of output is performative, where we’re constantly sharing what we’re doing online, where everything is tied to achievements and potential future earning paths, I think it can be really freeing to just do something poorly, inconsistently or otherwise not very well.

I’m glad that I could share this with all of you. And I’m pretty sure I will continue to write blogs, sometimes five in a week and sometimes not one for five months. And that’s okay because I’m doing this for fun. It costs me nothing. It costs you nothing. Fun.