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Aere Perennius: On doing work that matters
Why writing daily is bad advice
Among the most common pieces of writing “advice” I have found on Medium, the one that always caught my attention is writing daily.
A regular routine is crucial to developing any skill. I get it. Also, I understand that deliberate practice requires repetition until the new skill is mastered. Moreover, the more articles we write, the higher the chances our audience will find our work. It makes sense to advise novice writers to focus on quantity over quality. Still, I find the thought of daily publishing completely bonkers.
Perhaps I am trying to rationalize my lack of productivity, or maybe there is a silver bullet I have not yet discovered to shoot off insightful articles at will, like a Ford Model T out of the assembly line.
The truth is that good thinking takes time. In any field, the first iteration of an idea usually sucks. Interesting insights are simmered in the back of our minds, making connections between seemingly unrelated topics or finding good analogies and examples to articulate our ideas. Only bland, generic content can be generated without reflecting on it for at least a few hours or days — the kind of soulless content AI excels at writing.
