I think I am stuck at around a 1500-word-per-hour writing pace.

I finished the first draft of a product today. It will be the flagship “thing” for a new information business we are starting. It’s around 18,000 words total. 77 pages in Pages for Mac.

I wrote 4592 words today in 40 + 40 + 20 + 25 + another 20 minutes or so that I didn’t time. Let’s call it 150 minutes.

That’s actually around 1800 words per hour. I tend to fluctuate between 1400 and 2000 words per hour.

I’m writing this because I figured that if I wrote a 500 word blog post, I would cross the 5000 word mark.

I read in one of the ETR newsletters, maybe a year ago, that Craig Ballantyne writes 5000 words every day as routine.

I seriously have no discipline. Off the top of my head, I can’t recall ever building a real habit and sticking to it for a long time.

I just do what I feel like in the moment. I hate it when things feel like a chore. I am all about flow. I never do anything I don’t feel like doing. Today I felt like writing 5000 words. It’s not hard work when you feel like doing it. That goes for anything.

Some people say that different things work for different people, like people are somehow inherently different. That some people have different brain chemistry than others.

I don’t think that is necessarily true. I think what works for you depends on what is already going on in your brain. On your existing foundations. The stuff that makes up your current psychology and how you see the world and all that.

Building habits and sticking to routines has never worked for me. Maybe I am just an idiot and I am doing something wrong.

The only thing that happens when I attempt to build a habit, like doing something every day for a month, is that I defeat my resistance to doing it.

If I were to meditate every day for 30 days, I would simply kill that part inside me that says “naaah... don’t feel like it” when I felt like I wanted to meditate.

I don’t magically wake up and meditate without thinking.

The only things I do automatically without thinking about them -- truly automatically -- are all the things I do that I am not conscious of. Like which side of my mouth I start brushing my teeth on. I don’t consciously decide which tooth to brush first, but I probably start with the same one every time.

Everything I do is about flow. Zero-resistance living. That means I never do anything I don’t feel like doing. Sometimes I feel like doing something that I don’t feel like doing, so those times would be an exception. That makes sense to me, but it probably doesn’t to most people. Whatever.

I have talked before about habits that are important to me, like writing down lots of ideas, and journaling. I don’t do them every day, as much as I’d like to. I do them both frequently. I don’t have resistance to whipping out the journal. Which is really a text document. That’s what having a habit means to me. I just execute my habits when I feel like it, and usually when it really makes a difference in that moment whether or not I journal.

I don’t write every day either, but I don’t have resistance towards writing. I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words by this point. I didn’t really write anything yesterday. I had planned to finish that product yesterday, but I never felt like it, so I didn’t.

Today I wrote 4592 words, and this post is now over 600 words, so yay me.

Finally... a book recommendation. It jolted me in the first chapter, and I think it will be one of the most important books I have read. It’s “The 50th Law” by Robert Greene and 50 Cent. It jolted me because it’s aggressive in a special way. And it’s about things which just syncs with how I already think about things, and offer me a new perspective. I took a long walk with my dog in the rain today while listening to the audio book.

Then I ate lasagna.

Good evening.

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Photo is of someone's lasagna.

Photo credit: ex.libris